Black Nerds Need a Producer Credit. Who Can Set That Up?
After a decade that saw comic-book movies and fantasy shows take over pop culture, we’re the ones calling the shots
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
I was lucky to grow up a comic book fan.
My parents saw my early love of comic books — the way I’d hide out at the Waldenbooks in the first floor of West Jackson’s Metrocenter Mall while they shopped, the way I talked endlessly about storylines I’d written myself — and indulged it. Maybe one day they thought I’d eventually write comics for a living, or write about them, or something. Every Wednesday when new issues dropped, they would drive me to the comic book store in a neighboring town, and sit patiently in the car while I went inside and thumbed through the newest issues of X-Men and Batman. I went to that comic book store hundreds of times as a kid.
And I rarely, if ever, saw any Black people there.
This isn’t a unique story. Most Black nerds could tell you about how they felt like the only kids who had comic book collections — but not a lot of friends their age to talk about the books with. But this also isn’t one of those things about how…
