Part of what I am dealing with, with this blackness, is asking the question, "Where are those black people, who are as dark as the description of a young black boy that Solomon Northup gives in 12 Years A Slave?" He describes the young black 14-year-old boy as "blacker than any crow." You have to question if he is using that metaphorically or as a descriptive?

There's a beauty shop companion called School of Beauty, School of Culture at the Birmingham Museum of Art. I got an email that said a couple had a guerrilla wedding in front of that picture. They slipped into the museum with a preacher and had their wedding ceremony in front of it. It turns out that the woman is a beautician and the man is a barber, they had seen that picture, and they said it was the perfect place to get married.

When State Way Gardens and The Robert Taylor Homes were being torn down, it seemed like a perfect opportunity to use that as a backdrop for the development of a super hero narrative.

I tend to think having that extreme of color, that kind of black, is amazingly beautiful...and powerful. What I was thinking to do with my image was to reclaim the image of blackness as an emblem of power.

The appearance is the allusion of abstraction when in fact I am in control of every aspect of that symmetry.

What I was trying to construct was relative symmetry, where it seems clear that the shapes have arrived through consideration.

Like a lot of young people who wanted to be artists, comics were a gateway for me.