When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor.

Just like in the art museum, and notions of beauty and pleasure, if the hero is always a white guy with a squared jaw or pretty woman with big breasts, then kids start thinking that's how it's supposed to be. Part of the problem was that black comic book artists were making super heroes with the same pattern as the white super heroes. When you read a lot of those comics, the black super heroes don't seem to have anything to do.

In some places you can find an extreme blackness used as a descriptive. I also take into account historical realities that some of this range in color is the legacy of white supremacy.

When I started, I was aware of using the black as a rhetorical device. It's understanding that black people come in a wide range of colors, but you find instances in a lot of black literature in which the blackness is used as a metaphor.

I just thought someone has to figure out how to break through that barrier and create a narrative for a black super hero story to unfold at the same scale as something like Star Wars. Rythm Mastr is about producing a narrative of a hero engaged in a struggle as complicated as those other stories. The catalyst for it was the beginning of the demolition of public housing in Chicago.

In some ways you still have to buy your freedom, but that's because you live in a social structure that's organized around capital, and capital does equate with a certain kind of freedom, especially if you can start to generate capital on your own.

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