Today, we are going to be talking about a book that is probably one of the hardest but most necessary reads that I've read in the past. I can't think of how long. It's called I Am Alfonso Jones. And today, we have, to my left, Stacey Robinson. Yes. Are we? We have John Jennings. And this is Mr. Tony Medina's story. This is Tony Medina. This is my first time in California in San Francisco, so. And you're welcome for the weather. And we have Damien Duffy. And I'm Sean Taylor, one of the co-founders of BCAF. And I'm going to be here speaking with these gentlemen today. Let's just get all this great. I mean, because it's like there's no light way to talk about this book and this material in this book. But Tony, I would like to address you first. How is it that, I mean, A, the courage and the gumption to write this story and release this story in a time where most of us are kind of, we're experiencing black abuse fatigue into a way, but we're at a point now where it's just so heavy. Up to the minute. Up to the minute.  I know we're all feeling this heaviness now, but I'm going to put this out in the world. I feel this is necessary now. What was that? Where did that come from?  Black folks are being singled out. And we had this tremendous rash of police brutality incidents across the country, particularly, I recall a lot of that happening in New York back in the 90s and also the 80s, especially with Ellen the Bumpers and Amadou Diallo, Michael Stewart. And these are people who play a role in this story. So I was, and I was posting a lot of stuff on social media. My publisher was noticing a lot of that stuff. And I think that Jason Lowe of Lee and Low Books and also Stacy Whitman, who runs the Imprint two books under Lee and Low, they were interested in getting a book out there like that, a graphic novel, because there's never been a graphic novel that dealt with the subject of police brutality. And I've been really wanting to write a graphic novel. So it was just a perfect kind of coalescing of us. They approached me and I said, hell, yeah, I'll do that story. I've been writing all these things and they know what I'm writing on social media. They know what I've written in my poetry and stuff like that. So I had to put together a proposal. So I jumped on that as soon as possible. And within a couple of days, well, really, within a couple of minutes, I had the story idea. It just poured out of me.  You put so much seasoning in it and it's never right. But literally, that's why this is what Alfonso Jones became, in a sense, in terms of all of the layers and the complexities and the nuances that appear in the narrative. I mean, one question after reading it, I've read it twice. And I'm going to be teaching it. And but I'm like, how do you keep yourself? Because as John said on your panel yesterday, you were saying that writing is rewriting. Comic art collaboration, especially a lot of editing. But how do you all of you keep yourself safe when you're drawing some of the images and having to conjure some of the ancestors in the book? But how do you keep yourself without getting totally just crushed by the work? I mean, imagine having to draw a gun permitting shot five different times. Yeah. So let me talk about that. When I got the script from Tony and he had descriptions of the characters. And I had the script, but there were no visualizations. Should we set up the premise for the audience, you think? I will get to that. OK. I don't want them to be like, well, I'll get to that. No, no, no. So I will say this.  It is we're in a time where we see police brutality. We're in a time where we are watching black death happen on live television. Philando Castile was killed. He died on live stream Facebook. I'm saying this to say that as I'm drawing this book, I have to I'm working my way up to the scene, the actual scene that I have to draw. And I have to pull on all of my resources of graphic design and storytelling to make this black death convincing so that the readers, so that those who are not sensitive to the subject matter, will feel this enough to be convinced that this is an important story, right? It was very difficult. As I worked on this, and I worked on this book for 13 months, there were people, police brutality did not have the consideration to stop while we were working on this book. So I am literally watching the news, reading articles of people who are being killed while I'm working on a book. And I don't have the time to mourn. I have to OK, I've got to keep drawing this book because I have to push through, I have to push through, I have to push through because we have a deadline on black pain. We have to meet the deadline so we can get this out to the people. It was very difficult. So I said, to be honest with you, I went through a range of emotions. I was, I fell in love with characters. My least favorite character of the main cast of characters, I will say, became my favorite character. And I learned that I'm drawing a 15-year-old boy in a particular way. I'm drawing my son. My son is a theater major. He is literally, in many ways, Alfonso. As I'm drawing this book, I'm thinking about my son. I'm like, I fell in love with this character because it became so personal. So there were times I was joyous, and I would call Tony. I'd be in love with the characters. And there were times I would call Tony. I'd be pissed off because he did something in the story. And then there were times, as a 45-year-old man, I broke down and cried as I'm drawing this black death because I have to keep pushing through so I can get it out to the audience that needs to read it. It was very, very difficult. So I am Alfonso Jones. He's about a young Afro-Latina brother in Harlem named Alfonso Jones, whose father has been wrongly convicted and is actually getting released. And he goes, he's a bike messenger. Alfonso Jones is. He goes to buy a suit so he can be dressed up for his father. And he ends up being, spoiler alert, ends up being shot and killed by a never security guard who must stick a hanger for a weapon, because somebody in the store was like, somebody's waving something around. And so shades of Timmy O'Reye, shades of every knee-jerk reaction of a trigger-happy police officer that we've ever experienced. And so when the young Jones passes away, he re-emerges in an underworld of other people, victims of violence. And they're on a train, which has a lot. There's a lot of symbolism. I mean, there's a couple of cars. And a lot of symbolism. Subway is what, an underground railroad. Hanger is what, sometimes used for abortions. I mean, there's so much symbolism that is in this book. And it's, I think a lot of times we talk about, I think when you, Afro-Latino culture, there's a lot of magical realism. We could put that there, and there's something there, and there's also a gothic feel to this book that's really powerful. So I'm kind of curious, what was your like?  Because nowadays, Black Death is like Pokemon cards. I'll trade you one Philando Castile for bumpers. Because we do that because now, because we feel so desensitized from it. So how do you, how do you marshal empathy and still do the work that you have to do? Right. So just to be clear, so you guys know what I did. I was the letterer, which means I did the word balloons, and I copied and pasted text in. Which makes it sound like it's nothing. It's an art form. No, no, no. It's a great job, yes. Well, thank you. But just so you got like, so my work of copying and pasting and placing is not, it can get kind of clinical in a way. Just because it's like, well, I look at a page. Where is there empty enough space on a page to put the words? And how can I make it so it reads the story well? So that's sort of my first way through the work. Also, I was getting the pages out of order, which makes it, this gets more to the empathy thing, that made it even harder. Because I didn't know what was going to happen next. And I didn't really have context. But I'm like, I know that's Alfonzo. I'm like, wait, he's dead. No, he's OK. He's on a train. But wait, that person's dead. Oh, god, no. So I found out the story in bits and pieces out of it. So it was more kind of harrowing for me in that sense. It was less a subway car than a roller coaster for me. Because I didn't get to read the script all the way through beforehand. But yeah, because I've worked with John for forever and Stacey for half a forever. Half a forever. Half a forever. Half a forever. Yeah, I just realized none of this was actually answering the question. I'm just sort of thinking about the process of it. But I hadn't really had the pleasure of working with Tony before. So I didn't actually know what to expect. They were just like, oh, we have this book. And they says Black Lives Matter ghost story. I'm like, that sounds awesome.  But it's a timely and important commentary on constant. Yeah, anyway. But for me getting through it, I just felt like it was the importance of it, was the impetus for it. But I didn't actually have to draw him being shot. I just had to see it repeatedly and then put words by it. Because there's one that's better. He's being really modest. The art of the letter is really amazing. And there's two, I guess there's no traditional panels all the time in there, but there's two scenes in the book where they're at a poetry reading. And the way that the juxtaposition of the character and the poem that you wrote and how it's placed on the page, it gutted me. It hit me so hard because it's like, I mean, when you talk about the graphic form, graphics, words, placements, all that camera angles, all that matters. If you wanted to take two perfect snapshots of the graphic form would be those two poetry readings in the book. And it just really gutted me. And so I'm just wondering, especially being a New Yorker, being from the Bronx. Bronx and Harlem. So that's part of, I mean, we grew up, that's the poetry she's spoken, worked scene. That was that. So but you, how did you? That's where I emerged from. The New York Post Cafe, all that stuff. I did the anthology, Bumrush the Pages, tied to a deaf poetry jam that Russell Simmons was tied to. Well, the story of Alfonso Jones is important to me because we get the 24 hour loop in the images of black brutality and death and murder rammed down our psychology through the media and then we get the smear campaign, of course, the demonization, but what don't we get? We don't get to learn about the people.  And what I tell my students at Howard University, I'm like, you know what, I don't like this phrase, this academic clinical phrase, referring to people who get killed by the police or whatever as bodies. These were actual people. They have souls, they were spirits. They have memories and experiences and all that stuff. And we're bombarded constantly with film, television, literature, with just the emotional world of white folks. But what about us? Where's our emotionality? Where's our imagination? Where's our sensitivity and creativity? So Alfonso Jones becomes that character because he's telling the story from the vantage point of being a ghost. In the beginning, he's in the first 20 or so pages, he's alive, right? But then he just, he gets, as he's fully thriving in his life, he gets literally yanked out of his flesh and he ends up on this subterranean ghost train, this subway car with Eleanor Bumpers, Amadou Diallo, Michael Stewart, the graffiti artist. Henry Dumas eventually he meets and he goes to the Henry Dumas School of the Arts. Henry Dumas was killed in 1968 at the age of 33. This was a, you wanna talk about Afrofuturism, this was a brother who was doing Afrofuturism before it was coined the term in his poetry and his fiction. And his poetry and fiction didn't really see the light of day when he was alive. If it wasn't for Dr. Eugene B. Redman and Toni Morrison who literally published his work and kept it alive and he's now regarded, I mean, he's reached a mythology. That's right. He's got Millard wrote about Afro-surrealism in relation to Henry Dumas. So that narrative brings all these things together. Alfonso Jones' father is a reverend, right? His paternal grandfather is a reverend who's in the Black Power tradition. So he has a liberation church in Harlem. So you get the generation of the civil rights and Black Power generation bridged together with the Black Lives Matter generation today. And the last thing I wanna say about this thing is that I wanted to be able to say, look, this Black Lives Matter movement did not just start five years ago, six years ago, whatever. People have been getting killed even beyond Emmett Till and all that stuff, right? Our narrative, of course, we have Dumas, Henry Dumas, 1968, and we have this actual, towards the end, we have an ancestors war where we pay homage to all the victims of police brutality and some of whom are white. From 1968 all the way up until the book had to go to press. We had to constantly edit it to add names. I mean, it's a start, right? Yeah, I know. It's the final page in the book and it's such a stark image. I mean, reading each one and then, as Tony you're saying, each of these lives, not bodies, had stories. Some of those stories actually interconnected when you realize how many relationships happened between the people who were actually on that wall. And they get to testify and bear witness as James Bolton would say to their experience at the hands of police in the narrative. Right, right, right, right. Because they take alfalfa on that journey. That's right, that's right. No, no, no, no, I thought that was a dramatic pause. I thought, I'm sorry. I wanted to talk a little bit. You get, yeah, Damien definitely is being very modest as first thing, that I remember when I saw the final PDF of it, I actually emailed McCall and I said, you have elevated the artwork in this particular book. I saw it, it's brilliant, brilliant work. Stacey did the pencils and the character designs and layouts and I did the, you know, a lot of the inking and we actually had to create a whole team of people to help us out because Damien and I, we actually ended up doing the Octavia Butler book, Kendrick, right? And Damien is the adapter for that book, right? And so what was happening was that book was about particular types of black trauma was happening, right? And then we were working on this other book where we said, hey, you know what? Let's talk about some more trauma, you know? And even though it was a different way. And so, when we were making, yeah, I know, when we were making that book, the Kendrick book, you know, we were, both of us were going to this piece where we were constantly dealing with different types of historical trauma and then trying to reify it and tell that story. So by the time that we came to Alfonso Jones, even though it was different roles because I did some product management on the book as well, I think that, you know, we could help encourage Stacey because sometimes I would talk to Stacey or have conversations with Stacey about just the rigor and the weight of this. Which we had just kind of gone through, yeah. Six months ahead and just like, here's what happened, yeah. Yeah, so it's kind of a muscle.  These stories are technologies of resistance as well. And so Stacey and I actually meet Stacey and Damian, we're working on a lot of projects together, right? So when this came across our emails, so to speak, we really did not have time to do this book, but we also knew that we had to make time to do this book at the same time. It's like, because Stacey and I were saying like, this is something that either Black Kirby or Black Kirby and Tan Lee would have done or J2D2, which is me and Damian, would have done anyway. You know what I'm saying? This is something that we felt resonant. See, we should have the Pokemon cards. Yeah. I like that analogy. Like, we had names. But yeah, but there were times when there was, you're crying and you're emotionally drained, you know? Well, I knew, like, I was really happy. So the other part of that, not knowing Tony's work beforehand, like, not that I don't trust John and Stacey, but I'm like, I hope this is good. Well, thank you. Thank you. With this, you wouldn't let me have the water. I remember. No, we're good. Always messing with me. All right, so, no, but very, like, pretty early on, after I lettered the first couple of pages when Alfonso's alive and he's just rolling through Harlem, I forgot he was a fictional character, like, pretty quickly, which was like, oh, that's awesome. Like, so I was like really excited after that. I get excited when you got, when I got those first pages because I was like, oh man, it's coming out. And then as a writer, you know, I could be able to edit from the laid out version. And it makes it easier. And you'd be like, oh, this sounds wack. I need to shorten this. The rhythm is all. Yeah, yeah, which it is weird how it's like different visual rhythms and then like the poetics, like rhythm, like coming together like. Yeah, buddy, I was saying that it's one of the few books that he's read that felt like a mixtape sounds. There's different elements in there and they're remixed in certain ways and there's some temporality that's in there that really made it feel like a really, like a visual mixtape that was a really great visual description of the book. How do you take trauma and honor it in a two dimensional form without belittling it? Yeah, that's a really hard question. Thank you for that. Well, no, it was interesting like when the story, when I started thinking about the story after I talked to Stacy Whitman on the phone when she said, do you want to do this project?  So I immediately got thrilled and excited and I started thinking about the story. The first thing that came to my mind was this, a bullet chasing this teenager, but the bullet was the size, it was streaking across the page, it was the size of like a MX missile or something, right? That was the first idea that hit me. You know, like Nas has a rap song where the narrator is a gun, so you get the vantage point of the gun that's going to kill this other kid or whatever. Yeah, I gave you power, his name. And so much as well when the gun draws. You know, we follow that bullet. Two parts. You know, that bullet that is going to go after this kid and kill him. And that was the first thing that came to me in terms of that whole trauma piece. And I know Jennings and Robinson over here have something to say about that. Yeah, you know, so one of the things that I think is important to mention is as John and Damien were working on Kendred and John got hurt, so there was this employment of a number of us who became involved with that project as well to make sure that that book got out on time. We went from that degree of illustrating Black pain. And that was my first experience with that and looking at how, is there enough blood here to make this convincing enough that this whipping scene is really painful? But we finished that up, which was rigorous. Then we went to another book called The Prison Industrial Complex for Beginners. And we drew in a month, I think we drew about 150 illustrations for that book. So we went from Black pain to, and then there's this Black pain that happens to your physical body as you're illustrating this, as you're getting this done on time. You're staying up late, you're getting up early, you're living on coffee, right? It's not a healthy lifestyle. So you put yourself through this and then you're illustrating this over and over again. So we go from Kendred to The Prison Industrial Complex to IML Fonzo Jones, which is 13 months of going through this as John and I are transitioning to new cities, to new jobs, family changes, life changes, speaking engagements, all these things while we have to keep these deadlines, right? So it's constantly this tearing of your own self to make this that becomes really a part of the narrative. But I wanna talk about that design. So you talked about the design of that and we've been having this conversation about that. I had to find ways of inside the story. What are the fun and the happy parts? Because it's not all sad. Yeah, that's humor. There are some points in there that were joyous for me to draw. I mean, and as a designer, I had to find those, I had to hold onto those, grasp those. And there are times where I would save that scene so that when I was at my lowest, I could actually go and draw this scene, right? And some of them were, once again, it all deals with this pain in a particular way, but I had to pull on every area of graphic design and storytelling that I knew to make this as beautiful and attractive as possible as well. That was part of the process and it was difficult. Again, I was fortunate enough to have, as crazy called it, fortunate to have gone through this process of reifying pain. Stacey's talking about this notion of doing a color of a bruise to make sure it was old enough to look, oh, okay, what does a bruise look like when it's two weeks old? That kind of thing, right? And actually to have references, oh, let me, and sampling from the color of a bruised eye. Bruised continuity. Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. You say bruised continuity? Yeah, it's like, oh, that's painful. Yeah, so you have to objectify and your cartooning is abstraction, too. So in a lot of times, it's hyperbolic, right, too. So there's that aspect of it, to which Stacey is a master of, as far as creating these hyperbolic scenes, right? But I was actually also fortunate that my wife and I were living in Cambridge and were looking at places to live out in Riverside. We moved, we're moving. So a lot of times, I was taking all this work with me, inking on the road, this kind of thing, and then trying to figure out the most optimal ways to get the book done, right? And so, we actually had to figure out as, I had to basically become a project manager to a certain degree, too, as with the Kindred book, where I'm working with a lot of different people, trying to make sure that everything's on time, pulling it together so that it gets out, and at the same time, pushing down that affect, constantly. And so, yeah, the mechanism of it just becomes a muscle, because all of us have dedicated ourselves as educators and as scholars to deal with this particular type of work. And this book, I think, beautifully, I'm really proud of the work that we've done on the book. But we realize this is going to be the rest of our lives. Yeah, and that's a very sober thought. Yeah, and not in a negative way. We just realize this is our calling. We have to make stories that address these things. But we also have to make stories that celebrate and explore black futures, right, the speculative black future, and give us joy. Joy is very important. So that was one of the things that attracted me to Tony's story as well. Yeah, because there's a sub-narrative or parallel narrative about students at the Henry Dumas Art School are putting together a remixed version of Hamlet. And as a teacher, I'm just like, I know every student I would have given her detention. I knew these students. And so when the event happens and the ripple effect that happens, it's visceral. It's like a very, but I mean, when we talk about this thing, as you're saying, black joy, but there's also an element of whimsy that doesn't. Take away from the trauma. It doesn't take away from seriousness. I think that something that we don't really talk about enough about is black joy because black pain is so prevalent. Black joy matters. Yeah, black joy. Absolutely. And I think there's something about, I think Tony, when you write, there's just, oh, you mean the one that the bubble-ow blessed. You just drop it in there. But there's mystic traditions. Because that's part of our natural upbringing and our heritage and stuff. You have Santeria and the household. You have this connection with the spiritual world. You know, it's just part of our grown-up. And ancestors aren't just an abstraction. There's an altar in your living room to Granny. That's right. To Gabalitha in the corner. You have something for her, for Gabalitha in the corner. You have that. So what was it like to be able to mix the more contemporary with so-called ancient traditions which are contemporary as well, but people may anthropologically put them as a primal tradition or whatever. But what was it like to be able to marry those things, especially being from Harlem and the Bronx? I mean, I had to tell a story that shows the full expanse of blackness within these black spaces in the Bronx and in Harlem. That just doesn't be confined to a certain group. It's the universal, globalized, de-esporic blackness. And that's what Alfonso Jones represents. I mean, the wild part is that a tree is planted at the Schoenberg Center in his honor. He's named Alfonso, which is the middle name of Arturo Alfonso Jones, who created the Schoenberg Center out of his personal library because he wanted to make sure that black culture and black history and black thought and black art and creativity is preserved and celebrated, much like with John Jennings and yourself and all these other great people are doing with the black comic book festivals across the country, preserving black culture. So that's part of that. It's saying that this is how we live every day.  They having dreams. They looking the lucky number book, right? I had a dream, a spirit talk to me. My grandmother spoke to me last night. I wrote to you, Rick, play the numbers now, like, OK, granny? And this is real stuff. This is how we grow up. This is our heritage. All of this leads. It's all a long string back to Africa, right? Culturally, and genetically, and spiritually, and emotionally. And what was really dope about it for me was it took place in America, but it wasn't an American story. Because blackness just isn't just an American version because it was a liberation theologian for a grandfather. Got the bobble-out in there. We had all these people connect and intersect. I guess Fernando Ortiz in the 40s called the transculturalism. It was a way that cultures are mixing, but there's always an exchange. And so there's something about that. There's a culture change happening on that page. Harlem is Dutch. I mean, even that, it's in the Dutch context. We bring these things out. And so there was, I guess, you know, Guy DeBoer talks about psychogeography, right? Like, how place affects us spiritually, psychically, emotionally. So what was it about? Like, why not the Bronx? What was it about Harlem that you had to tell that story in Harlem?  I wrote so many books in my little apartment in Harlem. Harlem is everything to me. You know, I used to go, think I was Langston Hughes going bar-harping and stuff to all the jazz spots, you know, with my friends and stuff, my writer friends. At the Schomburg Center, I'd done so much at the Schomburgs. One of my first readings was given to me by the great black arts poet Raymond R. Patterson on the stage of the Schomburg. Langston's ashes are entombed in the lobby of the Schomburg.  So, I mean, there's a lot of history that's rich and it's wealthy, but people don't get that when they see a body laid out from the bullet of a trigger-happy cop, a racist pig of sorts. We gotta be able to tell our stories. We don't get our stories told en masse on the big screen and on the little screen and in books. And as an educator, that's gonna be my second week assignment this semester, is I'm gonna have them go do, from their particular cultural group, go do a selfie scavenger hunt of icons of their particular cultural groups in my class, but I think it's really important because history isn't taught to us. History is dictated to us, I think there's a difference. And dictating is about curation. That's right. It's about here's the eight things you're gonna learn this semester and that's it. And what I think Alfonso Jones does is actually, turns Alfonso's story, not just as a journey of him being able to reflect on his own demise, but it's actually a journey for us to reflect on every single other tributary from this one particular person, how we are actually all radically interconnected. Which we don't ever talk about because we are so siloed or self-siloed or forced to be siloed ideologically, philosophically, religiously, gender-cess, class, all the rest. What is really good? I mean, you, Tony, made things in that book as an is. These are just how these kids are. And he collects famous quotes from them. Famous quotes from them. So there's this other thing happening with the quotes from these. And just like when you mentioned the hip-hop version of Hamlet. Right. Alfonso first wants to try out for the part of Hamlet, right? But he learns that he doesn't get the part. His rival, punky, Pedro Delgado, gets the part of Hamlet. Alfonso ends up with the part of Hamlet's father. Ghost dad. Who gets ghosted. So there's that. Yes. I'm sorry, I hadn't thought of ghost dad in a long time. And in the current context, I replayed the whole movie in my head in like a second. And I was like, ah, yeah. Sorry, that was way off topic. And you know, they freestyle, you know, they freestyle in the hip-hop version of Hamlet. Him and Danetta are in their way basically going over lines, you know, in the snow with the bike to the Marksman department store where eventually, you know, she bears witness. So there's like a composite. You know, remember the sister that saw Trayvon Martin get killed and she was on the stand during the trial? Well, kind of like Danetta sees him get gunned down. And he's laid out in the snow for hours upon hours, just like Michael Brown's that was laid out and in festering in the sun, you know, that summer that he was killed in Ferguson. And there was something about that, too, because I think we don't really think of witnesses having a responsibility. We think of witnesses as bystanders, but witnesses are participants in the traumatic act that they witnessed. And I think what was great about that, we showed what a witness can and cannot do because there's a part in the book, I hate, read it. So I've got spoiling it for you. But there's a part in the book where Danetta, who was his almost-girlfriend, Alfonso's almost-girlfriend. His secret crush, his best friend. Yeah, where Alfonso's mom gets mad at her because she can't really give her an answer about whether she's gonna be at the rally or not. And then I'm like, yeah. She's got so much pressure. She's got so much pressure.  And I thought that was so real, like, I'm 50, I got stuff to do, but now I'm part of this global movement when all I did, quote unquote, was being re-traumatized. She's getting re-traumatized. That's right. Right, yeah, yeah. And I had to draw that. I know. I was pissed at mom. But how many of us in this room, whether we wanna admit it or not, are re-traumatized every time somebody comes in the news? Yeah. You be driving by and to see a cop like, I hope to God, a white dude got pulled over. Yeah, yeah. It's not us. You see a black guy, you're like, I have done that. Yeah, you definitely have. Or how many of you hold your breath when you're driving or walking and wondering is it my day-to-day? I have a nine-year-old who tells me, Pop, are you gonna be okay? You're gonna be careful, daddy? I'm just going to the store, but things can happen. I'm like, you're nine. Why are you holding this now? I mean, how many of us are dealing in the collective trauma than how many of us react as she would do? Donetta reacted into normalcy. That's right. I have studies. She got attacked at a rally. At a rally. Yeah. And almost was killed. Yeah, once again, I mean, as I was drawing this, I was drawing my children, right? And I had to talk with my son about surviving the experience, right? And matter of fact, when I finished the book, so I drew most of the book in the Champaign Public Library. Show them the book. And when the book came out, I gave a special shout out to one of the librarians there because she opened the door for the conference room every time it came in. She didn't know what I was doing for months. When I was almost done, I showed her what I had been working on all of those months. And I put a hitter name in a book, I mean, in the acknowledgments and she read it and she called me while I was teaching. She was like, oh my God. And she had this story.  I didn't understand Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter. She's like, well, all lives matter. And of course, that's absolutely right, but not at the expense of Black Lives. And she was like, after she, of course, thanked me for putting her name in the book. And she was like, I read this book and she was like, now I understand Black Lives Matters, I get it. Now I understand the importance of this. And she was like, I will never understand it fully because I'm a middle-aged white woman. My son has encountered the police and it was never a question about whether he would survive the experience. He was walking on the train tracks one day. Police said, hey, are you okay? Everything okay? He's just walking on train tracks, just walking where he's going. Police asked him if he's okay, does he need anything? And she was like, I cannot imagine if that was your son, what would that experience be? And I was telling, as I'm doing this, like I said, I had to talk with my son about how to survive the experience. At the end of the day, make sure you survive the experience, right? It was difficult, but once again, there are points in the book, for example, there's Black Love, which is, I'm always looking for Black Joy, Black Love, and that is definitely in that book. And those were some points that I could hold onto and take my time and draw and really pull those out because I needed to keep my sanity in there as well while keeping the time. Just really briefly, when you talk about that Black, the love scene, he calls me up out of the blue, he says, well, Tony, there's no, I don't see the mother and father dancing stuff. So he drew a picture of them dancing. Right, yeah, because the thought, well, I don't wanna give too much of a hint. It's hard. No, it's difficult, yeah. No, but yeah, it's definitely, you definitely have to have that in that. And then also at the same time, like I said, we have these deadlines, we have these things that are jumping off. And one of the first things you have to create while you're doing this work and thinking about the, I have to say it, but the marketing of this pain, how do you make this type of pain beautiful? The first thing you have to do is create a cover for it. So in the process of all this, Stacy's got a new gig, Damien's dealing with teaching and being a father and other things. I'm dealing with moving, but we also have to come up with a cover that actually says everything it needs to say. And Stacy went through different iterations of the cover and we were actually, as a group, we're like looking at, okay, which one is dealing with it? But you have to speak symbolically really quickly with how do you reify all this stuff into one image? And so actually Damien Duffy did the logo design for this as well and also some of the lettering. So it was a team effort to kind of get all that story structure and all that negative affect into one solid image that then would be put into a catalog while we're still dealing with the process of trying to make this book happen. And that's his other thing too. It's like, it's a difficult, it's way difficult. Comics, making comics already very hard. And it's just this, when you're dealing with this type, we're not making superheroes or like the Hulk. You know what I'm saying? It's a different thing. You know what's interesting? When we launched this at New York Comic Con in October, middle of October, we were hustling from New York Comic Con all the way up to the Langston Hughes House, right? To do a book signing. At the Langston Hughes House. At the Langston Hughes House. We saw young people that look like Donetta on the cover, that look like Alfonso. We saw little kids that look like a younger version of Alfonso. So the way Stacy and John did the images of the characters, they're so universal. I don't know how you did that. I looked at pictures of real children. I really did. I wanted to draw us. And we listened to you too. Because you had your ideas about what you wanted to characters. Yeah, you really did. Your descriptions were very good. You wrote them as the characters. You wrote them as the characters. So that's how they got drawn. I wanted them to have some complexion. Yeah. I wanted Donetta's hair to be able to be a natural hair, but she could do it in all different styles and stuff. So her hair kind of changes like. Just points where her hair changes. Well the other thing too is a black and white book. So when we're doing the shading of the book, we have to take those different things into account. And also take on the inherent seriality of the comics medium too. And actually translate that as well. And I think it was more effective as a black and white book than a color book. I don't have to agree. I think in a color it would just be almost garish in certain scenes. It seems like it would be a little bit too garish, but I think that as a black and white book, you got shadow, texture, tenor, tone.  When you can fall into the like, there's the first train scene. You can fall in.  Like everything about that was like, mm, yeah, that's why I walked. Let me talk really quickly. I'll talk about that. So I used the collage method for that. Number of things it did, it made sure I haven't lived in New York City in over 20 years. And so I didn't necessarily know what trains look like at this point. I don't have that into memory. So I found images in Google images of trains and collaged those into the sketches so that John could ink over them, or I could ink over them, or our team, right? And so there's a part of that, there's a part of realism that you're speaking to that come from real photos, right? I had to be like that because, again, the spatial narrative of Harlem and is so intrinsic to the narrative that that had to be right. It had to be right. It had to feel right. Couldn't mess up those monuments. Exactly. I think most literate people have an idea of what Harlem is in their heads anyway. And so does what you're doing conform or counter their image of their version of Harlem. Harlem is a world famous place. Yeah, yeah. You capture that so well in your words. And the train is actually a real train where people are coming and going as these spirits are there. That's right, right. Yeah, so they're interacting with actually just just like the ancestors would. That's my last point was ancestor veneration is a part of cultural matter. I mean, even sampling is ancestor veneration. That's right. So what was it about making sure, Tony, that ancestors, even our traumatic ancestors, were included and honored and elevated because it was almost like Virgil and Dante going down into Paradiso, Inferno, and the rest, right? So I was wondering, why was that part important to you? Well, I really dig all your questions because I grew up in a culture where the spirits, the ancestors, will always protect you, right? When you left the house, you were blessed, right? And the ancestors were called upon to look out for you. And I think that in the struggle that people of color have on the planet against white supremacy, against capitalism, and imperialism, all that stuff, and neocolonialism, our ancestors got all back. And that's really what the message about, I am Alfonso Jones is. Our ancestors got all back. Alfonso Jones is rendered an ancestor, and he's got to find out what his new mission is in the struggle. Because it was so dope about, you know, we talk about ancestors all the time in an abstract, but like, what is it like? What's ancestor boot camp look like? You know, I'm not ready. I'm 15, I'm ready to be an ancestor, like, oh, damn, I'm one now, it shows this maturation, the spiritual maturation of Alfonso Jones from 15 year old kid to becoming an ancestor, but he don't think about our ancestors are 15 and eight and 12 years old sometimes. He think about ancestors being ancient or whatever, because he was getting the grounding at home in terms of the culture. So he would have been doing something in the struggle. Anyway. Yeah, anyway. But now he's rendered, you know, his life is interrupted of so, and he's in the spiritual realm. Now what do you do? Right. Well, I think, oh, no, I think speaking of ancestors, but also something that you were talking about earlier, the kind of meta history of trauma that is like the work is nested in is what makes it so important because, so there's the one moment in the book because, you know, Alfonso's meeting different victims of police brutality, and then there's the one dude, and I can't remember his name, because it's Radio Raheem. It's the guy who Radio Raheem is based on. Right. Oh, Anthony Byer. Anthony Byer, yeah. Oh, okay, yeah. That's a real life person. Right, right. That's kind of my point, is that we tend to forget, because there's the part where Alfonso Jones says to him, like, oh, you're like Radio Raheem. It's like, no, Radio Raheem was like him. No, like, damn. Right, right, yeah. And so this book provides that, but no, it was like him, like it goes. And Radio Raheem makes a cameo. Right, yeah. So it kind of undoes some of that work that some of it's sort of, I think, self-preservation, but forgetting, so you're not constantly focused on this drama, but there is a whole history. There's a healthy abstraction. Yeah, but that can go too far, and then you get disconnected from that history. You only know the popular culture, and that means something entirely different. So I want to thank first Stacey Robinson, John Jennings, Tony Medina, Damien Duffy. So a couple of housekeeping, so if you are taking video and posting photos, please use the hashtag, BCAF, B-C-A-F-S-F-2-0-1-8, 2018. Thank you so much. We kind of went over, so we don't have time for questions, but you guys just take it around for a little bit, I think. Yeah, right. We'll go over to the room. But I really would encourage everybody, please buy a copy of I.M. Alfonso Jones for the young people in your life who may be having some feelings and not being able to express them or have the mechanism to express them, because trauma is a language that not everybody speaks. And we respond to it, and it comes out in different ways. Buy it for your Trump-supporting relatives. Give it to them, put that in there. Buy it for everyone. If you can, buy a copy, donate it to a library. Please do so. And it's not just because I'm like, buy the book because it's a capitalist thing, because I think this is probably one of the most important cultural artifacts in the past five to 10 years, and we need that. Thank you. So tonight, we have at seven o'clock, we have a BCAF meetup. What's that restaurant? I'll call it, it's not Harvard. Oh, Hazel. Hazel, and tomorrow is our expo, City View, Metrion, at 11 o'clock. Please come out. There's gonna be a bunch of local people, international people coming up, and we will not have this, because this is our fourth year doing this. Yes. Thank you. So thank you so much for attending. Next year, we got some big announcements that I'll announce tomorrow for next year, but once again, we have a book room over here in the Latin American Book Room. We have things for sale, their books, they'll be over there. Once again, everybody, thank you so much for coming. Have a great rest of your afternoon. Thank you.


The Farm-Able Robot Mario has been a gaming icon for decades, present in countless titles. Although no year in recent memory has gone past without some type of Mario game being released, series fans will remember the nearly decade-long drought of original Mario platformers. From 1997 to 2005, there was only a single new one released, Super Mario Sunshine. During the second part of this drought, after Sunshine's release, the mysterious Super Mario 128 was the main focus of the fanbase. No concrete information was given on the game, and eventually, series creator Shijiromi Yamamoto planned it. It had simply been a series of test concepts that were never intended to be an actual game. The mystery faded from memory as the Mario drought finally ended, and most people forgot about the game that had once been the center of every Mario fans' imagination. The Mario drought corresponded with a bad era for Nintendo in terms of console sales. The Nintendo 64 and GameCube did not have the financial success of the earlier Nintendo Entertainment System and Super Nintendo, or the later Wii. For a very proud company that relied solely on video games to make money, this was quite upsetting for the higher-ranking employees, who were attached to the company and felt its success or failure reflected on them personally. Nintendo started working on a sequel to the 1996 Super Mario 64 shortly after the game was released, but during the late 90s, it became clear they were not winning the console war. The Super Mario 64 sequel was restarted from scratch, since the company believed that it was not a substantial enough improvement over the original to turn the tides of the market's battle. Seeing the generally more realistic and violent games on Sony's PlayStation, the market leader, Nintendo, considered making a Mario that was closer in tone to what the public seemed to want. There was quite a bit of internal conflict over how far to go with this new direction, and the new Mario was clearly not going to be ready until Nintendo's next console, the GameCube. The only hint of this release to the public was a comment by Miyamoto. He apparently thought Mario and Luigi should act more like grown-ups in their games for the, then soon-to-be-released, GameCube. The new Mario project was ultimately split into two games. Luigi's Mansion, which reflected the darker tone that many felt the series should turn to, although it was still toned down quite a bit compared to what some Nintendo executives and developers wanted, and Super Mario Sunshine, which went in the complete opposite direction. Both were released within a year of the GameCube, and Nintendo felt confident that their new system and Mario games would return them to their former glory as market leader. As those familiar with gaming history know, they didn't. The GameCube did even worse in market share than the Nintendo 64, and the mass markets' taste shifted even more toward violent realistic games. During this period, the summer mood at Nintendo intensified, and the darker Mario project was revived, this time code named, Super Mario 128. It isn't clear exactly what happened at Nintendo during this period. As we know, nothing called Super Mario 128 was ever released or publicly shown. The source that revealed the internal strife at Nintendo during the later N64 era refused to discuss what was happening during the time of the GameCube's failure, but released a prototype of Super Mario 128 online that can be played on the Wii Homebrew channel. The following is a recollection of my time playing it. The game was clearly an early beta. The title screen was nothing but white text saying, Super Mario 128, against a black background. There was no options menu or save file selection either. After the title screen, the game started. Bowser's laugh from Super Mario 64 looped in the background while a plain text box displayed this dialogue. Mario, I have taken Princess Peach. She will not live to see the sunrise tomorrow unless you take her place. You know what to do and where to go. Do not try to stop me unless you want to hasten her death. The game certainly was going for a darker tone. After I made the text box go away, I was thrust right into gameplay. The first thing I noticed was Mario's character model. His body was as detailed as in Super Mario Galaxy, although a little more realistically proportioned, but his head was taken from his SM64 character model. Obviously, his design wasn't finished yet. The setting was a sky level. There were some simple platforms floating in the air. The rest of the area was just blue sky, with several clouds scrolling in the background. They were quite graphically impressive, more realistic than the usual cartoony puffs in Mario games. There was no music or full voice samples from Mario, but there were grunting sound effects when he jumped. The jumping was more subdued than in other Mario games. He didn't jump as high as he usually did, and you had little control over his movement in the air. The different types of jumps in every 3D Mario were present. I played through the level. There was nothing especially notable about the gameplay. Enemies didn't seem to have been added yet. I just jumped from platform to platform, it wasn't very challenging. As I continued, I noticed the graphics gradually changing. The sky became more and more obscure until it was entirely composed of clouds, and the background gradually turned to a dark gray. After this, it started to rain. I reached a small platform with a toad on it. It looked like the Super Mario Galaxy model. When I landed on his platform, dialogue appeared. We don't want you anymore, Mario. You don't belong here. Just give Bowser what he wants. Die. After the text box went away, I no longer had control of Mario. He just stood there for a while, then turned around and walked off the platform. His body seemed to go limp as he fell. Eventually, it was revealed that there was a realistic modern city under the sky. The buildings looked neglected, but there were people on the street. Mario hit the ground with a realistic sounding thud, but he didn't explode or show any visible wounds. He just lay there. The people in the city were walking by, ignoring him, although I thought I saw a few glances at him with cold, somewhat angry expressions. This went on for a few minutes. Eventually, people stopped appearing. Mario got up. I was back in control, but he couldn't jump at all, and had a reduced walking speed. The large buildings of the city didn't appear to be interactive, so I just walked down the street for a while. Eventually, I found a small house that seemed out of place among the larger buildings. When I approached the door, Mario opened it. The screen went white and some black text appeared. House of torn memories. This seemed to be the level title. When I pressed a button, the screen faded back to Mario. He was inside the house from before. Everything seemed bigger than it should have been. Not gigantic, but scaled as if Mario was a very small child. The house was filled with normal objects covered in dust and signs of neglect. There were no people on the ground floor, just things like broken lamps and rotting food. I found a door that opened to a set of stairs going down, leading to a basement. In the basement, I found a dilapidated couch and a broken TZD. However, what really caught my attention was what was on the couch. Two skeletons that appeared to be children, judging by their size. Due to the scale of the house, they were still larger than Mario. I was starting to get really disturbed by now. How had a Mario game containing this been programmed to this extent? I went up to the skeletons and tried pressing buttons to interact with them or the TZD, but nothing seemed to happen. I was about to turn around and look elsewhere when I was nearly scared to death by a definitely loud crash coming from the game. What appeared to be Bowser seemed to have broken through the floor from below and landed in front of Mario. I say appeared to be, because he was nothing like the way Bowser is usually rendered. The reptilian monster in the game had Bowser's basic brownish yellow and green color pattern, but looked far more threatening than any Bowser model I had seen before. Its arms and legs were far longer in relation to its body, and ended in razor sharp claws. His green shell didn't look like it had spikes glued on. They were more jagged and organic looking, with the same dark green color the rest of the shell had.  Mario was cowering in fear from this thing. A dialogue box appeared. You've kept me waiting long enough Mario. I will taste flesh soon.  I still didn't have control. Mario just stood there, shivering for several seconds before nodding his head. Bowser then impaled Mario with his claws. There was no blood, but it was clear from the animation and sound effects that the sharp digits of Bowser's hands had gone through Mario's body.  Again, there was no blood or graphic details left behind on Mario's neck, just Mario's character model being destroyed. The screen faded to black. In white text, another level name appeared. Mario's Eternal Home. Mario's character model was whole again when the level started. It was the only thing on the screen besides the black background. He was gloating, as if in space. I could somewhat control him, but it felt more like I was deciding the general direction in which Mario would tumble, rather than fully deciding his movement. As I drifted towards no apparent destination, voices faded in. They were echoing and deep, telling Mario that he was worthless, that the world no longer had any use for him, and that everyone would be better off if he was dead. High-pitched crying was layered on top of the voices after a while. It sounded like it was supposed to be Mario's cries. This really disturbed me, and I found myself fighting back tears. For reasons I couldn't understand, this was affecting me on an emotional level. The voices and aimless wandering went on for several minutes, until I spotted a light gray speck in the distance. I moved towards it. It took a very long time to reach, and grew closer at a much slower rate than it should have. When I was close enough to make it out, I saw that it was a tombstone. It was a very plain one, with cracks in several places. When I got right next to it, I could see writing on its surface. I turned off the system right after reading it. I'm not going to play the beta or heck or whatever this was again. There was a single word written on the tombstone. Innocence.


And this is Poo Bear. Hey Poo Bear, what did we do today? We went on an adventure. On an adventure where? To Richmond, Indiana. Really? Yeah. What did you do there? We went to a hospital, an abandoned hospital in Richmond, Indiana. Was it a big hospital? Oh, it's huge. Yeah? Yes. Lots of buildings? Yes, lots of buildings. And where else was we going to go? Well, it went past. We were going to go to a haunted greenhouse and a gas company. And the gas company was, the building was demolished. And so was the greenhouse building. So we just got to do the hospital today. Yeah. So we didn't videotape the other two, although we found where they used to be. We didn't videotape them because there was nothing there. And I'm not going to bore you guys with, well, this is where this used to be. I know there's a lot of videos out there knocking guys' videos, but we don't want to bore you guys.  So that's why we're doing the intro like this. That's right. Yeah. So did you have fun? I had fun, but I got scared. YouTube gets to see me scared. Her gets scared? Did you get scared to prove it? Yes, I did. But that's okay, right? Yes, it is. Because we're all human. We all get scared. That's right. It was big and dark, and the light on the camera was going dead. Like, you'll see in the second part of the video where I get up by myself. I mounted a flashlight that she got forces. Nice LED. And it's very bright, but the batteries were going dead in it. So not much lighting, a little dark. But we'll do a good video for you guys. And she just was having a weird feeling. So when in doubt, get the hell out. That's right. Get out. So anyway, we hope you enjoyed the video.  So we're just going to do a two-part, like a 20-minute video each. And I hope you guys enjoy it, but I had a good time. We had a nice little road trip, but it was only about an hour and 15 minutes from where we live at now. But it was nice. It was nice. We took National Road Route 40 there. We had a good time. Had fun. Pooh got scared. We had a lot of fun. Yeah, it was awesome. But then of course, again, she had to park somewhere and drop me off and let me go videotape so she can see it. Yes. But that's cool. I'd do it for her because I love her. And we love you guys. And I hope you enjoyed the video. Thanks for watching. Pooh Bear out. Hi. What? I said hello. Well, it didn't start recording yet. That's why I said what? Where are you going? We're going on a little adventure. Where to? Richmond, Indiana. No way. Yes way. We're just leaving the house. Actually, I'm on the highway yet, but... So, this is our GPS. Where are you going to go? To a hospital and an oil company. Gas company? Gas company. Same thing. Oil gas. What's the difference? The Haunted Greenhouse. The Haunted Greenhouse. Okay. You not happy? I'm very happy. You are? Yes, I like adventures. You do? Yes, I do very much. What happens if Shea Bear gets caught by the cops? We're going to have a really funny YouTube video because Shea Bear has been thinking about it all day. Okay. Yeah? All right. Because we're not... Because two of these places are owned by the city, right? Yep. Okay. Now, do I pay taxes? You sure do. Do you pay taxes? I did. I sure do. Okay. So, now, how does the city own these properties? By our taxes. That's right. So, technically, we are owners of the places we're going. Yes. Now, if the police department says something to us, who pays their salary? We do. Taxpayers, right? Taxpayers. And we are taxpayers. You got to keep saying that, so they understand. Yeah. Okay. So, they work for us, right? Yes, they do. So, I will tell them, well, I'm a taxpayer. I pay your salary, so you work for me. I'm a taxpayer. Taxes bought that building, which I am a partial owner of. So, officer, you are fired. I'm going into my building and look around. Oh, God, please help me. They want to keep their job. Oh, I got to say, okay, look, I'm not that hardcore of a guy. You still work for me. I'm still your boss. You go find the non-tax paying son of a bitches that just created my building while I'm going in and try to find out what else they did. Okay. Okay. Does that sound good? Yeah, it sounds real good. All right. You think our viewers will bail me out of jail? Somebody's going to have to help. Yeah, but you know what? I have several charges against you. Well, for what? Going into my own building and firing my own employee? That's not against the law. As far as I'm concerned, President Obama works for me. I'm his boss.  A little rant from Shebear. I'm sorry, but hey, it's true, right?  Not impeached, fired.  He works for us, right? Okay. All right, YouTube. We'll get back with you with a little video here shortly. Who bear out? She bear out. See you shortly. Bye. Hospital or at a hospital or not.  Richmond, Indiana. Pooh Bearer. Hi, Pooh Bearer. Hi, Pooh Bearer. Go this way. What? What's it say? She said it says don't come in. I think what I was reading about this place, I do believe that it closed in 2008. People's been in there. Open windows, busted windows. Shit. You know what? Coming on very bright. Wonder where the morgue's at. There's the elevators. What? Do what? I feel really uneasy. Well, it's a hospital, so. Look at that falling down. Look at the image people have done. I know. I don't know why people do this stuff. Who runs it for everybody. Yeah, I'm feeling really uneasy. You are? Yeah. Our batteries must be about dead in this light. Look, there's an old clock. More elevators. This place is huge.  From when I was gathering that it's been abandoned since. There's a fine line between abandoned and just vacant. You know, back here. No, the floor's dead now, but I'm not on that floor. Really? Yeah. I think we need to go back up on that floor. See, I can't see nothing. It's lighting bright enough. Why didn't we think of our night vision? I don't know. Because I don't shave air. Take a picture. I don't want to get down there because I'm not seeing anything on this. Yeah. Yeah, because the lights are dimmed. What? Let's go back up the upper floor. New light. I'm not feeling real good about that. I got my knife on the way. You got yours? Yeah. This is a place I didn't think we would be able to get in, but we're in it. This could be a revisit of different floors, you know? Yeah. It's only a little over an hour from the house. What, honey? Because you have to know when you're caught. Well, I know, but I still want to look around a little bit. I don't know. It's really dark in this camera. Shit, we should have brought extra flashlight. See, this is what bothers me is not having a big enough light because vagrants, they think you're trying to harm them or something. Usually they won't hurt you, but you never know.  And we'll make this a revisit because of the tracks in the snow. What's fresh tracks from today? So I'm thinking the police make the rounds because of this stuff, you know? Yeah. The vandalism, the nurses station here. What? Okay, hang on. We'll get out of here, sweetheart. Did you hear that? What? Something just fell. Well, it might have. Okay, baby. If you're ready, we'll go ahead and get out of here. No, if you're... I'm fine. I just... No, baby. If you're uneasy, we'll go. I'm just not right. Okay. I think I'll be mad at me. No, baby. Let's go ahead and go. Next time I'll have a night vision and I'll come in by myself and you can sit in the car. How's that? Okay. That sound good? Yeah. There's a restroom and people just demolish things because they can. And I don't know why people think it's so cool and fun to do this kind of thing right here. Why not just come in and enjoy the place, you know? Go ahead. All right. So there's one for you. I will be knowing a revisit of this. You think too, Bear? Yeah. That was neat. You ready? I got a little uneasy, so... That's okay. So we have this to the best of us. All right. You ready? Yeah, I'm ready. All right. Where are we going now? Uh, to... Gas company. Gas company. Okay. All right. Bye-bye. Bye. Pooh Bear. Pooh Bear out. I really got uneasy, didn't I? Yeah, I'm shaking too. All right. We'll see you shortly. You can keep it at a steady speed, you bet. Did you get this front part here? Uh, no. But I did get some... Look at this.  To the right. To the right. You're on the right. You're on the right. Atty, but easy. Can't stop here. We're getting all them going, you know? Night time would be the best time. Oh, the police... You haven't got a lot? That's okay, baby. The police, you know, at night time, I don't know if they're going to want to scrim around in there because, you know, there's probably vagrants in there. I didn't see many footprints, but if there's vagrants in there, they'll know all kinds of ways around. I'll see if we could have...