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USDN Podcast is a cinematic indie comics interview series hosted by the USDN_Chairman and the Council of Nerds spotlighting the creators, storytellers, and worldbuilders shaping the future of independent comics.
Each episode dives beyond headlines into the real journeys behind the books from Kickstarter launches and creative struggles to the philosophies driving today’s indie storytelling movement.
This isn’t about rumors or recycled news.
It’s about the people creating the worlds.
Through in-depth conversations, creator spotlights, and crowdfunding discussions, USDN explores:
• The rise of indie comics
• The business of crowdfunding
• The art of worldbuilding
• The realities of independent storytelling
USDN is where indie comics come to life for the fans, by the creators, and powered by the community.
You are listening to the USDN on the
DFPN.
Let's go!
What is up, everybody?
And the chairman is back from vacation.
Welcome, everybody,
to the United States Department of Nerds,
where we are for the people,
by the people and of the people.
Science fiction has always asked one
question.
What if?
But for Jeff Carroll,
sci-fi is more than spaceships and aliens.
It's culture.
It's politics.
It's imagination without limits.
From black science fiction and hip-hop
horror to indie comics, filmmaking,
speculative storytelling,
tonight we explore why sci-fi matters and
who gets to shape that future and why
imagination itself matters.
may be revolutionary ladies and gentlemen
the council of nerds is now in session
i'm going to refer to you as coach
jeff coach jeff welcome to the usdm my
friend
Thank you for having me.
I'm excited to be here.
I love the intro.
I love that song, Galvanize,
with what you call it, Q-tip on it.
And that's one of my songs I listen
to on my road trips.
So I like that intro.
I think that one is the Imperial March.
dub stepped with parts of the Harry Potter
theme.
I believe is what it is.
Yeah, they do a lot of those mixes.
That's cool.
But, yeah, everybody loves the song.
It's one of those where it's going to
be sad when it's gone because I am
about to start working on the next big
thing for the intro.
Right.
But, yeah,
it's time for a change to reflect what
we currently do here at the USDN.
So that's going to be coming soon.
But right now, Jeff, it's all about you,
my friend.
All right.
Let's go.
Coach Jeff,
tell everybody who you are and kind of
what got you into everything that you're
into because you have your hands into a
lot of things.
I'm really at the core.
a liar, right?
Let me say that.
And I embrace that because it's important
to distinguish fact from fiction,
especially in the world that we're living
in now.
So I am a revolutionary liar.
I try to use my mind as some
form of social
um engineering like an engineer goes out
and tries to solve problems you know
they'll try to figure out a way to
cut down traffic through a certain
intersection by expanding the road or
adding alternate routes and stuff like
that i feel like there's certain problems
in society that i can play out through
my imagination
and I write a story about it.
And then there's also an element of me
that is trying to fill in missing pieces.
So if we look at the total imagination
of humanity,
the elements that are missing are people
of color.
And so when I write my sci-fi,
I embrace the blackness of it
But I embrace it as a needed component
to complete the human sci-fi experience.
So when people say, hey, you know,
you're just writing for Black people.
No, no.
I think all people need to hear the
voice of Black people,
especially African-Americans.
People from Africa, African Africans,
Nigerians, South Africans, Ethiopians,
they're all beautiful expressions of
sci-fi.
I want to hear those too.
I want to hear from Philippines.
I want to hear from people in Korea.
I want to hear Japanese, Chinese,
South American.
And I think those all equal footing.
However,
we deal with a very Western dominated
genre or art form.
way of combating that or aiding it,
I write from my perspective.
I think that goes a long way for
everybody.
More people wrote from their perspective
instead of another person's perspective.
I think we get a lot more great
projects out there.
I personally have had Filipinos on the
podcast with their projects writing
women creators on uh african-american
creators on and i i'd love to have
everybody on like i don't give a damn
who you are where you're from if you're
working within indie comics i want to talk
to you i want to share your story
and that's what i'm all about here is
the creator's journey that got them to
where they are today and to me that
is the most fun aspect of this.
Yes, I love the comic books.
I love the documentaries.
I love the drawings, the storytellings.
But to sit down with the creator and
get their journey,
that's the best part about this,
in my opinion,
is getting to share those journeys with
everybody.
And that's why I do what I do,
really.
I think that's good.
That's very good.
But let's jump in.
We're going to talk about you
Jeff,
so you describe sci-fi as the total
freedom of your mind.
What does that mean to you personally?
I told you, I did my research.
Before we went live, I told you.
I dig into it.
I actually want to put that on a
t-shirt if I ever get around to printing
them,
because I feel that's what it actually is.
I think thinking about the present is
immediate micro
science fiction because you're thinking
about the immediate future you're thinking
about later tonight you're thinking about
tomorrow but you know years down the line
that is full-out sci-fi you know and it
is uh it puts your life into perspective
you know i'm a
you are past what could be called middle
age.
You're in that bubble.
And it gives you a little bit of
perspective because now you have to accept
that you've done things in your life,
specifically physically,
that you may not be able to do
again.
Even if you can,
your peers and your friends,
you get past fifty,
you've lost some close friends of yours.
You know, and, you know,
it's not survivor's remorse.
It's really life perspective.
And that perspective gives you a chance to
think about, all right, what, you know,
like Karis one says,
what do you think about when you're out
of here?
You know, when you're out of here,
what is it going to be like?
Because then your mortality becomes a
realistic thing to you.
So you start to think, oh, my God,
I'm not going to be here forever.
I'm not a vampire.
I'm not going to scramble and try to
clone myself or put myself into a
hyperbaric chamber.
You know,
I'm just going to embrace life's
mortality.
And that is kind of what I feel
motivates me in sci-fi is like I'm writing
about the future for people to speculate
about it now to kind of put themselves
into perspective.
You know,
I think a lot of people needed to
think about their future when they were in
their twenties, you know?
Yeah.
I mean, you think about it,
most people in their twenties are just
living for that moment, right?
Yup.
And then we find out there were people
that were saving, that were eating right,
that married right.
And now they're in their fifties,
sixties and their lives show the benefit
of that investment.
They might've been corny people.
They might've gotten teased very early.
They didn't probably go out to all of
the parties,
but they were investing in their future.
You know?
So, you know, yeah.
I think it's that moment where you get
that eye opening like, like, damn,
I'm thirty five.
Where am I at?
I think that moment right there is where
you kind of take a step back and
you go,
Where am I at this stage of my
life?
Yeah.
Any of your friends that had teenage
pregnancies by thirty five,
their kids are like middle school.
He's like, whoa, whoa.
Yeah, I'm I'm not that old.
And you're like, yeah,
I have a son that's twelve.
You're like, goodness.
Oh, my God.
And then you have people that get married
in their twenties.
So by thirty five, they're already,
you know,
hitting that seven year mark in their
marriage.
Yikes.
I got married at thirty two, thirty three,
I think.
I got married at twenty four.
You were early.
Yeah.
And I've been married,
I just hit twenty years.
Wow.
So it's a beautiful thing.
And my daughter,
a nineteen year old kid in college.
So.
I was growing up very differently,
I don't really consider like, yeah,
from birth to eighteen,
I was living and then I joined the
Air Force.
Then that's when I feel like I really
That's where you grow.
Right.
And I kind of feel like that's where
I grew up into the person that I
am.
Yes.
I look at growing up very differently from
how most people view growing up.
So I really don't in my head,
my life really didn't start until I
arrived in basic training,
put the uniform on the first time in
my head.
That's when I grew up and started growing
up.
It's kind of similar for me.
I went to college the night of my
graduation from high school.
I didn't go to the graduation parties.
I went and moved in on campus that
night.
And I went to a school that was
in New Jersey,
but there was nobody from my hometown
there.
kind of wild ain't it and nobody knew
my hometown they kind of heard about it
but nobody knew my hometown and so it
allowed me to create my own reputation you
know um and that was powerful wasn't
anybody that was in senior or junior they
didn't know me at all they didn't even
hear my hometown
My roommate used to make jokes.
You are their perspective of your
hometown.
So whatever they think of your hometown is
what they've got from knowing you.
So that was a really beautiful thing
because most of my friends went to school
in the South.
In New Jersey, everybody went to Rutgers.
I know a lot of Rutgers fans.
So many Rutgers grads.
It's crazy how many.
They have such a good journalist school.
They got like eight campuses.
They got like a bunch of campuses.
So there is, you know,
just their enrollment is bigger.
My school had one college.
And now it's a bigger school.
But when I went there,
it wasn't that big.
yeah you know shout out to rutgers man
they they do have a very good journalist
program there and a lot of my friends
who are journalists graduated from there
so shout out to my journalist friends
That's what I started.
I should have gone to school for that.
When I was in high school,
I started writing for a newspaper just to
get into concerts free.
Hey, I like your thinking.
Well, my mother was a writer.
She was a play critic,
Off-Broadway Black Plays.
So she was like, yeah.
you know um you want to do this
so i started going to amateur night at
the apollo um the year that it opened
up and um i just you know my
senior year every wednesday night i would
go there during the season of the amateur
night and i write who won give a
little line on my opinion you see
time oh man and then and this was
eighty four so when I was in college
my college was like forty five minutes
away I take a train there and my
cousin ended up getting a job at the
Apollo so when they started Showtime at
the Apollo I started doing bus trips to
the Apollo from my college and
And, um, man,
I'm still going there every week,
you know, that would have been so amazing.
Oh man.
And then when I graduated,
that was made there.
Yes.
That was one of my first jobs after
I graduated was television production.
So it wasn't every day.
But during the season of Showtime,
I worked there.
And I substituted.
And then I had a internship at Sony
Records.
At the time I got in,
it was CBS Records.
Yeah.
It became Sony Records.
So I got to work with Mariah Carey,
Lisa Lisa, Cult Jam.
I saw Russell Simmons when he had his
Splitted label.
Yeah, that was it.
Yeah,
so I was in with all of that.
I was an intern the same time Puffy
was an intern.
Oh, wow.
Same year.
I'm glad you come out a different person.
Oh, man.
I saw the fifty cent thing and I
was like,
I did not know that about him.
I only knew who he was,
but I didn't hang out with him.
I wasn't a money flashing guy.
You know,
I was enough to not look broke,
but I wasn't flashing jewelry and,
you know, riding around expensive.
I wasn't my thing.
So I was more from the KRS tribe,
you know, tribe called Quest.
I was black medallion.
I was like that, you know, most deaf.
You know,
so I wasn't in that same lane,
although we knew that lane exists.
Yeah.
You know, I was in it.
But yeah.
So I got to work with comedians from
day one.
When I was in college,
I actually went to Rutgers and saw Bill
Bellamy hosting a step show.
And I hired him to come to my
college.
And I believe it was for three hundred
dollars.
And that was his first college booking.
And we became friends.
Whatever happened to Bill Bellamy?
He's still a man.
Bill Bellamy is amazing.
He still does his stuff.
He finds his revitalize his show maybe
three or four times.
He's presented himself in different ways.
Yeah, very funny.
I remember him when he was doing
I think it was a stand-up.
Yeah, TRL.
Yeah.
Yep.
And I think he was also doing a
stand-up too as well, right?
Well, he's been doing stand-up.
That's his bread and butter.
Yeah, that's what I had thought.
That's where the first time I remember
seeing him and it was on BET,
I think, doing stand-up.
And then all of a sudden he was
on TRL,
which I thought was –
damn, Bill Bellamy on TRL.
Yeah,
it was a perfect progression because he
had a very personable stage show.
So for him to move to television was
really smooth.
And then in the acting,
I know Hollywood is a really monster,
but I like him in almost every role
he's been in.
yeah and it's funny that you brought him
up i was just like damn that's the
name i haven't heard in so long and
then you know you see like how um
martin come up you know yeah funny as
hell i watched i remember the first time
i seen him doing stand-up then he had
his tv show and then he was a
bad boy right i was like what the
hell did i just watch
When I saw him,
I worked on Deaf Comedy Jam from the
very beginning.
I used to do the audience production,
and then I also used to help,
because a lot of my comedians that I
had on my college agency were getting
booked on there.
So I was a go-between.
I'm seeing them all the time.
And Martin being that host threw us,
because it was a very...
vulgar, say-anything show.
And Martin, up until Deaf Comedy,
he watched his mouth.
He was Martin on his show.
But that Martin wasn't that vulgar.
It was definitely sexual and suggestive
stuff.
It wasn't a Cosby show.
But it was like, oh, snap,
your mother starts cursing.
And you'd be like, oh, shoot,
moms can curse.
And that's how it was with Martin.
And having him on Def Comedy Jam,
you just felt the burst of freedom that
he had.
And he was really that guy that you
saw on Martin.
Yeah.
So it,
my grandpa was a huge fan of deaf
comedy jam.
And, um,
I remember like walking by him watching it
and sitting down and watching it and just
laughing my ass off for hours.
Cause you remember BET, I think at like,
or something would just be like the,
the very vulgar comedy shows.
And, um,
I would just sit there and watch that
until he's like, all right,
get the hell out of here.
I gotta go to bed.
I got work in the morning.
I'm like, all right, cool.
And I go back to my room and
find it on the TV.
I'm like, all right,
I got to finish watching this dude stand
up.
Yes.
But just watching all those legends come
up in the system on Def Comedy Jam
and all these other comedy shows,
I was just like,
then you see them on TV,
then TV shows and movies.
Yes.
I was like.
this is awesome.
When I look back,
having had that opportunity,
when I was in college,
I've always had a sense of humor.
One of my girlfriends, after I graduated,
she said, you know what?
I went out with this comedian and he
was telling me about this comedy club in
New York.
You should go.
They offer classes.
I went and it turned out it was
the Uptown Comedy Club.
And I went in and I met J.B.
Smoove.
I met all of these guys that were
Flex Alexander,
all these guys that were going to become
big, big names.
Same week or month that I started going,
Tracy Morgan started going.
And I was in it,
but I wasn't in it to become a
stand-up.
I really wasn't.
So it took me a long time for
Tracy Morgan to grow on me,
because I didn't think he was that funny
at first.
So let's just say this.
He's not that funny, OK?
He's a caricature.
He's a caricature.
Yes.
Yes.
When he got Saturday Night Live,
he was still Tracy,
but he wore that thing on his top
and he came in and he played a
bit character on Martin.
That's his money right there is the
characters.
Right.
And so he did have a stand-up show,
but his show, he was always very dirty.
He wasn't even vulgar.
He was just dirty.
You know what I'm saying?
And I think for a certain...
white community, they like those vulgar,
dirty, black comics,
as opposed to somebody that's clean, like,
say, Bill Bellamy,
somebody who's polished, like Sinbad.
You know, they'd rather have...
Sinbad used to have me rolling on the
floor laughing.
right, but they don't want that.
That's a real N-word.
You know what I'm saying?
Tracy became that.
He wasn't clean cut, polished.
He's overweight.
I've seen this stand up a few times
and I just didn't enjoy it,
but I appreciated what he brought to SNL
because he is such a good character guy.
He can do that really well.
Yeah, he plays that role very well.
I remember, you know,
if you ask people that know my company
in the early years when I tried to
book him at colleges,
I used to do community events,
he would always ruin it.
You know, I was like, oh my God,
you know, stop the show.
What is he talking about?
Take him off, you know?
Yeah.
You know,
but he got on Saturday Night Live.
He played that role.
He was on Martin.
Then, of course, you know, now,
He's had the last OG television show.
And it's stuff that's scripted around him.
I know the comedians that write the show.
And he is who that character is.
So he fits all of those norms.
And he is that person,
that Black person that did get caught up
in the system that you hear about.
He's not the college.
He's not Theo Huxtable.
But he's still a good guy, you know?
He's still a good guy.
Or at least he's not a criminal,
you know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
He's probably about average.
He's not a crime-doer.
Other than that, I can't tell you.
I haven't seen him and haven't been around
him in years.
And whenever we see each other,
at least before his accident,
we would always joke on each other.
He would, oh, there's Jeff Carroll.
Ah, ah, ah, ah.
And I'm not devoid of a sense of
humor.
So I'm going to joke back with the
best of them.
So I'm hitting them.
He can't out-snap me.
I'm keeping mine.
I still got my wits.
Now I write comedy comic books.
So my sense of humor is professional.
So I have confidence in it.
Could I be on stage?
Not so much.
the eagles this is a whole other world
to be on stage and do it i
know some funny people out there but in
real life they are the most funny people
i know i just be like being on
stage that's another world right there so
star wars what is star wars the moment
that truly
did it for you?
Well,
I'm just preparing for The Mandalorian.
You and me both.
Two more days.
Two more days, friend.
I realize I never finished watching The
Mandalorian series.
And so I caught up on it,
started catching up on it last week.
And today I just finished the last episode
of three.
But I will say I saw Star Wars
at eleven years old.
in the theater, my father took me,
of course,
and I remember the feeling of piloting a
star fighter, an X-wing, you know,
just that feeling of being out in space.
Now, you know, I had been, you know,
other space shows you know things like
that but there was something about star
wars that did it for me that connected
with me and it connected with everybody
and now i use it i was just
thinking how many easter eggs they drop um
how many books in the expanded universe
video games games animated cartoons
that actually stem from that sandbox.
And it's a, what do you call it?
It is a example of how to replicate
stories on stories.
It's how we can, with good writing,
everything can have a sequel and a
prequel.
and star wars is testament to that um
i can't wait one of the um stories
that i i spent a year reading star
star wars books it was really about a
book a month i'm not a fast reader
yeah one of the books that i read
that i really liked in that year was
um the death troopers
And I was like, wow.
And I just remember what it was about.
I remember all the details of it.
But when I watched The Mandalorian,
The character that John Carlo Esposito
played at the very end spoke to one
of the guys on their ghost council where
they were trying to take over Mandalorian
and they were to shadow Empire to the
New Republic.
And he said to guys,
you got that Necromancer project.
That's fine.
But I think the clone project is better.
And you learn that, spoiler alert,
that he had cloned himself.
And that was cool.
I don't think he died.
I think he had another place where he
got other clones of himself.
And then he said that he was trying
to isolate the Force genome to give his
clones Force-wielding capabilities.
The Necromonder experiment could directly
tie into Death Troopers, right?
And then his ability to isolate the clone
gene could tie into the Force Unleashed
video game.
That's when Darth Vader cloned a
force-wielding kid.
made him Starkiller.
And they took the name and they made
Force Unleashed one of the movies.
But it's really,
Force Unleashed is the video game.
And that story was amazing on how the
one clone.
That's probably one of my favorite Star
Wars video games.
It is just so good.
The story is good.
The gameplay is good.
Even Force Unleashed II.
And then if you get to read the
books,
The book is good.
So, I mean,
that's what Star Wars represented to me,
to go back to your question.
It was my,
it busted my science fiction cherry.
I was eleven years old.
I wasn't reading science fiction books.
I was, you know,
probably just getting into DC Comics.
And I was really a Conan the Barbarian
fan.
So space wasn't my thing until Star Wars.
So you speak about sci-fi as escapism,
but also problem solving.
Do you think great sci-fi should entertain
first or challenge society first?
So yesterday was my favorite speaker's
birthday.
and that was malcolm x and malcolm x
was a very good educator did he say
things that nobody else said before
absolutely not he actually remixed what
elijah muhammad was saying and made it
easier to digest and what he used to
make it digestible
was humor, was entertaining.
When you watch those speeches,
they might be dated,
but if you look within context,
he wasn't putting people to sleep.
He was using analogies,
he was using voice inflection,
all of those things that good speakers
use, even the minister Farrakhan,
and I'm not in the nation Islam, right?
But looking at him as a speaker,
he's very effective.
And so when it comes to presenting
information, all of my favorite educators,
right?
One of my mentors is Dr. Leonard Jeffries.
He was very humorous.
He would get up to, you know,
I just got back from Africa or whatever,
whatever.
And then he would go into presenting some
deep concept.
To me, that's what entertaining is.
It's not only humor,
but it's understanding pacing.
You're not just talking.
You know, I'm a public speaker.
You know,
when I go out and do my dating
workshops,
that's a whole hour that I'm speaking.
You can't just talk monotone to people.
You'll put them to sleep.
Even the most entertaining subject,
you have to give them,
you have to have in the back of
your head, entertaining.
Is it a comedy skit?
No.
But even information and
In educational speeches and presentations,
books, comic books, movies,
whatever it is,
you got to get your thing in there.
You got to make it entertaining.
I think about that from my title.
Like I had a story that was inspired
by a bad relationship that I had.
And it wasn't a bad relationship.
It just ended in a bad future for
me.
The girl that I was dating,
she was used to dating more than one
guy at a time.
And having a guy she could turn to
just for money.
Of course,
she was probably sleeping with the guy,
but she didn't have to be his girlfriend.
She wasn't no commitment involved.
And she dated me,
and I'm an exclusive person.
So you date me.
You're my girlfriend.
I ain't got no other girlfriends.
You ain't going to have no other
boyfriends.
And she couldn't take it.
So before the year was out,
she was like, listen, I can't take it.
It's too much.
It's like pre-marriage.
And I'm not into that.
So I was like, all right, cool,
if that's what you want to do.
And then a week later, she said, look,
you can't call me.
I got a boyfriend he's paying for.
my rent, he's paying my phone bill,
he's paying my child's tuition.
And I'm like,
what kind of baller did you get?
You know what I mean?
Yeah, right.
You got you know,
this is every you know,
a lot of women's dreams.
I said,
but it comes with strings attached.
And I couldn't just tell her because I
wasn't sure she had just broke my heart,
you know.
So I thought about it and I wrote
this movie about a girl who felt she
could use her looks
to get what she wanted.
And I thought of a real colorful name
and I called it Gold Digger Killer.
But the whole story was inspired by me
giving this girl a message about the
dangers of that world that she was going
into.
And I also released my fury, which was,
you know,
when you're a guy that doesn't cheat and
or hasn't cheated or
you know, that's not in your MO.
And you have girls that constantly ask
you, you know,
who is she to get jealous of you?
It becomes confining.
And then at the end of the day,
you really don't blame them.
You understand that they were scorned.
So then you develop,
a frustration to guys that mess over girls
and you're a guy you know what i'm
saying but you look at these guys and
be like you messing up women that i
might end up having a date and you
giving guys a bad reputation so of course
now i have a problem so in my
movie gold digger killer it wasn't a guy
running around killing
gold diggers it was this girl who tried
gold digging who gets you know victimized
in the worst way who gets her revenge
on guys who feel they can go around
raping and disrespecting women yeah so in
my own way i i gave a message
to the girl that i was dating and
to guys that felt they could be
disrespectful and that was my most
successful movie
that we won every award that every film
festival that it was in, it won something.
And because it came from the heart,
but was it amusing?
Heck yeah, from the title alone,
I'm having fun.
We had a scene, we had,
You know,
I had comedians and poets in there.
We spiced it up, you know,
and it it came out in two thousand
and seven on on street, you know,
on digital.
I mean,
DVD and it sold out in Wal-Mart and
then we released it in twenty twenty one
and it became one of the movies that
shaped the to be narrative.
You know, became this movie,
a hub for low black,
but black cinema go killer.
This old movie was top twenty five movies
on TV.
So that's really well,
that's a long answer to that question.
No, I love answers like that to questions.
Why do you think science fiction stays
with people for life in a way that
many genres don't?
So there are genres, right?
Romance is a genre.
Mystery is a genre.
Westerns, crime fiction,
a lot of those depend on new information
or new perspectives.
they can get stale.
Thanks to the internet, now we have,
a plethora of opportunities to look at
history from different perspective.
But up until the internet,
we knew most of what the government was
letting us know about history.
And it was in our history class.
So things of the present and past kind
of reached a stale level.
The only thing that was unexplored and
that continues,
that's endlessly unexplorable,
is science fiction in the future,
you know?
So that is...
Now,
can you hit it from different
perspectives?
Absolutely.
But when it comes to a Western or
anything historical,
all you have is different perspectives.
Once we know what happened,
there's no new history.
Now, in the internet,
there's a lot of new historical things
that seem like they're coming,
but most of them become conspiracy
theories.
So you're like, ah,
aliens come here or not.
So that falls into the category.
of science fiction.
But I think that's why science fiction is
so fresh, is it's always fresh.
It's always unexplored territory.
That's part of it,
because science fiction,
science in itself is an experiment of
things that haven't been done before.
So just in that dynamic, yes,
it's a use of science,
but the scientific experiment is to try to
find and learn new different things.
So when you're doing your writing,
The three tenets,
and I'm going to get them wrong.
I keep forgetting them.
But, you know, if this continues,
what if this happens?
And if this had happened, you know,
those are the three tenets,
the what ifs of science fiction.
And those are all questions that never
stop because the moment you answer one
question,
there's another one that pops up.
So that's science fiction is a continuous
loop like that.
So let's talk some more about the
documentary itself.
Okay.
So in your documentary or in the
documentary,
you talk about black sci-fi being your
interpretation of the future.
Right.
Can you expand on that and what you
mean by that?
Cause that to me is.
I'm glad you asked me that.
And when I defined it like that,
I don't know if I was thinking about
how, um,
revolutionary or unique it is,
particularly Afrofuturism, right?
Afrofuturism is a dimension of Black
sci-fi.
Sci-fi can be anything.
People debate whether Frankenstein is
science fiction because
He was using science to bring this guy
back from the dead.
So science fiction doesn't always have to
be in the future.
It can be in the past,
it can be in the present,
but Afrofuturism is futurism.
So in the definition of Afrofuturism,
they move it to more of a visual,
more of a audio sound where it becomes
like hip hop,
where it has a certain cadence to it.
And then when it becomes visual,
it has a certain look to it, right?
But in its core,
what made it its look was somebody that
was African, African-American, Afro,
thinking it up.
You know what I'm saying?
So even the music came from an
African-American thinking it up,
whether it's Afrofuturism music like Sun
Ra,
or if it's the costumes that Sun Ra
wears,
or Parliament Funkadelic's Mothership.
That also goes back to,
because it's not funk futurism, it's Afro,
which I don't have anymore.
It's Afrofuturism.
So it comes from the African mind.
You got me with that one, man.
I'm sorry.
The Afro?
Yeah, you got me with that one.
I was like, oh, man.
So Black sci-fi is defined in its science
fiction.
But then when you start moving into
Afrofuturism,
They try to define it as a sound
or the aesthetics.
And it's not aesthetics.
Aesthetics stem from the mind.
Because black sci-fi has an aesthetic.
Black sci-fi also has a sound.
You understand?
But I feel like...
the Taco Bell or the enchilada or lawsuit
where this term cultural appropriation
comes into play,
where you almost have like the Beatles or
you have Elvis Presley,
not only hijacking,
but covering certain things and saying,
hey,
all these songs that Rolling Stone
started,
their first album was all cover songs.
You know, Elvis Presley,
his first few hits were covers.
So he didn't create the sound.
He popularized the sound that was created
by other people, African Americans.
So I'm very guarded in this time period
of cultural appropriation awareness,
because I don't think we had that term.
in the time of Elvis Presley and the
blues and all of that.
We didn't have that.
That's why they allowed it to be called
jazz.
And we have different jazz musicians.
But if you're not Korean,
you can't do K-pop.
because they owned their version of
Michael Jackson music,
because that's what K-pop is to me, right?
So when I think of Afrofuturism,
I make it as a product of the
African-American mind.
musically or visually or literally.
And that's what it is because when you
start making it a visual Sun Ra image,
now you're confining it.
What if I don't want my futurism to
be gold and shiny?
Is it still Afrofuture?
Absolutely.
Does it look like Sun Ra or does
it look like, you know,
Afrika Bambaataa and Zulu Nation?
No,
it don't look like Parliament
Fundacadelic, but that's still futurism,
you know.
But they define it as a certain visual
aesthetic because now everybody can create
something that looks like that.
And they can be called Afrofuturistic
creators, but they're not an Afro person.
You know what I'm saying?
They get me every time you do that.
Right.
You know, I mean,
they could be Greg Brady because I used
to laugh at Greg Brady having this curly
Afro, you know.
He didn't really call it an Afro.
But yes,
so they have defined it in a way
that it doesn't make it something
connected to Black people,
more so an independent
thing like jazz, like country music,
like all of the musics that
African-Americans created.
If those were all called African-American
music,
then Elvis wouldn't have been called Elvis
rock and roll guy.
He would have been called Elvis,
the guy who could sing like a black
guy.
You know what I'm saying?
Who's singing black music.
But if we correctly define Afrofuturism,
it'll be ours from here on to the
future.
And as a Afrofuturistic person,
you're supposed to speculate about what
could happen in the future of the term
Afrofuturism, right?
No, a hundred percent.
Right.
And this way you can safeguard it from
ending up like hip hop,
from ending up like jazz, you know,
or country music.
Country music got so culturally
appropriated,
even black people forgot they created it.
That's the truth.
The last two years when Beyonce came out,
we had to look into internet to be
like, you wait a minute.
She's not singing white music.
It's dominated by white people now,
but it wasn't white people's music.
It was all- Yeah,
you look at where it come from, yeah.
Yes.
So-
And that's just American history.
It's not a hate anybody thing.
It's just history is what it is.
And so to protect Afrofuturism from that,
I define it as something coming from the
mind of an Afro-possessing person,
which was before we were African-American,
Jesse Jackson used to call us
Afro-Americans.
It didn't last that long,
but we certainly called ourselves Afro
because we had Afros.
Hey, I'm loving this.
This isn't something that I would normally
get to talk about in any kind of
perspective.
So I love hearing about this because it's
so cool to me.
And I appreciate you bringing this
perspective to us.
So why do you think representation in
speculative fiction matters beyond just
being included?
So...
If we look at our future from a
jump, from Star Wars to Star Trek,
Star Trek offered us a model of a
future Earth where you had almost every
ethnicity
represented in a representation for
humanity right not just ethnicity but also
race of peoples and aliens and everything
in between and that's what i learned about
it you know so they saw the the
universe or you know space in that way
but they also brought earth together in
that way so if humanity was given a
challenge
to solve something, we would need to have,
we would be smart if we allowed every
culture a stab at it.
or a contributing element to our answer.
So if science fiction is that speculation
of the future,
it would be smart for us to include
every race and culture's speculation about
the future, not just Russia's,
not just United States, not just China's,
but India's, Philippines,
Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, Ethiopia,
all of these different cultures have a
idea.
So I'll give you an example.
In my documentary,
I talk about the threat of a comet
coming to Earth.
Boom, snap,
it destroyed the Earth once before.
It can do it again.
It's a big threat.
We got X amount of years to come
up with an answer.
Okay, the Europeans' answer is no.
Armageddon.
We're going to send a ship up there,
and we're going to blow it up.
Do you ever seen the movie The Wandering
Earth?
I have not, no.
You should check it out.
I'll have to.
It faces the same threat,
but it's an Asian answer to that threat.
OK.
And what did they do in Wandering Earth?
I'm just going to tell you because it's
in the title.
It's not a spoiler.
So the comet is coming to Earth.
Have you ever studied any Asian martial
arts?
Yes.
I lived in Asia for a while.
What part?
A Korea.
Okay.
So even in Korea, right?
And I forgot the name of this.
Is it a Muay Thai?
King Sudo or something like that.
Okay.
Because I know a lot of them are
variations of the same thing, right?
Yeah, they all are to some degree.
So one of the things you learn different
from karate, right?
Because karate is kind of a Western,
Asian martial art.
Yeah.
all of those other ones,
what do they teach you?
How to move out of the way of
a blow.
It's not punch back.
It's not even offense.
Most of their martial arts are defense,
right?
And the thing is you deflect
Instead of a block, right?
Because a block is different than a
deflection.
They also teach you that in the way
of blocking it,
you can use your opponent's weight and
momentum against them.
So in The Wandering Earth,
if the opponent is the approaching comet,
what do you think they did with Earth?
Moved it.
Moved it.
They put engines on Earth to change the
Earth's rotation and trajectory so that
way we would not be in the path
of the comet.
And that is beautiful.
Yeah, that's awesome.
but it goes right back to their core
values, their cultural values.
They deflect, they avoid, you understand?
All of those things is who it is.
And that's just one perspective.
What would the indigenous Americans think?
Maybe they would go up there and talk
to it because indigenous Americans believe
they came from earth
So what would they,
maybe they would go up there and try
to find out it's a way to communicate,
maybe have a frequency with it, who knows?
But it would be nice to hear what
they speculate because again, you know,
space is the great unknown.
So when you don't know something,
you try every answer.
You don't just go get bullheaded and be
like, whatever America thinks is what,
you know, no, there's people,
there's cultures on this planet,
like the Dogon people who believe they
came from Sirius, which is another planet,
you know, another system, right?
Sirius is a star.
So in that star circle, there's,
they believe there's life on the planet
there.
So they came, so again,
When you don't know,
you go with all of the options,
you know?
And so that's why I think science fiction
benefits from a diverse palette of
answers.
I like it.
I really do.
And I think that's something that
because I'm a comic book guy.
I don't think we get enough of that
in comic books as well,
like those different perspectives.
Actually,
I'm gonna walk that back just a little
bit.
I think over the last year and a
half,
there have been a lot more representation
in comic books from a lot of different
races and a lot of different cultures.
I don't know if it was just like
me opening my eyes more and seeing more
of what's out there,
but I've always been an indie guy.
I've always loved independent comments,
boom studios, mad cave image.
But what I had noticed over the last
year and a half is,
is that there's more diversity out there
now making comic books and the shout out
to missy franklin who created harley quinn
they're not getting pushed away like she
did she each had to fight tooth and
nail to get every single thing that she's
earned from that character and i still
don't think she gets enough right
But I think now,
at this moment in time,
we are seeing a one-eighty of who is
making comic books out there.
The different cultures,
the different races of people,
the different languages of people.
I know a Korean who just had a
story published two years ago in Image
Comets, I believe it was.
No.
DC Comics, I think.
But his story was published and then drawn
into the comic book,
which was really cool to see represented
in a comic book in the US.
Because that's the first,
not the first time,
because a Korean writer did have a comic
book come out on Image Comics as well.
And they're being represented more.
You got the Peach Momokos of the world
out there who is Japanese.
uh you're starting to see um god i
wish i could remember anything give me
just a sec because it'll drive you crazy
it's on your computer exactly it's a group
of brothers well not a group of brothers
but brothers that did this book and it
was so good um from boom studios by
shobo and shelf
Uh,
but it's about their Nigerian heritage and
this group of people,
they are still in back there,
the relics of who they are.
Right.
And, um, but yeah, they're brothers.
Damn,
I think I've heard a few stories like
that, the reverse Indiana Jones.
Yes, it's a reverse Indiana Jones.
It's called Bronze Faces.
So damn good.
It was really good.
And then a female writer,
African-American, amazing writer.
She just got nominated for Eisner.
Oh,
you're talking about Stephanie Williams.
Yes.
Yes.
Roots of Madness.
Roots of Madness.
Yes.
That shit was so good, man.
About that time travel to the other one
that got nominated.
Yeah, without a doubt right there.
Yeah.
And, you know,
I just finished my twelfth or thirteenth
Kickstarter.
And.
Part Kickstarter is the first time I
haven't made money on a comic book.
And I was able to pay myself.
It wasn't a lot of money,
but after selling the book at conventions,
I made more money off of it.
But it was the first time I was
able to pay for an illustrator or
reimburse myself for an illustrator and
get it done.
So what do you call it?
Kickstarter is amazing.
I have over fifteen, twenty books now,
you know,
and that's like five hundred pages of
illustration work, you know,
and just having that amount of work
illustrated is liberating.
Like I'm working on something now and I
don't even know if I'm going to be
able to go Kickstarter with it because of
the way they change the policies.
My book that I'm working on now is
like Fritz the cat.
Yes.
It's not X-rated,
but it does have some nudity.
But it's not about nudity.
It's just that nudity is part of the
story.
Profanity is part of the story.
And I've been a clean guy for so
long.
I was like, you know what?
Let me try doing one of these other
stories.
I didn't really do the
kind of the overly sexualized books that
they actually banned um but i don't know
i may get caught in the crossfire because
mine is going to be an adult book
um but you know i'm able to pay
for it i have enough money to cover
it and um you know there you have
it but real quick i want to
We were talking beforehand,
and I was telling you I've covered
independent comics now for about a year,
almost a year and a half, maybe two.
I'm losing track of time when it comes
down to it, but shout out Christopher R.
Ford, Dark Pink Comets.
Fantastic writer.
That comic book, I think,
was one of the largest in Kickstarter
history.
Really?
Yeah.
then this was dark pink yeah dark pink
comments um fantastic book but lloyd
cheatham jr uh nathan rouse of um the
idol verse since fifteen comics um sorry
uh alfred page arnesia wimberly uh braston
cosby dark city comics doug marcada
who is Filipino.
I'm probably going to miss some.
Zing Zen, amazing dude with his universe.
He just signed a TV deal for his
show.
Wow.
Aleem Leggett.
Alejandro Rosales Doran, who is,
I believe, Brazilian.
Akihiro Goska, another Filipino.
uh colin mclemore young kid coming up in
the comic book industry um yeah there's i
think that's that was that what that's
march last month let's jump to last month
see why how we did um
I got the... Steve Bino of Comics Asylum.
I have had a very good year with
representation of different peoples and
cultures.
It has been...
I fucking love this year and what I've
gotten to do this year and just having
different...
people on and representing different
cultures, nationalities.
Because cops aren't just white people.
And it feels like that's what is in
people's heads, like, oh, white people.
Maybe it was at one point, I guess.
But going back to see all of these
Black creators and how far back they go,
maybe it never was.
You know, but there's a lot of intent.
The image that it was.
But yeah, exactly.
And I want to continue down that path.
I want to represent indie comic books.
I don't give a damn who is making
them.
If they have a place here at USDN
is what I'm saying.
And I'm going to continue to showcase
anybody and everybody.
I don't care who you are.
If you're making independent comic books.
we have a place for you.
You just have to bear with me because
you may not be scheduled into August
because that's where I'm at right now.
That's good, though.
It has been an amazing time.
I've loved every second of what I've been
getting to do lately.
We're going to continue to do that.
You brought up ideas in your
you're um oh my god i'm brain farting
that's okay but you brought up ideas like
alternative futures ai ufos and
post-apocalyptic storytelling from black
perspectives why do you think those
perspectives are still unexplored or i say
are they being explored and they're not
just they're not being seen yet
I say that people of color in America
are still struggling to get past thirteen,
fifteen percent representation
historically.
That's cool that Palestine and Arabic.
There's a lot of great creators coming
from over there right now too.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, you know,
that's the internet allowing us to reach
out to people around the world.
I have the last collaborator that I have
for fingernails,
he is an illustrator from Nigeria.
And the next work that I'm doing,
the illustrator for You Picked the Wrong
Planet is from Argentina.
Yeah,
one of my close friends is an Argentinian
artist who's going to be working on my
book with me.
So to go back to your question,
we're a small percentage, right?
Your documentary.
I'm thinking about your documentary
because we're talking about your
documentary.
That's the word that slipped my mind.
I am so sorry.
No, no, no.
Listen,
all of this is relative because I cover
a lot of it in the documentary.
But to answer your question,
why is it that these communities still
feel underserved?
Well,
women and men are almost fifty-fifty,
right?
When you say women,
that's women in every ethnic group,
that's every race, you know,
that's every state.
There's no state that's all men,
but there are states that were founded for
all white people.
And there's still states that don't have
high percentage of diversity.
Right.
Black people are still struggling to get
past thirty and fifteen percent nationwide
in America.
We might be majority around the world,
but in America we're not.
And also when that comes to comic book
stores and comes to comic book
conventions.
We're still a very small minority because,
yeah,
my son was raised with static shock and
he's gotten that since he was six years
old.
But I had Bill Cosby, you know,
I didn't have diversity in my, you know,
my growing up.
You know,
I had the Jackson Five and the
Globetrotter cartoons.
You know,
those were my diversities and they were
still very limited.
So you can go back to the eighty
four and eighty five when I graduated high
school.
There was still what Octavia Butler,
Samuel Delaney,
you could count the black science fiction
writers.
And then they weren't really writing Black
sci-fi promoted stories.
Octavia Butler's stuff is more so
feministic as it is Black.
So there you have it.
And not Samuel Delaney.
It may be him.
One of them was writing in the LGBT
community.
A lot of their stories was there.
I think somebody that really represented
Black sci-fi early was Stephen Barnes.
And then it wasn't until the two thousands
did we get L.A.
Banks, you know, and then L.A.
Banks started moving.
Now, somewhere in there,
there was some independent writers like my
favorite book is still Zorro,
a tale of alien Avengers.
And that was written in the early nineties
by William Sims out of.
uh philadelphia but that didn't get
nationwide publication and it was before
black sci-fi but it's still to this day
my number one black science fiction book
you know because of what the story is
about and how he executes it and i
was in the seminal work of black science
fiction called space funk
And so I read every story in there
and none of them hit it as hard
as Zorro.
There's definitely books that, you know,
stories that come close to it,
but Zorro is still the biggest one.
So I think that's why it is.
You know,
we had to read outside of our culture.
We didn't get Black Panther in any
significant way until Christopher Priest.
And that was in the two thousands.
Yeah.
So if you were twenty years old before
two thousand, you know, which is,
you know, the forty year olds,
you didn't grow up with a diverse palette.
All of this black sci fi stuff is
post two thousand fifteen.
you know, and comic books and novels,
you know, sure.
Well, growing up,
we had brother from another planet.
There was no such thing as a black
Panther avatar.
What's the one that Michael B.
Jordan did Kim, you know, um,
we weren't even fighting aliens like an
attack the block.
And that didn't even have a lot of,
you know, it wasn't even a black movie,
but it just felt, um,
diverse because you had, uh,
English hip hoppers.
Yeah.
So I think it's still underserved in
movies.
We don't have really too many.
There's never been a theatrical Black
science fiction movie yet.
Still.
Yet.
It's coming.
It's coming.
It's due time.
Due time.
I like Avatar,
but those people are based on Black
people, but they're blue.
But to answer his question,
I don't personally know any Brazilians.
I thought Alejandro was,
but he is actually Colombian.
But if you go to any of the
Facebook groups on Facebook,
any comic Facebook groups,
there are bound to be some Brazilians in
there.
I know Alejandro, who is Colombian,
he is doing his best to bring comic
books to Colombia.
So shout out to him for doing a
big job to try to make that happen.
But so black sci-fi.
Yes.
Is it currently in a renaissance period or
is it approaching one?
It isn't a renaissance.
It hasn't reached this plateau.
It's still rising.
So that's one of the cool things about
it.
It's still rising.
I mean, because, you know,
we're in books and we are in the
independent book circuit.
We have Indy Okafor.
We have Eugene Bacon.
You have, there's a brother out of Canada,
Maurice Broaddus.
We have,
Who's an African-American?
I mean,
you could say Tomei is with Children of
Blood and Bone.
And we're just tipping the iceberg.
They had, of course,
you had Roots of Madness,
but you had the other one that David
Walker and them did.
God, what was the name of their?
But comic books haven't really approached
Black sci-fi that much.
I mean, superheroes are science fiction,
but they are a genre of their own.
So do we have a Black Star Wars?
I have it in books,
but my planet Keebalon is there,
so you can count the Black space stories.
you know, on one hand,
you know what I'm saying?
But yeah, other than that, nah.
So until we cover at least all of
the top three mediums of dominating
things, you know,
from comic books to movies to novels,
it's still climbing,
you know what I'm saying?
And better with David Walker.
Yeah, Bitterroot was David Walker.
And that was almost like Lovecraft
Country.
Oh, that was good.
And that was good,
but that wasn't black sci-fi.
Lovecraft Country was written by, I think,
somebody from Kentucky.
I forgot where he was from.
Yeah, I can't remember.
It was a good story in Bitterroot.
It was definitely good.
Yeah.
But so there you have it in terms
of that.
Until we get there,
we have a couple of Black science fiction
movies out.
We're still climbing.
It doesn't matter how wide.
books go,
we're going to figure everything and write
a book about it.
Independent books are good for that.
But we need something to hit the top
of the charts.
We need to get nominated for Hugo Awards.
And then we need to get something in
theaters.
And then we got to hit books.
And Roots of Madness is
Definitely a breakthrough.
I think she's going to open the door
for other Black books to be considered.
A hundred percent.
I think it's achievable.
But I don't think she funded that by
herself.
I think she wrote it,
and Ignition helped her with the
illustrational funding.
So it's a tough market now.
It's very hard.
Here's the thing.
We're talking about a publisher,
a big up and coming,
bigger publisher pushing the book, though.
Yeah.
You know,
so most of like we're talking that's
that's that's growth right there in it
being one step closer to being represented
the correct way.
Yeah.
You know,
hopefully it goes to season two and she
can do ongoing.
But, you know, like with my book,
shout out to my comic.
Hopefully you have you've checked it out,
but it's in its second month and it's
the last Harlemite.
And that came out through Red Five Comics.
And even with that.
Shout out Red Five.
Yes.
Even with that.
I'm trying to get them on the podcast.
Let them know.
What did you say?
I'm trying to get Red Five on the
podcast.
Hit him up.
I've got a couple of writer friends on
there.
Alex DeLuca.
I just had Alex DeLuca on.
Then he's one.
Then the gentleman who does Butch Planet.
Then the owner.
He's available to come.
I'm trying to get him on.
He just had his book go to theaters.
Samuel Jackson was in his book's movie.
I think it was Solar Flares or Solar
Flares something.
Gosh, I can't remember the name of it.
I had the poster up in my wall
upstairs.
But again, even with those publishers,
I had to have my book fully illustrated.
And of course,
it's on the budgetary constraints that I
can afford myself.
You know,
I can't afford three hundred dollars a
page, you know?
Yeah.
But I don't know what Stephanie Williams
got per page,
but I'm pretty sure she got an editor.
I'm pretty sure they gave her, you know,
they funded her project, you know,
and I'm glad it won because it made
its money back.
But now I'm happy.
I'm so excited for her.
I don't care how that story got made.
I want to see more stories like that
get made at that level.
But yeah, I'm hoping, yes.
You describe your work as hip hop, horror,
sci-fi, and fantasy.
What defines hip hop horror to you?
So there's a lot of ways to describe
one thing, right?
i'm a man i'm african-american i'm a
suburban right because i came from the
suburbs i'm not i'm not from the inner
city so all of those are accurate
descriptions of me right i am a hip-hopper
i started when i was you know i'm
i was born four years before hip-hop right
so i got in but when i was
in elementary school i was in in uh
introduced to the culture and i've been a
part of that culture ever since it shaped
how i talk to girls it shaped how
i talk the jokes that i say or
everything everything about me came out as
hip-hop so when i started to write horror
which was the first thing I wrote.
My first attempted fiction was my movie,
Holla If I Kill You.
And that movie wasn't like other horror
movies.
It was a slasher,
but I wrote it as,
how do I distinguish it?
I called it hip hop horror.
And hip hop horror is not,
like for me,
like Malignant is one of my favorite
modern horror movies.
Black, oh my God, what was it?
The Blackening was more hip hop than
Malignant.
Although Malignant was written by a Black
girl, it wasn't as hip hop or cool.
You know what I'm saying?
So that's kind of what hip hop horror
is, is that cool.
So I'll give you an example.
I have a zombie story called Rashida the
Zombie Killer.
Right?
I have another,
a graphic novel that i'm working on called
forty ounces of death and that's a zombie
story i have a uh short that i
have waiting to get fully illustrated
which is a vampire story and that's called
vamp five vamp now it is fraternity and
sorority but it's a cool fraternity the
name got swag to it you know i
could put it next to a jay-z album
you can go right right there with wu-tang
clan stuff
My science fiction,
my space opera is called Welcome to Boss
Lady's Planet.
You know, boss lady.
That's a that's a hip hop term.
You know,
we we've taken it and we've made it.
So to me, that's what I write.
I write with the energy in the hip
hop who describes the energy.
Now, is it a black science fiction?
Yeah.
Is it black horror?
Yeah.
But at the end of the day,
it is also hip hop horror because that
describes the energy of it.
Yeah.
What's your cat's name?
This is Eevee, named after the Pokemon.
And I'm glad we're talking about this
color.
That's a character from V for Vendetta.
That would have been cool.
Yeah.
Well,
my daughter named this one after the
Pokemon, so.
That's OK.
Pokemon's cool.
But what does hip hop culture bring to
speculative storytelling that other genres
do not?
I don't know every genre's birth.
I'll just say that hip hop has a
community service element included in it.
So Zulu Nation was the first organization
of hip hop.
It's what gave hip hop its name.
It's what gave it its value.
They came up with love, peace,
and having fun.
It was used to break up gang violence
in New York City.
And when you look at hip hop clinically,
clinically,
it is a community service
a therapeutic form of medicine.
So if you were to go to a
therapist and you had problems with your
mother and father arguing,
you had problems with being molested,
you had problems with just knowing who
your father is,
not knowing who your father is,
they might say to you,
write a poem about it.
Well, what was the early hip hop?
Broken glass everywhere,
people pissing on the corner like they
just don't care.
Sure, it was entertaining,
but it was also therapeutic,
because he was sharing his problems to the
community in a way to get it off
his chest.
Was he saying,
I need you all to get a broom
and come to my neighborhood and clean it
up?
No.
He was saying, this is where I'm living,
y'all.
Let me just vent for a little bit.
And that is therapeutic.
You understand?
So in its lyrics, in the music,
there's musical therapy.
What is musical therapy?
It's without words.
And they tell me to calm down, Jeff.
Why don't you listen to some calming
music?
I use disco because disco calms me down.
Yeah.
They'd still tell you music.
And there's people that, you know,
hip hop was that music.
You gotta understand,
New York would have been like LA if
it didn't have hip hop.
If it didn't have Zulu Nation saying we
need to, you know,
battle dance and rap battle and DJ battle
this out instead of fighting,
we would still be fighting.
We had more gangs than LA.
Yeah.
But Zulu Nation and hip hop brought that
together.
So when you talk about what does hip
hop bring to science fiction,
what does hip hop bring to books,
black science fiction and horror?
Well, it brings a moral to it.
It brings a moral.
It brings, you know,
it's not like you have to have a
Disney ending.
That's Disney.
But you are not spreading out negativity.
You're not purposely doing something that
would pollute the environment because hip
hop is about it.
And you're being truthful about the
problems of the world to offer a call
for a solution, to offer a solution,
or just to get it off your chest
to be able to deal with it.
And that's what hip hop brings.
I like it, dude.
I love this conversation.
So you've talked about Jordan Peele,
the blackening, Blackula,
one of my favorite people in the entire
world, Rodney Barnes's work.
Where do you think black horror is heading
next?
Well,
he's taken Black Horror on his shoulders.
But fortunately,
we had this book by Marcus Roberts and
Bradley Golden called Shook.
And that's coming out with Shook, too.
And that is an anthology of Black Horror.
And that's in comic books.
So it's offering the opportunity to
redefine what black horror is or to
announce it.
Because I don't even think we had like
when they had Eerie,
when they had Tales from the Crypt,
they didn't really focus on diversity.
They didn't even have probably any black
horror stories in it.
So what Rodney Booker was.
I don't know.
I know when I did my book...
Off the top of my head,
I can't think of any.
Right.
I don't know if there was.
So I know with my book, Spoof Streets,
it was the first Black...
a humor comic book like Mad Magazine or
like National Lampoon's.
Were there black superheroes that were
humorous?
Yes.
But there was nothing that was spoofing
things like Mad Magazine.
I spoofed Madea.
I spoofed Star Wars.
I spoofed superheroes in general.
I spoofed Wiling Out, the comedy TV show.
These are the things that Mad Magazine
did.
And I'm gearing up to do Spoof Streets
too.
That should be in two thousand twenty
seven.
But, you know,
I don't have a budget to do it
every year.
This year I had a whole lot of
other things slated.
Hopefully I got one of my stories in
Shook.
But yeah, Shook, Rodney Barnes,
Stephanie Williams,
Roots of Madness is a horror.
It's a horror.
Little Root in its own action-packed way
is a horror.
So, you know...
We're doing it there.
And then in books,
we've been in black horror for a long
time in books and novels.
Yeah, we've been there.
Black horror has even, you know,
it used to be beloved,
but that's the older generation's black
horror.
Now we have modern black horror that they
can go by.
My Fangernails book,
that's a light horror.
That's like Scooby-Doo.
Scooby-Doo is horror.
So Fangernails is right there with
Scooby-Doo.
So in comic books,
we got a lot of expressions.
In film,
you'd have to really go to independent
film.
If you're going to be,
there's a lot of,
like I've got six black horror films.
you know, on Tubi and other platforms.
My last one was The Black Nun,
and that's,
something that I did a spinoff with the
Black Nun versus Krumpus in my last comic
book, Harmonic Streets,
that came out in February.
So yeah, you know,
and I'm actually writing the Black Nun
origin story now and it's not a horror.
So it is a pirate adventure story,
but it's the character that made the
horror.
It's such a wild backstory for a nun.
Yes, but I was inspired by,
I don't know if you ever saw this
TV show that came out last year,
Washington Black.
I did not, no.
My God.
When I moved to Miami,
I learned of this pirate named Black
Caesar.
And he had a statue outside of the
University of Miami.
So wherever they go to, like they party,
their sports bar off campus,
there's a statue of Black Caesar there.
And I was like,
where is this Black Caesar guy?
So I learned about Black Caesar and Black
pirates.
Black Caesar ended up joining up with
Black Beard.
Blackbeard, at best, was biracial.
So he would be considered a Black person.
Even if he wasn't,
he had six ships in his fleet.
Black Caesar had two to four ships.
Ninety percent of their crew was escaped
slaves or liberated booty off of slave
ships.
So that is a significant amount of people
just having two ships.
Most of the ships had in between one
hundred and one hundred and fifty people.
So if you got six to ten ships,
right, that can be a thousand people.
Easy.
And there was the Queen Mary's Revenge,
the one that Blackbeard got caught with,
had two hundred and fifty people.
So I learned of that and I still
had the Johnny Depp Pirates of the
Caribbean in my head.
So I'm still thinking.
The Curse of the Black Pearl, right?
The history of that and how Johnny,
Jack Sparrow,
why he's cursed with the Black Pearl is
because he
It was a slave trade, right?
And it led to his ship being burned.
He made the deal with the devil to
come back.
Yeah, to bring it back.
Was it Calypso?
Yep.
So that is fun fantasy, right?
It's beautiful to separate it.
But in reality,
I thought pirates were drunken,
disorderly people.
I mean,
then when I saw Washington Black and I
was introduced to the term privateer and
in Washington Black,
they have a pirate culture that is
traveling through the Caribbean,
not running from the Royal Navy,
but right beside them as independent
contractors.
And they were free people of color.
And that blew my mind.
Because in my mind,
I'm thinking like the video game
Assassin's Creed,
Cry Freedom or Freedom Cry.
I'm thinking the Caribbean is one big
slave penitentiary.
You know,
but when you watch Washington Black,
it makes more sense that these islands
weren't full countries with a military
border around it.
You know what I'm saying?
That these plantations became insulated
fortresses.
So if you went there, yeah,
it might be Epstein's island,
but there was parts of the island that
his compound didn't dominate.
So you could go to a restaurant as
a free Black person on any island in
the Caribbean.
And I didn't know that.
To me, the Caribbean was, oh my God,
there was no way to run.
Any step on any island,
you were locked up like America.
You know what I'm saying?
At least America had the North.
You know, but yeah,
it just felt like so.
Then when I was introduced to the Black
Caesar, I was introduced to, you know,
pirates as a revolutionary expression.
Right.
So now I in my story,
I had Harriet Tubman freeing slaves and
Africans,
but taking them to Blackbeard and saying,
you know,
you can ride with Blackbeard in his army
or.
I could take you up north.
You know what I'm saying?
So now I had that in my mind,
in my universe.
OK.
So I was like,
I had Harriet Tubman escaping African
slaves to Blackbeard's ship.
And I connected those two things because I
was like, his ship is all escaped slaves.
Where did they come from?
They could have come from somebody
escaping a plantation or finding them on a
slave ship and liberating them from that.
So anyway,
it just made me think they may not
be drunk and disorderly because I might
not be drinking myself to death in the
middle of slavery.
if i was taken off a slave ship
i might want to seek revenge you know
what i'm saying and i'm not going to
get drunk to seek revenge all the time
so um the black nun's origin story is
that she was born on us on a
um a revolutionary pirate ship and the
pirate in my story was from jamaica
You know,
and the ship crashed on the shores of
South Carolina,
and she was taken into a plantation.
And that's when she becomes the Black Nun
from the movie.
But prior to that,
she was on a revolutionary pirate ship or
a privateer ship or whatever we want to
call it.
I like that so much.
And I'm in the middle of writing it
right now.
So I have two stories that I'm writing.
So I need to finish it.
But that's going to be a short story.
And then I have...
a science fiction short story collection
called why i love sci-fi and it goes
directly with the documentary so this um
she is this is the last her book
her story would be the last story in
that book uh that that's so when i
lived in in florida
Because they have pirate festivals and
stuff like that.
That's when I really dug into that.
Just the culture and the history.
We get one side of that history,
but there's this whole other side of that
history that is just...
Why aren't we telling this side of that
history?
Because it's so much better.
It's not about the drunken pirates chasing
gold.
There's so much more to some of those
stories out there that need to be told
a proper way.
And just from a different perspective,
but it may be the right perspective.
So I was watching,
and we're going to digress to the pirates
for a second.
But I was watching a documentary on
pirates,
and they talked about this pirate.
I'm going to say it was Black Bart,
but I don't know.
They called him a terrorist.
Do you know what his act of terror
was?
He they chased him out of the Caribbean.
He went back to Africa because he was
a black pirate.
Black is no place on Earth.
He's an African pirate.
Right.
So he's on the coast of Africa.
He encounters two slave ships.
Mind you,
it might be legal in the Caribbean,
but we know where they're getting them
from is not legal.
Even if it's legal,
it's human trafficking.
At best, it's a human crime.
Slavery never made sense.
Even if it was legal in places,
it was still a humanistic crime.
But they didn't describe him like that.
They said he encountered two ships off the
coast of Nigeria.
and gave the captains an ultimatum.
Either you give me the ship and clear
off this ship,
or I'm going to burn it down.
And he burned one ship down.
And the guy never freed the people on
the ship.
They ended up dying on the ship with
him.
But to me, that's not a terrorist.
You understand what I'm saying?
But they still, in the documentary,
it's Black people that were part of the
scholars.
And they still use, in my mind,
a oppressive narrative to describe
somebody that if I come in and I
find a room full of pedophiles and all
I'm doing is shooting pedophiles,
but I'm giving them an alternative to turn
yourself in or I'm going to kill you.
That's not a terrorist.
Mm-hmm.
He made him a promise at that point.
If he ran that shit down,
that was a promise.
He kept it.
But they described him as a terrorist.
And to me,
that's a different narrative as to what we
have been taught about pirates.
So yeah,
if I ever go to a pirate festival,
I'll probably be dressed as Black Caesar.
And I would probably, you know,
have some pirate people.
We have a whole black delegation.
Oh, dude, I'm down.
Call me up.
Call me up.
Right.
And I probably would approach it like you
ever see those Hebrew Israelites on the
streets of New York.
where they're just verbally assaulting
everybody that walks by them,
I would probably be doing the same thing
to all those people that are drinking and
be like, y'all need to wake up.
Pirates didn't exist anywhere
outside of slavery.
They run parallel to the biggest human
trafficking.
So if there ever was a time you
needed a Marcus Garvey, a Harriet Tubman,
or let's say a big speaker to speak
to the atrocities of the time,
that's when you needed one.
And I'm pretty sure Black Beard and Black
Caesar, Black Bart,
all these guys were Black in their name.
Or are they, you know, you find,
it's easy to find a Black pirate by
looking up Negro pirates because the
Spanish write about Black pirates
different than English.
The Spanish, you know,
so there was a Black pirate off of
Cuba and I couldn't find anything written
about him in English.
Everything I had to find was in Spanish
translated books.
And that was crazy.
But again,
this is the world we live in.
History always has two sides, right?
One of them's wrong and one might be
only half right at the end of the
day.
The victors have their story and the
victimized have their story.
Exactly, exactly.
So you discovered indie comics through
filmmaking and conventions.
What kind of pulled you into that medium?
So my first film,
How If I Kill You,
came out in two thousand and three.
And I was looking for festivals to put
it in,
but it couldn't go to the regular film
festival because it was already in video
stores.
One of the venues that accepted my film
was Florida Supercon.
And it was their first Florida Supercon.
And at the convention,
I met other comic book creators and comic
book illustrators.
And this is two thousand and three,
two thousand and four.
So it was long before social media.
It was long before Fiverr, you know,
Facebook groups or DeviantArt.
None of that was a thing.
So you had to go up to people
and talk to them and ask them to
work on your comic book.
And that's how I found somebody.
And actually,
I had finished my second movie,
Gold Digger Killer.
And I said, you know,
it's winning film festivals.
I don't have anything to sell.
I should have printed up some T-shirts,
but I wasn't a big T-shirt guy,
but I would have made money and I
should have did it.
I should still do it now.
Come up with some.
Hey, I'm telling you,
you make that one T-shirt, man.
I'm in on it.
The total freedom of your mind.
Oh, yeah.
I love.
Yeah, I trademarked that.
So I own that logo.
Yeah.
So but that was a must.
You got to do that one.
Yes, it's on.
It's this, you know,
there's a print on demand T-shirt site
that I uploaded it.
I just never approved it yet because I've
got so many different things going on.
I have little health issues.
So when I clear my mind and I
can get some of the stuff that I
want to do out of my mind,
then I'll be all right.
I got you.
I think I answered the question.
Did I answer the question?
No, no, you're good.
Yeah.
No, you did.
So what advantages do you think indie
comics have over Hollywood when it comes
to original sci-fi storytelling?
And I know the answer to this,
but I want to hear your answer.
We don't have the pressure of corporate
sponsors.
We don't have the pressure of making
billions of dollars.
Because when you have a story that has
to make a billion dollars,
you can't piss too many people off.
You have to find a way to appease
everybody.
And when you're indie,
if you make a hundred thousand dollars,
you're losing your mind.
If you make ten thousand dollars,
you lose your mind.
But so your bar to please you can
focus on just one community and satisfy
that community and make your money back.
Whereas when you're doing a billion
dollars,
you've got to find a way to not
piss anybody off and draw them all into
your project.
And that is the constraints of Hollywood.
That's why they don't take too many new
small types of projects.
It's got to have big vision for some
of these Hollywood pictures.
So I think that's the biggest thing,
the money constraint.
We're also not restricted by race or
gender,
so we can be more experimental with our
stuff.
So the indie world, even film,
is experimental.
Indie stuff,
they'll give you a fifty thousand dollars,
two hundred thousand dollars to make a
movie that's focused on being a midget or
whatever.
You know, let's see if that community,
you know.
the black people with one hand,
you know what I'm saying?
Let's see the handicapped community,
you know?
So,
but it's a venture capital community and
for independent people, it's really cool.
So what has the process been like working
with publishers to get your comic books
into comic shops nationally?
I mean, there's not any big deal.
I mean,
they'll give you a consignment deal,
you know, and many times it's to your,
labor to call them and say,
did the book sell?
You know what I'm saying?
Is it still there?
So I abandoned going to stores as an
indie person.
I more so would send my stuff through
one of these new distributors and have
them deal with the store.
My local stores,
I don't mind because I know the owners
and I can go there and I can
see the stock.
But outside of my
direct distribution,
I will go through a distributor.
Because calling somebody,
like before I did comics,
I distributed the soundtrack to Gold
Digger Killer.
It was a poetry CD.
I had a comedy album.
And I had it selling in stores.
But stores didn't take more than ten.
The CD was selling for like ten dollars.
They gave me five.
I kept five.
So in ten CDs, it was fifty dollars.
Many of these stores weren't even staying
open more than two or three years.
So it was hard getting your money.
So I am for now,
for national and international
distribution, I go through distributors.
Because for local,
I can get my stuff in my local
store.
I can get it in my local smoke
shop.
You know what I'm saying?
But that's because I know the owners.
But in terms of...
nationwide, I wouldn't try it.
I don't have that big enough volume that
people are buying a hundred books of mine.
And I, you know, I'm like,
I just collected from a store.
He ordered the book in February and he
said, oh yeah, I owe you fifty dollars.
Yeah.
You know,
and then it was a one out.
It wasn't like, oh, we sold out.
I need more.
was just a fifty dollars so yeah you
know and and i and i'm happy with
it because it was in stores i had
what ten books in the store it sold
out so that's one of those things where
it's kind of cool just to see your
your book in a store period yeah so
now having a book with red five i
know what it's like having a book on
shelves you know and you know
I can do signings at my local stores,
even stores in cities that I travel to.
But trying to get to stores to promote
your book,
in places that you'll never go or you
aren't able to go is very hard.
So that's why national publishing works,
these big books companies,
these big companies have.
It's just really hard.
The internet makes it a little bit easier,
but that's why we come on shows like
yours to put our name out there and
we build something.
Hopefully I'll pull in one or two fans
from this show and they'll say, hey,
I heard of Jeff Carroll.
He got a new book coming out.
You know, and that's how you get it.
So that way that's a two way street
right there.
You know,
like I rely on the people coming on
my show to do the same thing.
Right.
Right.
It's like you're talking before we went
live is I am trying to put indie
comics on another level in order to put
that on another level.
I have to bring in the fans.
of the creators that i'm bringing on the
show and it's how do i make them
stay once that's over like once this show
is over the clips have been posted the
social media portion is done it's how do
i make jeff carroll's coach jeff's fans
stay a fan of the usdn at that
point and it's easy to do it is
um
They'll stick around just long enough to
ride the Jeff Carroll wave,
and then they're gone.
But maybe they'll stick and say, you know,
he brought out a really nice conversation.
I enjoyed it.
He was entertaining.
Let me see who else he talked to.
It's like I always say, it's like
find your next favorite comic book creator
here.
And that's what I try to do on
a daily basis, weekly basis,
monthly basis.
But let's talk a little bit more about
your comic projects and some of your
current projects that you have coming up.
So you got Amani the Killer.
Well,
Money Killer was my first one that I
came out with to go with Gold Digger
Killer.
And that is something I want to do
again.
I actually want, you know,
like we was talking about all of the
different genres, horror, science fiction,
what else?
You know, Tales from the Crypt, my humor.
I want to do a crime anthology.
And I want to lead with Gold Digger
Killer.
And I want to lead with the graphic
novel adaptation of the Gold Digger Killer
movie, or one of the sequels.
And I will put the Amani the Killers
into that.
But I don't want to re-release it
on its own,
I want to re-release it with some new
material.
And I haven't started.
I have the script,
but I haven't had an illustrator yet that
I want to actually do it.
Yeah.
So you got Planet of Keyline,
The Wrong Planet, Baba, Harlem,
Shake Universe, Church of God in Space.
So of all these great projects that you
have been working on,
which one do you think best represents
your creative identity right now?
Well, when I was doing the Kickstarter,
my longest comic book expression was,
it's still fingernails, right?
Okay.
It was written as a story for a
graphic novel from the first book.
Planet Akebalon is the series,
but the graphic novel is going to be
called You Picked the Wrong Planet.
And that's going to be my next one.
So in that one,
I'm actually explaining my universe.
So I have Planet Akebalon has cities and
places on the planet.
but then it also is a planet.
So I have a universe that I've outlined
with Earth somewhere in that universe so
we know where we fit.
And I have a detailed description of all
of those planets and places.
I have animals in there.
I have different groups of humans in
there.
And I'm going to describe all of that.
So when you pick the wrong planet,
it's going to feature the Planet Keebalon
four-book series.
But it's going to be bigger than that
because it's going to also explain my
planet.
So it's almost going to be like a
role-playing guide encyclopedia.
OK, that's really cool.
I like that.
And so I came up with my own,
you know, remember,
I don't know if you remember,
if you're old enough to remember,
cereal box uh prizes oh yeah yeah so
some of the cereal boxes they would have
a board game in it they would have
you know things so um i have been
doing gaming connected to my kickstarters
since my since the fingernails first
kickstarter i did a a game where it
was uno meets candyland
You know?
And that was tied into the Fangernail
story.
I did a version of Bingo with all
of the characters from Planet of Keybalon.
And that was a reward level.
Now I have,
I wanted to do it like the board
game Risk,
but I found another way to do a
three-player battleship.
So you know you have battleship, right?
Yeah.
So now I have three armies,
and three people can play at the same
time.
And that is my reward,
because you pick the wrong planet or
planet you have a
an evil group of space marines.
You have a good group of technological
people.
And then you have an army of organic
people like Avatar,
the James Cameron avatars.
Because in my space world,
I have a character called
the space scarabs.
And they're called different things by
different people in the universe.
But in English,
we would call them space scarabs.
So you remember Gamera,
the flying turtle like Godzilla?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Gamera was a space traveling animal.
So what I did in my universe was
to create an organic army.
I didn't want to have technology be the
dominant thing in my universe.
So yeah,
I have a group of Warhammer Space Marines.
And I also have futuristic sci-fi guys
like Star Trek and Star Wars.
But I also have an organic army.
So one of the problems I felt with
James Cameron's Avatar,
while I liked the world building of the
Na'vi people,
I just felt that they were always inferior
to the technology.
You know, AWAR bailed them out.
You know, you can't keep relying on AWAR.
You know,
when are you going to develop something
yourself that can fight a military?
I mean, taming the animals is beautiful.
Flying dragons is beautiful.
I like all of that.
That held it to a certain level.
But when you go into space,
you get the bigger ships.
Come on, what you got for them?
And so I felt just as they bonded
with the flying lizards,
they could summon a space Gamera.
And mine are crabs.
And they can travel inside the crabs.
Like,
if you remember the Ahsoka series on
Disney?
Yeah, of course.
She caught up with Admiral Thrawn by
flying inside the space whales.
I wanted mine to have a...
Did you do the comic book interpretation
of Ahsoka?
I didn't.
I think I did.
I think I did.
Did Rodney Barnes write that one?
Rodney Barnes.
Yes, so I did.
Did he have the space whales in there?
He did.
Okay.
So I, I read it,
but I'm more familiar because I just
watched the series to get ready for Gruco
or now I watched Ahsoka over because I
love Darth Maul series so much as I
need some more answers, you know?
Um, but in my story,
they have the space scarabs that can take
down a battle cruiser and they,
it is a legitimate class by class space
battle.
So you know how you have a battleship.
They have the battleship.
They have the aircraft carrier.
Well,
every army in my space battle has the
same class level.
It's just that in my natural army,
They have space scarabs.
Then they have dragons.
Then they have another one that's smaller.
So it's different levels,
but they're in the same class.
And so when you set your board game
up, yeah, you can, you know,
it's all three different armies fighting
at the same time.
That's really cool.
So do you think there are any projects
that you think would work better as comics
versus film?
Yeah, I mean...
I do multilevel stories.
So my stories are in books.
They're in film.
They're in comic books.
The way I look at it,
a story can be in all of them,
right?
It's just very hard to write a martial
arts,
kung fu movie type story because the
physical action is very boring to read.
unless they're talking while they're
fighting you know so that's what makes
superhero stories very hard to write in
books um even horror and you can't really
do humor in anything but comic books and
movies because humor gets lost in how the
person reads unless you're writing a joke
book
You know what I'm saying?
So some things don't translate,
but other things do.
Like when I wrote my Go Dig a
Killer, it was a horror blaxploitation.
When it wrote into a book,
it became street lit urban drama.
So sometimes the genre or the category
switches along with the medium.
But I would say humor is one of
those things that exists best
in film and comics.
Horror works best in film,
but depending on the horror.
If it's a psychological horror,
then it can work in a book.
But otherwise, you know,
Friday the Thirteenth and Texas Chainsaw
Massacre ain't going to be the same story
in books.
They've both been translated to comic
books.
Yeah, and both of them didn't succeed.
When I first tried to write horror,
those are the first things I looked for.
I was like,
where's their Texas Chainsaw Massacre
Freddy or whatever?
And it just never stuck because the people
that were publishing it did not allow the
writer to create an interesting world for
it to be more than just what you
saw in the movie.
Yeah.
And, you know,
it's like if you read Carrie or you
read The Shining,
they're a different type of story than the
one you see in the movie because you
have to adapt it differently to books than
you do in movies.
So, yeah,
because I was a lot in translation when
you do that as well.
You lose, but you also gain.
In books,
you don't have no such thing as pacing
and mood.
That's set differently.
And you're really depending on the
person's understanding of the words.
But in a film, you got pacing.
You can set your own pacing.
People read a book.
Some people read it all at once.
Some people read a chapter a day.
It's very hard to get pacing when somebody
is reading a chapter a day.
I get that because I'm the same way.
I don't read slow,
but I don't get a lot of time
to read either.
I'm both.
I don't get a lot of time to
read and I'm slow.
I have this one book.
I lost my place in the book,
so I end up now rereading stuff that
I...
God, and I keep saying,
take time to write the book,
but I have a whole lot of home
chores.
I have to make time to do it,
but I do have to write.
I'm getting my writing chops back.
I was writing right before we got on
the show,
and I'll probably write a little bit when
we get off.
Well,
we're getting ready to bring it home now.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Not to rush you or anything.
No, no.
We've been going almost two hours,
so it's time to start bringing it home.
Okay.
And I forgot to ask you,
how long is your show?
Normally I try to do about an hour,
but you know what?
If the conversation is flowing,
I just let it flow the way it's
meant to be.
And I'm getting to have a conversation
that I typically would not get to have.
So I've been just letting it rock out.
Well, I appreciate it.
Do you go to any comic cons?
i do try i'm trying to move over
to the hosting side or the uh the
table inside of things right now or
possibly like i last year i got to
bring the usd into a comic-con and do
a live episode of the usdn which was
really fun to do you know i would
like to be able to expand that more
to either host in
discuss it in the comments or something
like that.
Um,
I might know a little something about that
at this point.
So, but yeah,
I do try to go to as many
as I can.
It's just,
I'm really wanting to expand more.
So into, like I said,
the host inside of, uh,
tables are being a member of the table.
Well, I'll tell you,
I asked that because in June I'm slated
to be at heroes in Charlotte.
Okay.
So I don't know how far that is
from you, but if you come through,
I'll be able to meet you.
I'll keep that in mind for real.
But I got a couple more questions and
we're going to bring this home.
Shoot them and I'll try to get through
as fast as I can.
And these are probably some of the bigger
ones and the more important ones as we
started to close this out.
What does the future of black speculative
storytelling look like over the next ten
years to you?
I think when you kick through the door.
the um uh um gosh i can't the
jackie robinson's come through right yeah
the best of and he might not even
been the best you know i'm a judge
gibson fan but yeah jackie robinson was
definitely one of the best right from the
negro league um oh yeah so
When we get through,
not to say that there's not going to
be a Reggie Jackson, you know,
somewhere in the mix,
but you will get more of a diversity
of black storytelling in the future,
like my story.
Forty ounces of death is not a roots
of madness.
It's not a bitter root, you know,
but it is a horror and it is
more like
Friday the thirteenth you know what I'm
saying and so but it took a beloved
which is so well written and such high
literary that even a lot of black people
haven't read it you know what I'm saying
but we will get there our first space
story may be some high level something
like the Martian
But after we have a few of them,
we'll get down to B-movie level stuff like
Star Wars.
You know what I'm saying?
But the Jackie Robinson's break the door
down because they've got to be better than
the established white writers.
You know what I'm saying?
The guys that I met,
John Ringo and the other one,
I can't remember his name,
that wrote the monster series with Tor and
all of that.
Those guys didn't write high level science
fiction books.
Tor and Bane Books,
they weren't writing Hugo winning deep
books.
They were writing very fundamental books.
And when I started reading them,
I was like,
do we have anybody that's like that?
No.
And that's because all our books are
Jackie Robinson's.
You know, so to me, yeah,
we're going to have those Jackie
Robinson's Stephanie Williams come
through,
but then we're going to soften it up
and they'll get more expressions.
It's not that they're not top quality
writers,
but we're going to get a black Stephen
King.
who can write about rats in the basement.
Monster cars terrorizing a restaurant.
You know what I'm saying?
Stupid stuff like Carrie,
a little girl being bullied who can cause
rocks to fly out of the sky.
Stuff that doesn't even make sense.
A car that gets possessed.
You understand?
But we don't have Black stories like that.
Our Black stories have to make every bit
of sense.
You understand?
Soon.
Soon, I'm telling you.
Yeah, soon.
And that's, when you get there,
then you get to the Jeff Carroll level.
And then you're going to be, you know,
if you look at any of my movies,
they're definitely over the top silly and
fun.
Yeah.
You know, Forty Ounces of Death.
I got the story in Mississippi Zombies.
And, um,
It's in my Nightmare Streets book.
That's about a beer that turns people into
zombies.
So that's some B-movie stuff.
I love B-movies, period.
Yes.
My fellow collaborators are the Polonia
Brothers, and they did House Shark,
and they did Cocaine Shark.
You know what I'm saying?
And we don't have too many Black people
doing even movies like that.
Everybody black is trying to be the best
exorcist.
Amityville horror.
They're not having fun with it, you know?
So that'll be the next, that's the future.
I like it, Jeff.
We're going to close it out with this
one and we'll bring it home.
If someone watches Why I Love Sci-Fi,
which, by the way,
is linked down below in the description of
this.
What do you hope they walk away from?
Or what do you think?
What do you hope they walk away thinking
about?
Got it out.
So one,
when I first started writing science
fiction,
my my advertisement was give sci fi a
try.
Right.
And this is probably not even something I
put in a documentary.
But where I got the I love sci
fi from was the byproduct of a challenge
to some fraternity sorority members at a
Martin Luther King parade.
And they were saying, oh,
we just don't read science fiction, blah,
blah, blah.
And I was talking them into it.
So there's a fraternity called Omega
Sci-Fi.
Shaquille O'Neal is in it, Michael Jordan,
Jesse Jackson, right?
And it's Omega Sci-Fi.
And so when I got into the conversation
with them, I said, but you are Sci-Fi.
You are omega sci-fi.
So then I said, oh, I'm taking that.
I'm running with it.
So then I wrote, I love sci-fi.
And then the documentary is why I love
sci-fi.
So the core goal was to get people
to be interested in sci-fi and
particularly people of color and more
specifically Black science fiction.
And even more specifically,
my science fiction.
Ha!
Because really,
it's not just about science fiction.
It is my opinion.
And I give you an up-close personal look,
the little cutaways of me being in the
movie theater, me cutting grass,
me going to Comic-Con.
And what I'm thinking,
that's the mind of a science fiction
writer.
so those are all the things I want
you to get inspired to read science
fiction if you've never read it read some
black science fiction if you've never read
that or read some of my books or
watch my movies or my comic books so
those are the goals the wild part is
they may have read black sci-fi and not
realize it was written by a person of
color right,
yep so that's that or not to be
afraid to include it in your science
fiction catalog
A hundred percent, Joe.
I love it, man.
I really do.
This has been like,
this is the longest podcast I've done in
quite some time.
Welcome back.
Honestly, I just let it flow.
The conversation was so good.
And this is one of those where I,
as a, a big bearded white fella,
don't get to have conversations like this
often.
Right.
And when I do get to have a
conversation like this,
I get so absorbed into listening to you
and, and,
learning about your journey and why you're
doing what you're doing that.
I just, I just fucking let it go,
man.
Thank you.
for allowing me into your comic book
space.
Oh, you're part of the fam now.
Thank you for having me talk to you
about it.
And this is what I do with my
panels.
When I used to do panels at conventions,
I have a panel coming up this summer.
I like to let it flow.
I like to be engaging with the audience
because writing is a solitary art.
You can't write with fifty million people
around you.
So even with movies,
I like to watch my movie in the
theater with other people watching my
movie.
You can't do that with comic books or
books.
You stare at somebody reading your book,
they'd be like, that's weird.
I just was waiting to see if you
got the joke.
Like, are you on page twenty?
Are you on page twenty?
Right, right, right.
You know, so.
So that's why I like these conversations,
you know,
the podcast and then the panels and stuff.
So I encourage you to do that.
You know,
these conventions that will let you come
to the convention and set up a whole
live stream.
I wouldn't say try to do it all
three days of the convention.
um well yeah no that's it tastes a
lot out of me like another reason why
i scheduled the way i schedule now is
because this takes it out of you yeah
and then after this is done i still
have to edit clip it
schedule everything out to release.
It's a whole thing.
It takes a day or two to recover.
When I tell you,
if you do plan to do a full
day,
you might not be burdened with the editing
because it would be a live stream,
but you still have to space it out
and book it.
Then there's other things that you can do.
Instead of a commercial break, you say,
hey,
I want to play this previous clip of
me walking around the day before and
watching and talking to people as they set
up.
You understand what I'm saying?
Or this is a pre-recorded interview.
And that's something I want to do,
but it's getting access to do that.
And they go, well,
we've never heard of you,
so we're not going to give you that
access.
And I'm just like, well,
you're not hurting me because you're not
giving me the chance.
Right.
And that's a hard part to do.
There's some small conventions.
I know these guys do an Atlantic Comic
Con in August,
and I believe it's in the Norfolk Hampton
area.
Okay.
I'll send you those guys' information.
Yeah,
shoot it to me and I'll reach out
to them.
Jeff, we're going to bring it home.
You can have them on the show.
Oh, yeah.
I'd love to talk to them.
Yeah, and then when the convention comes,
you can replay the interview with the
creators.
You know what I'm saying?
No,
I would love to be able to do
that just because I like to explore all
aspects of...
what the comic industry is all about.
Whether it's publishers, writers,
creators, inkers, you name it,
I want to talk to them.
But Jeff, right now,
we're going to bring it home.
Let everybody know where they can find you
and where they can find your documentary.
Well,
you said the link is in the descriptions.
All of them,
where they can find you and the
documentary.
Right.
I am Jeff Carroll on Facebook.
Coach Yo Jeff on Instagram.
I am RBG World on YouTube.
What do you call it?
My podcast is the Sci-Fi Express Lane.
You can do that.
Or best for any of my comic book
future stuff coming out,
Check me on Kickstarter.
I'm Jeff Carroll,
Hip Hop Comics and Flicks.
And that's probably the best way to get
me is on Kickstarter because right now I'm
running back to back Kickstarters all
year.
I like it, Jeff.
I want to welcome you to the Council
of Nerds, Jeff.
Thank you, everyone.
Science fiction has never just been about
spaceships, aliens,
or futuristic technology.
At its core, sci-fi is about imagination.
It's about asking, what if?
and daring to envision a future nobody
else sees yet.
Tonight's conversation with Jeff Carroll,
aka Coach Jeff,
reminded us that black science fiction,
indie comics, horror,
hip-hop storytelling,
and creator-owned worlds all matter
because they expand who gets to shape the
future.
From comic books and film to speculative
fiction and cultural storytelling,
imagination itself,
is power.
Make sure you support independent
creators, support indie comics,
and support original storytelling.
If you enjoyed tonight's episode,
make sure you like, subscribe,
and share this,
because this has been the USDN Podcast,
where indie comics come to life.
Ladies and gentlemen,
the Council of Nerds is now adjourned.
Y'all be safe out there.