New Comic “The Cookout”
SPC Featured Artist: Daniel Irizarri
SPC Featured Artist: Daniel Irizarri
Who do we trust to tell our stories?
In his forthcoming book, Reparative Media: Cultivating Stories and Platforms to Heal our Culture, Aymar Jèan (AJ) Escoffery examines the film media meccas of Los Angeles and New York, how their hold as the largest producers could inflict damage as a monopoly producer of culture.
How well do they represent communities outside their immediate culture? How do they represent the underrepresented?
In his book, AJ shares insights from his research on media industries and community-based organizations and from his co-founding of Open TV as a reparative outlet. He explores how to repair systemic harm and discrimination in media with independent media and community-building.
AJ entrusted SP Comics to create the comic “The Cookout: A Guide to AI: Ancestral Intelligence”, which serves as a guide and complement to Reparative Media.
Our team of expert scriptwriters drew the main thesis and themes from AJ’s book and applied them to a scene taking place years in the future when the world is run by virtual reality technology. It weaves a tale about organizing, activism, community-building, and cultural ancestry in a dominated space.
SPC Featured Artist: Daniel Irizarri
It was a super fun process to translate AJ’s years of research and experience into a futuristic world with interesting characters and narrative storytelling. As he does with OpenTV, the comic was a chance for AJ to convey a story of reparation and community healing that is counter to dominant ideas about traditionally excluded communities.
On the art side, this was our first collaboration with the artist Daniel Irizarri who did both line art and color on this project. His work is so stunning that it really brings the world and AJ’s insights to life. We were amazed at every page!
The Cookout comic will be available as a companion to AJ’s book and a standalone comic on his (and our!) professional website next month.
