Dylan Muldrew (@nuafricacomix ) joins us on the Black Superheroes Matter Podcast. Dylan is a rapper turned underground comix connoisseur hailing from Portland, Oregon. His science fiction, horror drawings, and stories are meant to be your surreal escape from the pressures of being Black in America. Never too tired to create, Dylan’s traditional illustrations that are inspired by 70’s comic books, blend seamlessly with Afrofuturistic elements to create a one of a kind reading experience.
Notable Time Stamps
Creating in a Pandemic:
2:15-2:30 “I’m kind of a home-body so, you know I’ve been definitely enjoying the last couple of years. Getting better with the art, getting better with knowing myself and everything.”
2:40-3:00 “And not feel so uncomfortable it, cause’ whenever you’re around people that kind of like being out, going to bars and all that type of stuff it’s like oh you just want to sit at the house and draw? So now it puts you in a situation where it’s like I can just chill and nobody's really bothering me.”
14:00-14:05 “I get a lot of inspiration from real events, history, and science”
Ideas & Inspiration:
8:00-8:30 “Heavy Metal are these short story magazines from the 70’s. Frank Frazetta was a painter, he did a lot of the covers for these old sci-fi magazines but this is kind of like what inspired a lot of my work.”
8:34-9:04 “The first story is kind of like a wasteland in a way to say the world has kind of depleted of natural resources and from Africa specifically. They have to find a device to kind of regulate the atmosphere and to kind of bring life back.”
14:45-15:15 “Lately I’ve been working on a story, it’s like this female ninja clan and they hunt down George Zimmerman. It kind of sounds a little crazy but just as a what if? What does a Black future look like? And even if it is kind of a little twisted and f-ed up you know?”
21:10-21:50 “The color thing seems like it was just a little expensive so this next comic is one I’ve been working on just the last week or so and just trying not to rely on color, just trying to get better with anatomy and taking the drawing a little more serious.”
23:57-24:37 “What really inspired me to do black and white is Ken Landgraf of New York City Outlaw comics. It’s like these older kind of independent style just random stories...it’s just like a different way of drawing you know?”
47:56-47:06 “My main goal for comic books is to create Black futurism, that magic world of all of the stories that we all talk about amongst ourselves that never get told”
Background:
9:50-10:06 “I come from Hip Hop and being a rapper so comic books was kind of like a new thing for me figuring out how to put a story together or even how to print it, how to do all that type of stuff”
15:53- 16:25 “You had Superman and he had all these random powers and it wasn’t really as cohesive as a story as Spiderman because how many Black kids do you know that take care of an old grandparent? You know or they’re in high school, they’ve got to get a job, and I don’t know if he was doing that on purpose but it really tells the inner-city American kid story of struggling and kind of like needing a superpower to feel something else.”
33:00-33:40 “I have a vivid imagination and my brain just goes all of the time and I’m just kind of thinking about a lot of things so, it’s almost like a need. Cause I was making a lot of songs and it was like ok I can’t really rap space and I was watching a lot of alien movies like Star Wars; I can’t rap about a space station. I was having a hard time kind of translating certain ideas, I was making videos at the time too and (comics) just felt a lot easier to get ideas out. It wasn’t even necessarily a conscious thing”
39:24-39:55 “It’s just like we make comic books too. Instagram has definitely widened the spectrum of what a comic book artist looks like. It’s not just about superheroes, it’s not just about one single solitary thing, there’s a lot of things that you can do and there’s a lot of stories that haven’t been told, especially by us that need to be told. There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done in other spaces creatively other than music.”
40:40- 40:47 “The expectations that come with just being Black and how you’re supposed to be, a lot of that stuff just doesn’t come out because it just gets suppressed”
