richardmurray
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Status Replies posted by richardmurray
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I quote vivica a fox in the article using brackets delineated by commas and ending with an ellipsis: << "“In my life, it was career over children. And I never met the man I could have children with. I didn’t.”">>, <<“I almost made that mistake and three months before my family was like, ‘You will not! You absolutely will not,'” she recalled. “I lost a whole bunch of money and deposits and this, that and the third, but I trust my family.”>>, <<“I have six godchildren that when God took away my opportunity to bear children, he sent my godbabies,” she said. “So I’ve got kids!”>> .... The article title is dysfunctional. Vivica a fox , not me, said she chose career over children, meaning what, when she got pregnant she contracepted, before fornication she contracepted so fornication was never procreation. Like many women in the usa, she was pregnant many times i bet, but she contracepted it away, for her career. men has nothing to do with her choice to be career over children. IF she didn't have a relationship with a man that satisfied her financial desires or demands to allow for pregnancy,that has nothing to do with pregnancy. Black women during enslavement had tons of kids, by all sorts of men , as they were owned, if black enslaved women who worked in fields , being whipped and raped daily, can have children , all black women after are lying to themselves using anything as an excuse for not having a child. Her second quote suggests she listens to the people she calls her family, again, another non issue. If she listens to others over her personal life, that is her doing, what do men or babymaking have to do with vivica a fox listen to somebody else over her relationships. LAstly, she spoke about god taking away her ability to have kids, which is a lie, so clearly a part of her regrets listening to family and choosing career over children, thought she accepts it. the christian god, shiva, shakti, yemnyah, quetzecoatl, or similar, do not take away womens ability to bear children, bearing children is a temporary gift from nature, not meant to be forever, so it need to be cherished while you can, the christian bible does say to be fruitful and multiply right?
ARTICLE
Vivica A. Fox On Motherhood: 'I Never Met The Man I Could Have Children With' (essence.com)
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I saw this posted somewhere online
THE FOLLOWING IS MY REPLY
To me, the issue you raise is powerful. To be blunt, many in the industry, many fans, many et cetera oppose aging of characters in general and want ways to avoid aging, ala alternate worlds and dimension jumps because a central idea exists in comics in the usa. A comic imprint losses money if the title character is aged out. I will restate, taking away characters who were written long lived naturally, like kal-el or diana or thor or silver silver or similar in the us comic book world, can the comic book imprints of aquaman/batman/flash/greenlantern/shazzam/green arrow/zatana...spider man/wolverine/iron man/daredevil/hulk/captainamerica/luke cage survive if the characters naturally moved on and were replaced by this thing called time? I say yes. The problem is, most in the industry, most of their imbalanced research, many fans <can't say most> say no. Thus, the age problem in the usa comics industry. I argue, when we talk about characters changing in comics, that the absence of them changing naturally with time aids in their inability to be changed well culturally. I will end with Milestone. One of my biggest sadnesses is that Milestone chose that same model when they restarted their comics. I wish I had power or control to demand they continue those comics from when they stopped. Why not an older icon and rocket, with rocket who is human, not an older woman with a mature child. maybe she has already passed the mantle of rocket to her child. I think that is an interesting story, of an extraterrestrial , convinced to be a superhero by a human and continuing to be a superhero with the child of the human who convinced him , who he helped raise. I like that idea. No need for a reboot. What about a Hardware who is still working for alva industries but is a shareholder publicly, while privately still the superhero. What does that mean when one achieves a level of freedom as an engineer, which si what I felt hardware was about , but is not older and settled in? who are his villains? what about a family? What about an older static? living on his own? maybe a family? does he leave dakota? static was a teenager, does he leave dakota? What about hsi relationship to being a superhero? when I think of child actors and how many do not end up actors, I think that rejection of ones childhood job is alive with static. Shadow Cabinet is obvious? what intelligence agency ever stays the same over time. If anything the question is, where are the original members and how did they survive or get killed.? Xombi is much like the hulk in one way. How can a human man, with a condition that grants a sort of immortality survive as an outcast in humanity, forever, at some point, this human must be healed or this human must exist as an outcast on their own accord in the truest sense. And that connect to the natural immortals i mentioned above, at some point, they should , I have to leave? I never forget being told by a reader to a story I wrote, that superheroes don't want to give up superheroing? And I still think that is a false mentality. Just cause one has powers means they are infatuated with being a superhero. I think that is a lie, and explains the problem in superheroes is readership views towards what it means to be a superhero.. continuing... Kobalt, like any vigilante ala the punisher, suffers the most storywise. how does a street hero not get killed over time more quickly? i am not suggesting someone else can not pick up the mantle, but kobalt, punisher, come on, they haven't been injured very badly at least, in their entire tenure as a street hero? come one. And lastly, my favorite Milestone imprint, blood syndicate... What about blood syndicate! as an older gang ? the city has allowed this section of the city to be operated by them eternally. the bureaucracy of a city and their illegal existence alone demands a very lively existence that can't just be sunday mornings with the super villains for decades. so, time matters. I oppose faux immortality in my stories and I reject it when I appreciate others.
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I saw this posted somewhere online
THE FOLLOWING IS MY REPLY
To me, the issue you raise is powerful. To be blunt, many in the industry, many fans, many et cetera oppose aging of characters in general and want ways to avoid aging, ala alternate worlds and dimension jumps because a central idea exists in comics in the usa. A comic imprint losses money if the title character is aged out. I will restate, taking away characters who were written long lived naturally, like kal-el or diana or thor or silver silver or similar in the us comic book world, can the comic book imprints of aquaman/batman/flash/greenlantern/shazzam/green arrow/zatana...spider man/wolverine/iron man/daredevil/hulk/captainamerica/luke cage survive if the characters naturally moved on and were replaced by this thing called time? I say yes. The problem is, most in the industry, most of their imbalanced research, many fans <can't say most> say no. Thus, the age problem in the usa comics industry. I argue, when we talk about characters changing in comics, that the absence of them changing naturally with time aids in their inability to be changed well culturally. I will end with Milestone. One of my biggest sadnesses is that Milestone chose that same model when they restarted their comics. I wish I had power or control to demand they continue those comics from when they stopped. Why not an older icon and rocket, with rocket who is human, not an older woman with a mature child. maybe she has already passed the mantle of rocket to her child. I think that is an interesting story, of an extraterrestrial , convinced to be a superhero by a human and continuing to be a superhero with the child of the human who convinced him , who he helped raise. I like that idea. No need for a reboot. What about a Hardware who is still working for alva industries but is a shareholder publicly, while privately still the superhero. What does that mean when one achieves a level of freedom as an engineer, which si what I felt hardware was about , but is not older and settled in? who are his villains? what about a family? What about an older static? living on his own? maybe a family? does he leave dakota? static was a teenager, does he leave dakota? What about hsi relationship to being a superhero? when I think of child actors and how many do not end up actors, I think that rejection of ones childhood job is alive with static. Shadow Cabinet is obvious? what intelligence agency ever stays the same over time. If anything the question is, where are the original members and how did they survive or get killed.? Xombi is much like the hulk in one way. How can a human man, with a condition that grants a sort of immortality survive as an outcast in humanity, forever, at some point, this human must be healed or this human must exist as an outcast on their own accord in the truest sense. And that connect to the natural immortals i mentioned above, at some point, they should , I have to leave? I never forget being told by a reader to a story I wrote, that superheroes don't want to give up superheroing? And I still think that is a false mentality. Just cause one has powers means they are infatuated with being a superhero. I think that is a lie, and explains the problem in superheroes is readership views towards what it means to be a superhero.. continuing... Kobalt, like any vigilante ala the punisher, suffers the most storywise. how does a street hero not get killed over time more quickly? i am not suggesting someone else can not pick up the mantle, but kobalt, punisher, come on, they haven't been injured very badly at least, in their entire tenure as a street hero? come one. And lastly, my favorite Milestone imprint, blood syndicate... What about blood syndicate! as an older gang ? the city has allowed this section of the city to be operated by them eternally. the bureaucracy of a city and their illegal existence alone demands a very lively existence that can't just be sunday mornings with the super villains for decades. so, time matters. I oppose faux immortality in my stories and I reject it when I appreciate others.
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Sorghum & Spear - The Way of Silk & Stone Anthology - Kickstarter Coming November 26th!
Join acclaimed editor Sheree Renee Thomas and our award-winning group of authors as they explore and expand the world of Orun Aye into the next phase of storytelling! We have 14 amazing stories to share with you, as well as some new world-building reveals as well!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/greenecountycreative/sorghum-and-spear-fantasy-novel-the-way-of-silk-and-stone
We held a special panel of several of the writers during our SUBSUME SUMMIT: CREATIVE JUNETEENTH panel this year, for an exclusive look at the project. Relive this amazing conversation by viewing our YouTube playback:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSfrwOl6rXU
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The HArder They Fall
MEdia That Moves We
Black Daddies
some of my thoughts
My Media that moves we commentary
the film was influenced by all the genre's of western films in the usa, from the john wayne era to the spaghetti western to the black films like posse or buck and the preacher
That is the brilliance of the film, it in the end is an entertainment , not a documentary or historical film.
Nike, you precancelled , canceled westerns:)
YEah, Multiple review shows of this film have I Think missed one key point. if you want to make a film a certain way, own a film studio. At some point you have to reject the level of complaint to how the story is told. Own a studio and you can do what you want ?
and let's be honest, revenge is a constant theme of westerns of all sorts, denzel's magnificent seven differed from kurosawa's seven samurai or brenner/mcqueen magnificent seven, where the gunfighters are trying to redeem themselves in a quiet little place.
yes, they trained with their doubles so they could have a more john wickian fight choreography
I give my entertainment ranking a 10, I was entertained , love the womens fight:) in terms of black westerns , it is a high percentage, 7 or 8. I think posse or buck and the preacher are better as films. In terms of westerns in general , from the black and white silent black westerns and et cetera to now, 7 . In terms of historical quality in western films... a five.
My Black Daddies commentary
Was jill scott offered the role? did jill scott reject it?
blacker than buck and the preacher... I don't know, it is clearly up there
the usa has a long history of film superstar collabs in westerns, this films joins that very long list
white zombia was a financial play, legosi reportedly was paid a lot for that film, and it was clearly designed to play on the fandom of "monster movies" the cultural aspects of white zombie is clearly negative but the reason it was made was purely financial
do you guys think disney has written the entire phase 4 already, or at least all the parts?
Do you think a cartoon of a fiscally impoverished family from a dying black town, can be made by a high profile company like disney?
What about danny glover get production money to direct his toussaint louverture movie if he does this?
if lethal weapon 5 makes money does another Beverly hills cop happen?
What about the detective jumps from a spacex ship to virgin galactic ship to solve a cryptocurrency theft
This was for entertainment, in the spirit of westerns movies in the usa. never real history, always an entertainment
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My father love pop williams. I can see similarities between pop williams and my father. But the biggest question I have is, where are black parents? I remember as a kid people asking me, who do I idolize, and my answer was and still is, my parents. they are the finest people I know. I like or love pele, HArriet tubman, fred hampton, malcolm, shirley Chisholm, fannie lou hamer, Akhenaton... I like Lewis Hamilton, the williams sisters, Simone Biles, tiger woods, michelle obama. but I don't idolize any of them. I am not inspired by them. And I think that is what black people need, we need to be inspired by our parents to a level in which we do not need others
a question, what does being a champion mean?
serena williams, venus williams, will smith cover shoots
Venus in the dress, stills
Video Venus williams in that dress:)
kyle on Twitter: "Venus Williams looks STUNNING #KingRichard https://t.co/uQzAGLKh29" / Twitter
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The HArder They Fall
MEdia That Moves We
Black Daddies
some of my thoughts
My Media that moves we commentary
the film was influenced by all the genre's of western films in the usa, from the john wayne era to the spaghetti western to the black films like posse or buck and the preacher
That is the brilliance of the film, it in the end is an entertainment , not a documentary or historical film.
Nike, you precancelled , canceled westerns:)
YEah, Multiple review shows of this film have I Think missed one key point. if you want to make a film a certain way, own a film studio. At some point you have to reject the level of complaint to how the story is told. Own a studio and you can do what you want ?
and let's be honest, revenge is a constant theme of westerns of all sorts, denzel's magnificent seven differed from kurosawa's seven samurai or brenner/mcqueen magnificent seven, where the gunfighters are trying to redeem themselves in a quiet little place.
yes, they trained with their doubles so they could have a more john wickian fight choreography
I give my entertainment ranking a 10, I was entertained , love the womens fight:) in terms of black westerns , it is a high percentage, 7 or 8. I think posse or buck and the preacher are better as films. In terms of westerns in general , from the black and white silent black westerns and et cetera to now, 7 . In terms of historical quality in western films... a five.
My Black Daddies commentary
Was jill scott offered the role? did jill scott reject it?
blacker than buck and the preacher... I don't know, it is clearly up there
the usa has a long history of film superstar collabs in westerns, this films joins that very long list
white zombia was a financial play, legosi reportedly was paid a lot for that film, and it was clearly designed to play on the fandom of "monster movies" the cultural aspects of white zombie is clearly negative but the reason it was made was purely financial
do you guys think disney has written the entire phase 4 already, or at least all the parts?
Do you think a cartoon of a fiscally impoverished family from a dying black town, can be made by a high profile company like disney?
What about danny glover get production money to direct his toussaint louverture movie if he does this?
if lethal weapon 5 makes money does another Beverly hills cop happen?
What about the detective jumps from a spacex ship to virgin galactic ship to solve a cryptocurrency theft
This was for entertainment, in the spirit of westerns movies in the usa. never real history, always an entertainment
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MY REPLY
You miss two issues concerning milestone : First is of Dwayne McDuffie and that any literary form, needs a great storyteller, and milestone misses McDuffie. I submitted to the Milestone initiative, that didn't even involve one of the milestone creators , who had to submit to it himself. so, do black comic books have the best storytellers. Your focus is on what people call "Woke", what I call stories involving elements of modern sociopolitical frictions. The problem isn't the themes but it is the stories. The storytelling is simply not good enough. I oppose milestone's choice about changing the origin story, but I think other writers could had written a better story. Second, Literature is not meant to be escapists. Literature can serve any of infinite functions to a reader but did milestone's administrators comprehend the financial market for comic books? The problem with milestone today is they seem to be written absent a comprehension of the comic book market today. How do you sell the new milestone series better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhUMiLlSYgc
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MY REPLY
You miss two issues concerning milestone : First is of Dwayne McDuffie and that any literary form, needs a great storyteller, and milestone misses McDuffie. I submitted to the Milestone initiative, that didn't even involve one of the milestone creators , who had to submit to it himself. so, do black comic books have the best storytellers. Your focus is on what people call "Woke", what I call stories involving elements of modern sociopolitical frictions. The problem isn't the themes but it is the stories. The storytelling is simply not good enough. I oppose milestone's choice about changing the origin story, but I think other writers could had written a better story. Second, Literature is not meant to be escapists. Literature can serve any of infinite functions to a reader but did milestone's administrators comprehend the financial market for comic books? The problem with milestone today is they seem to be written absent a comprehension of the comic book market today. How do you sell the new milestone series better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhUMiLlSYgc
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MY REPLY
You miss two issues concerning milestone : First is of Dwayne McDuffie and that any literary form, needs a great storyteller, and milestone misses McDuffie. I submitted to the Milestone initiative, that didn't even involve one of the milestone creators , who had to submit to it himself. so, do black comic books have the best storytellers. Your focus is on what people call "Woke", what I call stories involving elements of modern sociopolitical frictions. The problem isn't the themes but it is the stories. The storytelling is simply not good enough. I oppose milestone's choice about changing the origin story, but I think other writers could had written a better story. Second, Literature is not meant to be escapists. Literature can serve any of infinite functions to a reader but did milestone's administrators comprehend the financial market for comic books? The problem with milestone today is they seem to be written absent a comprehension of the comic book market today. How do you sell the new milestone series better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhUMiLlSYgc
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MY REPLY
You miss two issues concerning milestone : First is of Dwayne McDuffie and that any literary form, needs a great storyteller, and milestone misses McDuffie. I submitted to the Milestone initiative, that didn't even involve one of the milestone creators , who had to submit to it himself. so, do black comic books have the best storytellers. Your focus is on what people call "Woke", what I call stories involving elements of modern sociopolitical frictions. The problem isn't the themes but it is the stories. The storytelling is simply not good enough. I oppose milestone's choice about changing the origin story, but I think other writers could had written a better story. Second, Literature is not meant to be escapists. Literature can serve any of infinite functions to a reader but did milestone's administrators comprehend the financial market for comic books? The problem with milestone today is they seem to be written absent a comprehension of the comic book market today. How do you sell the new milestone series better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhUMiLlSYgc
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MY REPLY
You miss two issues concerning milestone : First is of Dwayne McDuffie and that any literary form, needs a great storyteller, and milestone misses McDuffie. I submitted to the Milestone initiative, that didn't even involve one of the milestone creators , who had to submit to it himself. so, do black comic books have the best storytellers. Your focus is on what people call "Woke", what I call stories involving elements of modern sociopolitical frictions. The problem isn't the themes but it is the stories. The storytelling is simply not good enough. I oppose milestone's choice about changing the origin story, but I think other writers could had written a better story. Second, Literature is not meant to be escapists. Literature can serve any of infinite functions to a reader but did milestone's administrators comprehend the financial market for comic books? The problem with milestone today is they seem to be written absent a comprehension of the comic book market today. How do you sell the new milestone series better?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhUMiLlSYgc
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Title: Blackberry Cookie Run in my style Color inverted
Artist : Richard MurrayBlackberry Cookie Run in my style Color
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Blackberry-Cookie-in-My-Style-Color-895978158?ga_submit_new=10%3A1635196887Blackberry Cookie Run in my style Black and White- enjoy coloring
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/Blackberry-Cookie-in-My-Style-BW-895975264?ga_submit_new=10%3A1635196566Blackeberry Cookie Run theme song
https://richardmurrayhumblr.tumblr.com/post/666052665503055872/cover-title-blackberry-cookie-run-in-my-styleMy Cookie in Cookie Run style Color
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/My-Cookie-in-Cookie-Run-Style-Color-895979609?ga_submit_new=10%3A1635197698My Cookie in Cookie Run style Black and White
https://www.deviantart.com/hddeviant/art/My-Cookie-in-Cookie-Run-Style-BW-895979382?ga_submit_new=10%3A1635197582
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NEW VOICES. NEW VISIONARIES
IT’S TIME TO WRITE A NEW CHAPTER IN THE SUPERHERO STORY.
If stories are what shape the world we live in, then the storytellers should reflect that world. The Milestone Initiative is looking for the next generation of Black and diverse comic book creators.DC Superhero
In 1993, four Black creators created Milestone Comics: a new universe of Black Super Heroes, brought to life by Black creators and other artists of color. Milestone didn’t just change the way our heroes looked. It built a pipeline for talent who had been excluded and marginalized for too long, and an ecosystem in which Black creativity could thrive. Now, with the relaunch of Milestone Comics and the creation of The Milestone Initiative, we want to honor the creators of Milestone by continuing their mission. But we can’t do it without you.DC Superhero
MAKE YOUR MARK
Do you have a story to tell? Do your experiences, imagination, and perspective go beyond the limits of what you see on TV, in movies, and in other media? If you live and breathe comics, and you’re an emerging Black artist or writer —or a creator from an underrepresented group —we’re looking for you to join The Milestone Initiative.The path to a sustainable creative career in this competitive industry will never be an easy one. You already know that —you’ve spent years honing your craft on your own. But with The Milestone Initiative, we hope to give you the support you need to make that hard work pay off. The next step starts here.
DC Summit
THE
SUMMIT
Participants in The Milestone Initiative will be invited to a one-week summit, hosted by WarnerMedia, DC, and Ally, where they’ll make connections, create community, and begin an immersive course to help hone creative skills and better understand the comic book industry.WHEN
02.14.22 – 02.18.22WHERE
BURBANK, CA
1. ARRIVE
If you’re selected to participate in The Milestone Initiative, your journey will begin with the Milestone Summit. You’ll travel at our expense to DC’s headquarters in Burbank, to meet legendary creators, editors, and executives in the comics and entertainment industries.
2. LEARN
Under the mentorship of some of the most prominent names in comics, as well as Ally’s team of financial experts, you’ll receive in-depth, substantive instruction about building a creative life and earning a living in this field. You’ll hone your creative skills, but you’ll also learn the business of the comics industry and receive advice on sustaining a long-term career. Following the Milestone Summit, you’ll go home and participate in an 8-week virtual course, where you’ll receive technical training through best-in-class cartooning and graphic art school The Kubert School.
3. CREATE
It won’t be easy —throughout this multi-week course, you’ll be working as well as learning, crafting stories with your fellow participants. At the end of this journey you’ll come away with polished work that will showcase your unique talents, new knowledge, and skills and you'll have a pathway into the DC talent community if you want to pursue it.
4. IGNITE
The Milestone Initiative doesn’t end with the the completion of the coursework. The team from DC will remain in contact with all participants in the months following and will work with them to find appropriate comics assignments and other work that will help them continue to grow as creators and further their careers with DC and in the comics world.HOW TO APPLY
The Milestone Initiative is open to Black and other underrepresented creators who are ready to enter the comic book industry at a professional level. You’ve got the talent, you’ve put in the hours of practice, and this is the opening you’ve been waiting for.Think you have what it takes? Get ready to dive into the application. You have a story to tell. We want to hear it.
PROCESS
DC Milestone
Now a quick reality check: we know you’re serious, and we’re serious too. So this application is going to take some time. We think it’s worth it.STEP 1: 10-20 MINUTES
First, we’ll ask you for a bit of biographical information. We’ll also ask you to provide us with links to a few existing pieces of completed original work, to give us a sense of your creative voice and vision.STEP 2: 5-7 DAYS
The next sections are where you should plan wisely. We’ll be asking you to put your talent and skills into action by completing a short assignment. If you’re an artist, that will mean drawing three comic pages based on a script we provide; if you’re a writer, you’ll be creating a script for an 8 page story based on a loose prompt we’ve created.STEP 3: 2-3 DAYS
Finally, we want writers and artists to answer a few, short essay questions and tell us who you are as a creator. Describe your voice and your vision —what do you believe you have to offer the world? The answers won’t take long to write, but they will take some time to think about. (And artists, don’t be intimidated if writing isn’t your thing. We’re looking for substance here, not style.)Got it? Get started. You don’t have to complete everything now —our system can save your work, just make sure to click “Save Draft” at the bottom of the page so you can begin now and tackle it a piece at a time.
DC Superpowered
WHAT IS THE MILESTONE INITIATIVE?
Superman wasn’t just the first superhero: he was an immigrant, an American, and an enduring symbol of our shared ideals. But as an explosion of comic book heroes took place over the second half of the 20th century, there was something missing. Despite an enduring Black readership, it took decades before the first Black heroes appeared, and once they did, they remained uncommon. Even the most prominent Black heroes usually appeared in stories written and illustrated by white creators.Enter Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle. With talent, vision, and tenacity, these four Black creators carved a place for themselves in an industry that didn’t always welcome or understand them. Despite their success, they were frustrated by the dearth of other Black creators in their field, and the resistance they met in trying to tell stories that reflected their own experiences and perspectives.
DC story-1-480
So they founded Milestone Media —a company that placed Black superheroes at the center of the action with their Milestone comics line, and which would make an inclusive space for Black and underrepresented comic book creators to flourish and succeed.Milestone hit like a space pod crashing to Earth —and its impact has continued to this day. Now, Milestone Media, is helmed by Reginald Hudlin and Denys Cowan, and DC is relaunching Milestone Comics and reintroducing its characters to new audiences, but we understand that there’s still much more work to be done to continue the mission of Milestone’s founders.
That’s why, with Ally as our partner, we’ve created The Milestone Initiative. While Milestone Media is about telling the stories of Black heroes, The Milestone Initiative is about empowering the creators who can tell those stories in ways that are resonant, real, and revolutionary. The program is part of DC’s talent development program, Next Generation DC (NGDC), and is designed to identify, educate, spotlight, and empower the next generation of Black and diverse creators in our field so that the stories of the next century are truly reflective of the world around us.
Throughout American history —in the comic book industry as well as in other creative fields —Black and other underrepresented creators have been consistent innovators and visionaries despite systems that work to exclude them. Now, as comic books take center stage in popular culture, DC, WarnerMedia, and Ally want to change that with The Milestone Initiative. The Milestone Media founders started the mission. It’s time for you to pick up their mantle.
DC story-2-480
READY TO MAKE YOUR MARK?
SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS-
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The most important part of the article is only two sentences: After a chance meeting with Robert Townsend, Wayans was the first to break through into the mainstream with the 1987 film, “Hollywood Shuffle.” From there, he got funding for his cult comedy classic, “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka,” which was released in 1988. He got funding through people who saw him or he connected to in hollywood shuffle. And absent Robert Townsend helping him, he doesn't get SUcka. ... I am tired of black magazines focusing on stories like this absent the financial reality. Money in the usa is never about merit but about opportunity. Oprah Winfrey wasn't predestined for success, daytime talk shows was the fad and they gave one to her, disney owned channel seven had tried others before her, people forget how many different day time talk shows were tried before oversaturation and eventual domination by shows like oprah. ... The dupont clan first product was gun powder and their first client was eager white settlers who would kill native americans with that powder from the time new york was a colony of england till the utz indians in the place now called the state of washington in 1900s. Rockefeller was made rich by dupont who chose to use his firm to solely power the railroads that shipped his steel, ala standard oil, which is now called exxon. IBM chose to use one firm to be the operating system for their computers, a little unimportant firm called microsoft. Clint Eastwood had a meeting with investors which led to the little film by mario van peebles called new jack city, and clint eastwood had worked with melvin van peebles previously which led to mario getting work with him in heartbreak ridge. Sometimes, connections lead to opportunities. Most times opportunities are just pure luck as most I stated. But, those opportunities are the key to success in the entertainment business. Almost all the original acts of motown grew up in the same community in detroit. I am not suggesting merit has no value, but the truth is, everybody works, the key is to get opportunity and usually, you can't get opportunity on your own.
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NEW VOICES. NEW VISIONARIES
IT’S TIME TO WRITE A NEW CHAPTER IN THE SUPERHERO STORY.
If stories are what shape the world we live in, then the storytellers should reflect that world. The Milestone Initiative is looking for the next generation of Black and diverse comic book creators.DC Superhero
In 1993, four Black creators created Milestone Comics: a new universe of Black Super Heroes, brought to life by Black creators and other artists of color. Milestone didn’t just change the way our heroes looked. It built a pipeline for talent who had been excluded and marginalized for too long, and an ecosystem in which Black creativity could thrive. Now, with the relaunch of Milestone Comics and the creation of The Milestone Initiative, we want to honor the creators of Milestone by continuing their mission. But we can’t do it without you.DC Superhero
MAKE YOUR MARK
Do you have a story to tell? Do your experiences, imagination, and perspective go beyond the limits of what you see on TV, in movies, and in other media? If you live and breathe comics, and you’re an emerging Black artist or writer —or a creator from an underrepresented group —we’re looking for you to join The Milestone Initiative.The path to a sustainable creative career in this competitive industry will never be an easy one. You already know that —you’ve spent years honing your craft on your own. But with The Milestone Initiative, we hope to give you the support you need to make that hard work pay off. The next step starts here.
DC Summit
THE
SUMMIT
Participants in The Milestone Initiative will be invited to a one-week summit, hosted by WarnerMedia, DC, and Ally, where they’ll make connections, create community, and begin an immersive course to help hone creative skills and better understand the comic book industry.WHEN
02.14.22 – 02.18.22WHERE
BURBANK, CA
1. ARRIVE
If you’re selected to participate in The Milestone Initiative, your journey will begin with the Milestone Summit. You’ll travel at our expense to DC’s headquarters in Burbank, to meet legendary creators, editors, and executives in the comics and entertainment industries.
2. LEARN
Under the mentorship of some of the most prominent names in comics, as well as Ally’s team of financial experts, you’ll receive in-depth, substantive instruction about building a creative life and earning a living in this field. You’ll hone your creative skills, but you’ll also learn the business of the comics industry and receive advice on sustaining a long-term career. Following the Milestone Summit, you’ll go home and participate in an 8-week virtual course, where you’ll receive technical training through best-in-class cartooning and graphic art school The Kubert School.
3. CREATE
It won’t be easy —throughout this multi-week course, you’ll be working as well as learning, crafting stories with your fellow participants. At the end of this journey you’ll come away with polished work that will showcase your unique talents, new knowledge, and skills and you'll have a pathway into the DC talent community if you want to pursue it.
4. IGNITE
The Milestone Initiative doesn’t end with the the completion of the coursework. The team from DC will remain in contact with all participants in the months following and will work with them to find appropriate comics assignments and other work that will help them continue to grow as creators and further their careers with DC and in the comics world.HOW TO APPLY
The Milestone Initiative is open to Black and other underrepresented creators who are ready to enter the comic book industry at a professional level. You’ve got the talent, you’ve put in the hours of practice, and this is the opening you’ve been waiting for.Think you have what it takes? Get ready to dive into the application. You have a story to tell. We want to hear it.
PROCESS
DC Milestone
Now a quick reality check: we know you’re serious, and we’re serious too. So this application is going to take some time. We think it’s worth it.STEP 1: 10-20 MINUTES
First, we’ll ask you for a bit of biographical information. We’ll also ask you to provide us with links to a few existing pieces of completed original work, to give us a sense of your creative voice and vision.STEP 2: 5-7 DAYS
The next sections are where you should plan wisely. We’ll be asking you to put your talent and skills into action by completing a short assignment. If you’re an artist, that will mean drawing three comic pages based on a script we provide; if you’re a writer, you’ll be creating a script for an 8 page story based on a loose prompt we’ve created.STEP 3: 2-3 DAYS
Finally, we want writers and artists to answer a few, short essay questions and tell us who you are as a creator. Describe your voice and your vision —what do you believe you have to offer the world? The answers won’t take long to write, but they will take some time to think about. (And artists, don’t be intimidated if writing isn’t your thing. We’re looking for substance here, not style.)Got it? Get started. You don’t have to complete everything now —our system can save your work, just make sure to click “Save Draft” at the bottom of the page so you can begin now and tackle it a piece at a time.
DC Superpowered
WHAT IS THE MILESTONE INITIATIVE?
Superman wasn’t just the first superhero: he was an immigrant, an American, and an enduring symbol of our shared ideals. But as an explosion of comic book heroes took place over the second half of the 20th century, there was something missing. Despite an enduring Black readership, it took decades before the first Black heroes appeared, and once they did, they remained uncommon. Even the most prominent Black heroes usually appeared in stories written and illustrated by white creators.Enter Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle. With talent, vision, and tenacity, these four Black creators carved a place for themselves in an industry that didn’t always welcome or understand them. Despite their success, they were frustrated by the dearth of other Black creators in their field, and the resistance they met in trying to tell stories that reflected their own experiences and perspectives.
DC story-1-480
So they founded Milestone Media —a company that placed Black superheroes at the center of the action with their Milestone comics line, and which would make an inclusive space for Black and underrepresented comic book creators to flourish and succeed.Milestone hit like a space pod crashing to Earth —and its impact has continued to this day. Now, Milestone Media, is helmed by Reginald Hudlin and Denys Cowan, and DC is relaunching Milestone Comics and reintroducing its characters to new audiences, but we understand that there’s still much more work to be done to continue the mission of Milestone’s founders.
That’s why, with Ally as our partner, we’ve created The Milestone Initiative. While Milestone Media is about telling the stories of Black heroes, The Milestone Initiative is about empowering the creators who can tell those stories in ways that are resonant, real, and revolutionary. The program is part of DC’s talent development program, Next Generation DC (NGDC), and is designed to identify, educate, spotlight, and empower the next generation of Black and diverse creators in our field so that the stories of the next century are truly reflective of the world around us.
Throughout American history —in the comic book industry as well as in other creative fields —Black and other underrepresented creators have been consistent innovators and visionaries despite systems that work to exclude them. Now, as comic books take center stage in popular culture, DC, WarnerMedia, and Ally want to change that with The Milestone Initiative. The Milestone Media founders started the mission. It’s time for you to pick up their mantle.
DC story-2-480
READY TO MAKE YOUR MARK?
SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS-
-
2
-
- Report
-
NEW VOICES. NEW VISIONARIES
IT’S TIME TO WRITE A NEW CHAPTER IN THE SUPERHERO STORY.
If stories are what shape the world we live in, then the storytellers should reflect that world. The Milestone Initiative is looking for the next generation of Black and diverse comic book creators.DC Superhero
In 1993, four Black creators created Milestone Comics: a new universe of Black Super Heroes, brought to life by Black creators and other artists of color. Milestone didn’t just change the way our heroes looked. It built a pipeline for talent who had been excluded and marginalized for too long, and an ecosystem in which Black creativity could thrive. Now, with the relaunch of Milestone Comics and the creation of The Milestone Initiative, we want to honor the creators of Milestone by continuing their mission. But we can’t do it without you.DC Superhero
MAKE YOUR MARK
Do you have a story to tell? Do your experiences, imagination, and perspective go beyond the limits of what you see on TV, in movies, and in other media? If you live and breathe comics, and you’re an emerging Black artist or writer —or a creator from an underrepresented group —we’re looking for you to join The Milestone Initiative.The path to a sustainable creative career in this competitive industry will never be an easy one. You already know that —you’ve spent years honing your craft on your own. But with The Milestone Initiative, we hope to give you the support you need to make that hard work pay off. The next step starts here.
DC Summit
THE
SUMMIT
Participants in The Milestone Initiative will be invited to a one-week summit, hosted by WarnerMedia, DC, and Ally, where they’ll make connections, create community, and begin an immersive course to help hone creative skills and better understand the comic book industry.WHEN
02.14.22 – 02.18.22WHERE
BURBANK, CA
1. ARRIVE
If you’re selected to participate in The Milestone Initiative, your journey will begin with the Milestone Summit. You’ll travel at our expense to DC’s headquarters in Burbank, to meet legendary creators, editors, and executives in the comics and entertainment industries.
2. LEARN
Under the mentorship of some of the most prominent names in comics, as well as Ally’s team of financial experts, you’ll receive in-depth, substantive instruction about building a creative life and earning a living in this field. You’ll hone your creative skills, but you’ll also learn the business of the comics industry and receive advice on sustaining a long-term career. Following the Milestone Summit, you’ll go home and participate in an 8-week virtual course, where you’ll receive technical training through best-in-class cartooning and graphic art school The Kubert School.
3. CREATE
It won’t be easy —throughout this multi-week course, you’ll be working as well as learning, crafting stories with your fellow participants. At the end of this journey you’ll come away with polished work that will showcase your unique talents, new knowledge, and skills and you'll have a pathway into the DC talent community if you want to pursue it.
4. IGNITE
The Milestone Initiative doesn’t end with the the completion of the coursework. The team from DC will remain in contact with all participants in the months following and will work with them to find appropriate comics assignments and other work that will help them continue to grow as creators and further their careers with DC and in the comics world.HOW TO APPLY
The Milestone Initiative is open to Black and other underrepresented creators who are ready to enter the comic book industry at a professional level. You’ve got the talent, you’ve put in the hours of practice, and this is the opening you’ve been waiting for.Think you have what it takes? Get ready to dive into the application. You have a story to tell. We want to hear it.
PROCESS
DC Milestone
Now a quick reality check: we know you’re serious, and we’re serious too. So this application is going to take some time. We think it’s worth it.STEP 1: 10-20 MINUTES
First, we’ll ask you for a bit of biographical information. We’ll also ask you to provide us with links to a few existing pieces of completed original work, to give us a sense of your creative voice and vision.STEP 2: 5-7 DAYS
The next sections are where you should plan wisely. We’ll be asking you to put your talent and skills into action by completing a short assignment. If you’re an artist, that will mean drawing three comic pages based on a script we provide; if you’re a writer, you’ll be creating a script for an 8 page story based on a loose prompt we’ve created.STEP 3: 2-3 DAYS
Finally, we want writers and artists to answer a few, short essay questions and tell us who you are as a creator. Describe your voice and your vision —what do you believe you have to offer the world? The answers won’t take long to write, but they will take some time to think about. (And artists, don’t be intimidated if writing isn’t your thing. We’re looking for substance here, not style.)Got it? Get started. You don’t have to complete everything now —our system can save your work, just make sure to click “Save Draft” at the bottom of the page so you can begin now and tackle it a piece at a time.
DC Superpowered
WHAT IS THE MILESTONE INITIATIVE?
Superman wasn’t just the first superhero: he was an immigrant, an American, and an enduring symbol of our shared ideals. But as an explosion of comic book heroes took place over the second half of the 20th century, there was something missing. Despite an enduring Black readership, it took decades before the first Black heroes appeared, and once they did, they remained uncommon. Even the most prominent Black heroes usually appeared in stories written and illustrated by white creators.Enter Dwayne McDuffie, Denys Cowan, Michael Davis, and Derek T. Dingle. With talent, vision, and tenacity, these four Black creators carved a place for themselves in an industry that didn’t always welcome or understand them. Despite their success, they were frustrated by the dearth of other Black creators in their field, and the resistance they met in trying to tell stories that reflected their own experiences and perspectives.
DC story-1-480
So they founded Milestone Media —a company that placed Black superheroes at the center of the action with their Milestone comics line, and which would make an inclusive space for Black and underrepresented comic book creators to flourish and succeed.Milestone hit like a space pod crashing to Earth —and its impact has continued to this day. Now, Milestone Media, is helmed by Reginald Hudlin and Denys Cowan, and DC is relaunching Milestone Comics and reintroducing its characters to new audiences, but we understand that there’s still much more work to be done to continue the mission of Milestone’s founders.
That’s why, with Ally as our partner, we’ve created The Milestone Initiative. While Milestone Media is about telling the stories of Black heroes, The Milestone Initiative is about empowering the creators who can tell those stories in ways that are resonant, real, and revolutionary. The program is part of DC’s talent development program, Next Generation DC (NGDC), and is designed to identify, educate, spotlight, and empower the next generation of Black and diverse creators in our field so that the stories of the next century are truly reflective of the world around us.
Throughout American history —in the comic book industry as well as in other creative fields —Black and other underrepresented creators have been consistent innovators and visionaries despite systems that work to exclude them. Now, as comic books take center stage in popular culture, DC, WarnerMedia, and Ally want to change that with The Milestone Initiative. The Milestone Media founders started the mission. It’s time for you to pick up their mantle.
DC story-2-480
READY TO MAKE YOUR MARK?
SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS-
-
2
-
- Report
-
What is an internet protocol? It is at its core a set of rules. These rules come in many forms, the security is mostly through the subset of rules concerning time or encryption.
What is blockchain? Blockchain is merely encrypted data, that requires certain information to unveil itself.
Combine these two ideas and you get the core of what projectliberty or bluesky is.
If you can make a blockchain internet protocol you allow the flow of information between computers as it is on the internet now WHILE you allow a level of handshaking between computers that is "unhackable" by most conventional means.
To that end, Frank McCourt/ the CEO of Twitter / side many others are investing money on a way to use blockchain with internet protocols or other tools for a simple objective, make a more secure way while still media saturating way to be online.
PRoject Liberty
https://www.projectliberty.io/
Blue Sky
The web. Email. RSS feeds. XMPP chats. What all these technologies had in common is they allowed people to freely interact and create content, without intermediaries.
We're focusing on re-building the social web by connecting disconnected silos and returning control of the social experience to users. Our mission is to develop and drive the adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.
We're recruiting a small team of developers and technologists for this first stage, starting with a protocol developer < https://blueskyweb.org/Bluesky-Protocol-Developer.pdf > and a web developer < https://blueskyweb.org/Bluesky-Web-Developer.pdf > . Email your resumes and ideas to join@blueskyweb.org.
Or participate in our contest. < https://blueskyweb.org/satellite >
Satellite
A bluesky contest
Our digital identities are like satellites we launch into cyberspace. You may link one to another here and there, but how would you link all of them, systematically, in a way that proves to others they belong to you?Let’s try an experiment: A contest to demonstrate how to link your accounts and content. $300 in BTC awarded to the top three submissions, to make it worth your time.
Choose at least 3 of the following. Link them in a way that anyone can verify you are the author/owner of all. Explain how you did it, and what properties you were designing for.
A Twitter account
A Reddit account
A website... or two
A Matrix account
A Mastodon account
An SSB account
A PGP key
A piece of content on IPFS
A cryptocurrency address
Another decentralized social network
Another service/platform of your choosing
Have an answer in something that already exists? Feel free to use it, but describe how it works, the tradeoffs, and how it can be improved. Implement your solutions as much as possible. If you don’t want to actually link two of your accounts, create a new one for this purpose. Include any documentation or code needed to explain it. We’ll be scoring on a rubric of: thoroughness, robustness, originality, decentralization. Download the rubric and template here. Email solutions to join@blueskyweb.org. Multiple submissions allowed.We’ll keep a leaderboard up with pseudonyms of the authors who submitted the top solutions, so you can check if you’re on it. At the end of the contest, we’ll publish the top solutions and reveal their authors. End date: Oct 15.
https://blueskyweb.org/satellite
MEDIA
Billionaire Frank McCourt is building a new internet protocol — part of Project Liberty — to open the data economy & give social media users control.
Like the telecom revolution, he says government alone cannot fix the problem. "The private sector stepped forward and innovated."
Frank McCourt and @Twitter CEO @Jack are both creating #blockchain internet infrastructures to decentralize social media. While McCourt says he is unfamiliar with the @bluesky
details, he agrees in spirit. "If Jack Dorsey has a better product…I’ll be the first to support it."
Your thoughts?
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I will use as an example a community outside of the usa . In the last century starting in the 1940s to this year , global media, dominated by the usa, and primariily administered by the jewish community in the usa, has placed in countless history books/countless movies/films/stageplays the negative actions of german nazi's against the non nazi german populace <romani/jews/disabled people/et cetera>. Every single german person living today knows a history of germany during the world war II era. I said a history cause what the sister above calls a real history of the usa, includes the negativities or complexities all to often absent. But in german nazi tellings the reverse is true, all the negatives or complexities are well documented. But the positivity is absent, like how the nazi's rebuilt a country being intentionally impoverished by its neighbors. How the nazi's had become the envy of so many countires or communities absent any financial aid or governmental alliance to said communities. Thus, The german people today have been given all the negative or complex elements of nazi history and yet, in germany the post world war II nazi community has always continually grown. Is that reason cause the modern germans don't know about death camps, they don't know about burning people alive. Don't know about all sorts of experimentations? They are fully aware of history, all to often more aware of the negative than anything else, but they still align philosophically with the nazi party of yore. The question is why? Based on the sister's assertion , these people are ignoring history but how can they ignore what is commonly present. The attacks on turkish people in modernity, muslims is that indicative of the nazi's. The reason why countries ways don't change is very simple, what the people want doesn't change. LAws change Nike. Media narratives change. But the desires of people , of communities they don't change the same way. Many german people still want german superiority, they still want germany first, they still want those they don't deem german out of germany. What people want is why things don't change, not knowledge. Strom THurman was a white man who had a secret child with a black woman , treating that child so well, that child still speaks of him favorably. Even though this is a man who consistently, yelled to high heaven about the need to deny the black community all things, all the while he is taking his black child/ mulatto in latin america, to the beach or other places away from the media, having a good time. Knowledge, acquisition of knowledge does not change one's desires.
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My reply
I noticed your prime comment under the video. You say many will disagree and that is of course online. But, I want to speak to that first before I state my position toward your video.
A difference exists between a person of a certain race: gender/phenotype/religion/age/geographic lineage et cetera being employed as a thespian in comparison to said person's community being represented positively.
As a black man, I heard a million media outlets spout overjoy with the existence of a highly paid thespian who is black. While they chagrin that the culture of black people <which is very large, just for edification includes black people of america/africa/asia/europe or all the lands within> is absent or a negative caricature.
I know you are correct in your position. You are happy that asian statians <asian americans exists in jamaica/brazil/mexico not merely the usa> are getting opportunities to be paid thespians of the highest financial order in the film world. But, you are also unhappy that the asian statian experience is still rarely touted by the film wood in the usa. I know it is silly to say the people who disagree with you are wrong... but they are wrong.Now, to my position, I thought about the world. No country in humanity , to my knowledge, has a film industry that respects the minority populaces<minority in terms of numbers> equal to the majority populace. so, in the USA the majority populace is the white anglo saxon protestant<are most people in the usa white? the answer is yes>. In china it is the han chinese<I know different communities exist in china but I read han chinese were the largest, if I am wrong correct me>. In the same way Asian statians are not presented as part of the USA fold in film media in the usa, usually, Ugyars are not usually represented in chinese film media. I am not saying anything is wrong or right as much as , it is uncommon for any visual industry to treat the minority communities as equal to the majority community.
But, I realize a solution may exist to that problem. and it goes back to your point about cinema in india. I didn't realize india had various woods that seem to have a more equal standing to each other in india. The solution in the usa and I think everywhere is to have more varying woods. For example, the black community in the usa has made films since the time of oscar micheaux, but no one says, the Black Statian-Wood. It is black films, stateless/centerless from an industrial perspective. They are in the independent film wilderness. In the USA it is the hollywood scene or the independent scene. That has to change. The independent scene needs to stay, but the black, the asian, native american , and et cetera minority communities need their own industrial film industries in the usa. In that way is the only way I think you can not only get thespians of all races but also positive representation in film in the usa to all races. -
Some old tunes from the descended of enslaved black community in the usa
PHoto is Valaida Snow
- 0:12:13 Delta Rhythm Boys in "Take the 'A' Train" (1941).
- 0:14:46 Fats Waller in "Your Feet's Too Big (1941).
- 0:17:45 Count Basie Orchestra in "Take Me Back, Baby" (with vocal by Jimmy Rushing) (1941).
- 0:20:19 "Preacher and the Bear" featuring The Jubalaires (vocal quartet)
- 0:23:23 "Ring Those Bells" (Black children vocal quintet, unidentified; Possibly The Cabin Kids.)
- 0:24:22 The Ali Baba Trio in "Patience and Fortitude" (1946) (featuring Valaida Snow singing and playing jazz trumpet with trio of guitar, bass and accordion!)
- 0:27:06 "Rocco Blues" featuring Maurice Rocco (piano and vocal)
- 0:30:00 Gloria Grey sings "Oh By Jingo" (looks later, circa 1950 or so)
- 0:32:42 "I Want A Man", sung by Annisteen Allen and accompanied by Lucky Millinder and his Orchestra (huge big band)(1943).
- 0:35:36 Woman jazz harpist (LaVilla Tulos) playing "Swanee River"
enjoy
-
-
Was asked by someone online, the following is my answer
Its fine. I rarely hate any art. I never say any art is bad. No artists is trying to make bad work. So, an artist may fail to achieve what they wanted in terms of audience response or I may dislike a works aspects but it wasn't for lack of trying. .... I will specify a question. IF the question is, how does the what if series settle into the modern media of comic book story discussions? I think it settles into a pit. Modern media is for many the nonviolent warzone. How many black characters? how many female characters? how many white characters? how many christian characters? how many muslims characters? how many young characters? how many old characters? How many hetero characters? how many lgbtq+ characters? how many atheist characters? and then once people get past the quantity of representation. Now the condition of the characters. He is black, but do black people like him? she is fat, but do fat people like her? They are lgbtq+ but do the lgbtq+ like them? The couple are bdsmers but do the bdsmers like them? Number of characters and then how are the characters portrayed. What If is a pander to those questions. People sadly think, that when a character has their traits it means something. I have said this in the past and I will say it now and I will say it in the future. No artist is blockaded to creativity, in my view, but I look at the originators of characters as important to how I define their essense. Give me a black written /black drawn character and I will associate them to being black. I have always been a storm fan. Always will be. But, Storm wasn't designed by a black person. and, a black artists later manipulating what a white artist created. While in no need of validation as art, I do not see or will accept as a black character. What if captain america is a woman? What if Thor is transgender? What if Iron Man, a fiscally spoiled rich kid engineering genious, is Black? What if will have many lovers cause it gives visual form to a small set of infinite possibilities. What if is in my view, a video form of what comics originally were. We forget, before characters became so popular they had their own comics, and became rigid or cultural identifiers, most comics were what ifs? Most comic characters started out in what ifs. A writer has an idea and pitches it to the audience. If the audience like it you will see them in another edition.
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“I Probably Modeled Him on Something I’d Heard on The Wire”
The audiobook industry is collectively squirming through the cultural debate on representation and casting.
BY LAURA MILLER
Twenty years ago, Grover Gardner began narrating a series of comic mysteries whose title character is a white lawyer named Andy Carpenter. In the series—written by David Rosenfelt—Carpenter also has a partner, Willie Miller, who’s a Black ex-con, which means Gardner had to voice Miller too. Back then, he hardly gave any thought to the fact that he was a white narrator voicing a Black man. “I probably modeled him on something I’d heard on television, on Hill Street Blues, or The Wire,” Gardner said. Today, 14 books later, he’s still voicing Willie—but he’s changed his approach. “I’d think very hard about doing that kind of accent now,” he said.
In an era of heightened sensitivity to issues of representation and misrepresentation, it’s no longer acceptable to cast a white actor as a character of color in a movie or TV show. But audiobooks play by different rules. It’s customary now in the audiobook business to try to match a book’s narrator to the gender, race, and sometimes sexual orientation of a novel’s author or main character. Yet most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own.
When audiobooks first rose to popularity in 1980s, the field was overwhelmingly white. Gardner, who has been an audiobook narrator for four decades and also works as a producer, recalls that, for the first couple of decades of his career, “the whole industry was geared toward middle-aged white businessmen” who listened to “books on tape” while on the road for work. There were hardly any narrators of color, and few female narrators back then, Gardner said. “I recorded Scott Turow’s [1990 novel] Burden of Proof. The narrator of that book is a Latino lawyer,” he told me. “I did it. We did whatever they sent us back then. But I wouldn’t do that book today. You would find a Latino narrator to do it.”
Apart from the amused response to the cartoonish accents Ronan Farrow rolled out when narrating the audio version of his 2019 exposé Catch and Kill, the audiobook world has so far been largely free of the sort of scandals that have triggered reckonings about representation in other creative industries, like magazine publishing and television. This is partly because it’s a low-profile, unglamorous field that doesn’t attract a lot of attention from the press. But many who work in the industry still feel the tensions around casting acutely. Amid a publishing boom in literature by writers of color, nonwhite narrators are being offered more work than they once were. Meanwhile, like most narrators, they find themselves getting asked to voice marginalized characters from backgrounds that bear no resemblance to theirs. January LaVoy, a biracial narrator who identifies as Black, said that cross-cultural audiobook narration is freighted in different ways for white narrators and narrators of color. “For many white narrators, it’s difficult because of fear [of backlash]. For many narrators of color, it’s difficult because of the weight of responsibility.” The industry is grappling with these issues daily. “It’s difficult for everyone,” LaVoy said.
Although some publishers have audiobook divisions, they usually function separately from the print division, and the audio rights for many titles get sold to separate companies such as Brilliance or Blackstone. The producer of an audiobook, who is employed by the publisher, acquires the rights and oversees casting and other big-picture decisions, such as opting for multiple narrators on a novel that often switches points of view.
Michele Cobb, a producer and the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, told me that she and her colleagues have tried to figure out how they can sensitively ask narrators to provide producers with information about their backgrounds—such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability—that can be helpful when casting. Cobb explained that it’s an ongoing challenge to cast appropriate narrators for books by authors of color, while avoiding typecasting. In her own company, which publishes romance audiobooks, “I’ve definitely had authors come back and say, ‘Well, this character is white so I wouldn’t go with a Black narrator,’ ” a choice she feels obliged to respect.
Traditionally, both a director and an engineer, usually both freelancers, work on the recording with the narrator. Director Simone Barros outlined an exhausting list of tasks to me, from making sure the narrator doesn’t skip or add words to researching accurate regional pronunciations and maintaining continuity. “You can get to the last page of the book, and it will mention that a character had a German accent the whole time,” said Barros, speaks with the mile-a-minute lucidness of a person whose job is anticipating every contingency. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.*
In the case of some first-person narrators, such as the one in Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, an audiobook Barros directed, the book is “written so much within the perspective of the first person that the ethnicity of other characters are specifically heard from the narrator’s perspective of them. More specifically in Antkind, the author’s very point is this shifting, mutable and even unreliable perspective, to shine a light on how too often minority characters go unseen, or only seen or heard through a bias cipher.” But with a book written in the third person, she and her narrator will work up a full voice profile—a cache of recorded dialogue and biographical information—for each speaking character. That way, if, say, a villain appears in a novel’s first few pages only to disappear for several chapters, the narrator and director can remind themselves of what he sounds like. Such profiles are particularly helpful with recurring characters in sequels and series, which may be recorded years later.
In the past, it was largely left up to the professionals behind the scenes to anticipate and head off any problems. Ten years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a book’s author—the person most intimately acquainted with a title—to have no input at all in the audiobook production. But as audiobooks became a more mainstream and high-profile format, authors began seeking more oversight. Today, writers often get the final say on casting, and are often invited to choose a narrator from a selection of sample recordings and encouraged to provide crucial information about how characters ought to sound. Nathan Harris, a Black writer whose debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, is set at the end of the Civil War, knew the accents of his multiracial cast of characters, who include freed slaves, would be a challenge. “You can go down a very precarious road with how they sound,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to do it myself.” His publisher presented him with an audition recording by William DeMeritt. “They told me they could go in all sorts of different directions if that’s what I wanted,” Harris said. “But he just nailed it.”
Over the past few years, the crew of professionals who work on a given book has increasingly been whittled down to a bare minimum, putting greater pressure on narrators’ judgment—even though a narrator, who is in most cases a freelance contractor, doesn’t have much time to carefully screen a book for potential stumbling blocks before agreeing to the job. The exploding demand for audiobooks with the advent of digital downloads and, most recently, an increasing number of home studios built during the pandemic also means that more narrators have ended up doing most of the production work and key decision-making on their own.
Some narrators say they now turn down jobs when they feel unsure about voicing major characters. Cassandra Campbell—narrator of, among other things, Delia Owens’ bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel featuring several Black supporting characters—recalled narrating the first two in a series of books, which made her the automatic choice for the third. But when she discovered that the third book was told from the point of view of a young Burmese boy, Campbell, who is white, bowed out. “I just didn’t feel comfortable with it,” she said.
A multitude of minor characters can turn an audio book into a minefield for its narrator. Edoardo Ballerini, who was profiled in the New York Times Magazine last year as “a go-to voice for intelligent, subtle but gripping narrations of books,” says he’s now most often asked to narrate books requiring European accents. (His father is an Italian poet, and he was raised in New York.) Still, challenges do arise. “Take a James Patterson book,” he explained. “Let’s say it’s set in New York City and the detective is hard-boiled, an Italian-American. I can do that. His partner is a feisty woman and I think I can handle that.” But then the minor characters start showing up, sometimes slotted into uncomfortably stereotypical roles: “They get in a cab and there’s the cabbie, or they run into a perp who happens to be Black, or whatever it is. You have to voice them as well. And there’s really no way for anyone to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do this book because there are a handful of lines by an Indian cabbie.’ ”
Meanwhile, many narrators of color—extra-conscious of the weight of representation—find themselves engaging in a lot of extra, unpaid work researching characters and voices that they may ultimately decide they can’t do justice to. Recently, LaVoy bowed out on a title in a children’s series she narrates about a group of middle school students who travel the world with their eccentric professor, encountering mythical creatures from the cultures they visit. “When we did one that took place in the Pacific Northwest,” she said, “we got a Native American linguist from the Muckleshoot tribe to work with me. I felt really comfortable,” she said. “But this one particular book took place in Cuba, and it was very heavily written in Spanish,” a language LaVoy doesn’t speak fluently. When she got to a part where the whole group begins singing the Cuban national anthem, she decided to pass. “They needed someone with a different mouth,” she concluded.
A character’s accent can be an evocation of her origins and identity, but it can also be—as was the case with Apu, the Indian-born convenience-store clerk on The Simpsons, voiced by white actor Hank Azaria—a mocking caricature. (Azaria recently announced that he would no longer voice Apu and expressed a desire to “go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize.”) “Actors love to do accents!” Campbell told me. “It’s fun to do vocal gymnastics, but we have had a moment of recognizing that there are certain accents where you’re appropriating someone’s culture.”
The one motto that nearly every audiobook professional I interviewed repeated to me when I asked about their strategies for dealing with accents is “less is more.” Kevin R. Free—a Black theater actor who began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago and has become the voice of both a soap opera–addicted cyborg in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series and of Eric Carle’s iconic picture books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc.)—laughingly recalled reporting for his very first recording session armed with a set of theatrically bold character voices, only to be told by his director: “I don’t want you to think of doing this book as doing a solo show. … There’s no reason for you to go all the way there.”* That holds especially true for cross-cultural accents. If Ballerini feels that “maybe I’m not the right person to give a voice to this particular character, let me just do it as plainly and as simply as I can. I think that’s a general trend that’s happening in the industry.”
Campbell explained that when voicing characters of color, she uses an acting technique that focuses on the character’s intentions rather than on more superficial markers of identity like accent. “What does the character want from the other person in the scene? What is the conflict of the scene? Play that fully without relying on cultural stereotypes.” In Campbell’s recording of Where the Crawdads Sing, she audibly dials the rural North Carolina accents of the Black characters further down than the accents of the white characters they interact with.
Sometimes, however, an accent shouldn’t be underplayed, because it serves a crucial role in the story. That can create conflict with the production or postproduction staff, if they’re not familiar with or sensitive to the cultural context of a book. Barros directed the audiobook of Simon Han’s 2020 novel Nights When Nothing Happened, about a family of Chinese immigrants living in Texas. The wife in the book becomes annoyed when her husband leaves an outgoing message on their answering machine pronouncing the family’s surname as “Chang,” as the Texans around them say it, rather than using the Mandarin pronunciation, which is closer to “Cheng.” When narrator James Chen’s recording went through a postproduction process called quality control, or QC, Barros and Chen received orders for “pickups” (short rerecordings edited into the final audiobook to correct errors) on every instance of the family’s name, instructing them to pronounce it the Anglicized way—as the Texans do. This was, as Barros put it, “not only totally wrong,” but a literal replication of the assimilation that so bothers the main character’s wife. In that instance, the producer backed Barros and her narrator, but that’s not always the case; January LaVoy wincingly recalled the time that, at a director’s insistence, she recorded pickups replacing her correct pronunciation of Latinx with latinks.
Deciding whether to use the Anglicized or loanword pronunciations can be fraught for bilingual performers. Emily Woo Zeller, a Chinese American narrator, has sometimes clashed with directors and QC over whether to Anglicize the pronunciation of words taken from other languages, such as tofu or kung fu. She is also one of the few narrators I spoke with who took the step of contacting the author of a book that she found objectionable. “I won’t name names,” she told me, “but it was a white author,” and the scene involved what Zeller called “misplaced comedy,” in which the author “mixed up Chinese and Japanese culture, and the comedy was about the way characters looked and the fact that wanted to do kung fu and they were Communists.” Deciding “this can’t come out of my mouth,” Zeller brought her concerns to the author, who, she said, was “very apologetic and willing to change it.”
Hers was an unusual move. Audiobook narrators tend to see their role as strictly interpretative. Their job is to convey the book from the author to the reader in a way that remains true to the author’s intent. This includes texts like classics, books whose authors can’t be appealed to for changes, and books that contain words, passages, and characters that are now deemed offensive. There also remain plenty of contemporary authors who, as Cobb tactfully put it, “haven’t caught up yet,” and narrators will continue to have to figure out how to perform those books.
For Grover Gardner, four decades in the audiobook industry have taught him that “where there’s ignorance, you fall back on the only things that you’ve seen or heard, and chances are very good that, if you’re an older person, you’re drawing on a stereotype.” He’s had to work to transform some of his ongoing roles from vocal clichés into full characters. In the case of the former convict Willie in the Andy Carpenter mysteries, for instance, he has consciously tried to lean less on an exaggerated accent as an actorly crutch. “I’ve tried to focus more on attitude,” Gardner said, “on the real person.”Correction, June 23, 2021: This article originally misstated that Simone Barros is Black. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.
Update, June 23, 2021: This article has been updated to add additional comments by Barros about the narration and perspective in Antkind.
Correction, June 22, 2021: This article originally misstated that Kevin R. Free began narrating audiobooks five years ago. Free began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago.
How Stories Change When They Move From Page to Voice
Laura Lindstedt on the Different Ways We Read a Book
By Laura Lindstedt, translated by David Hackston
June 14, 2021To all intents and purposes, a psychoanalyst’s couch is in fact a bed—after all, it lacks a back and armrests. And yet, this item of furniture must be called a couch. Nobody would offload their traumas on a psychoanalyst’s bed unless, that is, they were in a relationship with said psychoanalyst.
In October 2019, I found myself sitting in the Silencio recording studios, headphones over my ears, reading aloud my novel My Friend Natalia, which had been published in Finland six months earlier.
“‘Natalia’ was one of my first clients to lie on her back without prompting,” I read and continued: “When I showed her round my office, which I had rented in an apartment next to my house, I told her about the couch.”
These two consecutive sentences are from the opening chapter of the novel. Reading these sentences aloud irrevocably sprained something in my brain.When one reads a book aloud as an audiobook, the visual aspects of the text all disappear. Of course, one could read the word couch, which appears in italics, in a slightly different way, perhaps by holding a short, artistic pause before the word. But this is not the same thing. Italics are not the same as a short pause.
The therapist, the book’s narrator, gives the patient the code-name “Natalia.” Under the cover of this anonymity, the therapist then proceeds to divulge intimate details of Natalia’s life to the reader, then at one point removes the inverted commas from Natalia’s name “as I might remove the safety catch from a gun”. When read aloud, this sentence is absurd: the listener cannot hear the inverted commas around Natalia’s name.
*
Let’s be clear: I am very skeptical about the practice of turning works of literature into audio recordings.
If audiobooks become the primary way in which we interact with books, it would be strange if at some point this did not have a direct impact on how people write literary works.
Will writers—either consciously or subconsciously—start writing books so that they sound good when read aloud? The succinct speech between Me (the writer) and You (the reader) works well when spoken aloud, so the current appetite for autofiction is unlikely to dwindle any time soon. A linear narrative, in which we already know (or think we know) something about the end point, is also easy to listen to. For this reason, celebrity autobiographies and so-called true stories make for successful audiobooks.
However, complex narrative structures, shifting perspectives, narrative polyphony, long, meandering sentences and the visual aspects of a text find themselves increasingly under threat from a medium that relies solely on hearing. If linear narrative becomes the only acceptable form of complex literary expression, our thoughts will be the poorer for it. Imaginary worlds and possibilities will shrink because such worlds and possibilities are not “content” that can be detached from “form,” they are not statements, suggestions or questions isolated from their rhetorical devices.*
That being said, I’m not a militant opponent of audiobooks. To my mind, it is simply important to recognize that there is a significant difference between the printed book and the audiobook. Written material turns into vibration, letters become sound waves. They always come from a concrete source that guides our interpretation, a source that is completely different from the reading process heard through our “inner voice.”
A new element appears between the book and its recipient: a voice that shapes how we receive the text. It is a sound born of a human body in a unique way and that is (generally) readily identifiable as the voice of a man or a woman.
In the audiobook of My Friend Natalia, this unavoidable fact becomes a poetic problem in its own right. Throughout the text, I have scattered conflicting clues as to the sex of the therapist, the novel’s first-person narrator, but I was careful never to define the therapist as either a man or a woman. With certain exceptions, in many languages a writer and a translator can easily disguise or at least avoid the matter of the narrator’s sex. A writer can also play with this ambiguity, as is the case in my novel My Friend Natalia.
Some readers have been convinced that the narrator is a man, others have considered the therapist a woman. Several readers have told me that their perception of the matter changed as they were reading. Readers always read a text through the prism of their own experiences, preconceptions and cultural stereotypes.
For this reason, I wanted to read the Finnish audiobook of My Friend Natalia myself. I am a woman, but because I am the book’s author my voice is above all an authorial voice, and in this way I feel I managed to resolve the dilemma described above.But my relief was somewhat premature. I was once again forced to confront this matter in early 2021 when Penguin Random House Audio began to produce the English-language audiobook of David Hackston’s translation of My Friend Natalia (W.W. Norton/Liveright).
PHR Audio’s producer kindly sent me a number of audio samples to listen to. All these samples were very professional and of the highest quality, but still they were unsuitable for my novel’s narrator. I started to lose hope. Was it at all possible to find an actor whose voice was neither that of a man nor a woman, a voice that wasn’t too young as it should be a voice that conveys the therapist’s wealth of professional experience? The voice also needed dash of pompous embitterment, stemming from the fact that nobody seems to value the therapist’s subtle genius.
But we were lucky, and eventually we found an excellent voice, that of the actor TL Thompson, who identifies as non-binary and whom I chose as the English-language reader for My Friend Natalia.
Thompson’s voice is characterful, mesmerizing and unforced. To my own ear, Thompson’s voice sounds more masculine than feminine, or perhaps it’s the whisky baritone of an elderly lady. However, the voice is not remotely “gender-neutral,” a voice-type that we tried to look for at first and whose very existence I have seriously begun to doubt. Thompson’s voice made every sentence oscillate between the two. I have not written such oscillation into my novel, let alone a gender-neutral narrator’s voice: the question of the therapist’s identity opens up—if, indeed, it opens up at all—when readers find themselves indulging in assumptions that the text does not affirm.
I can say quite whole-heartedly that I love Thompson’s reading. Yet in the same breath, I must reiterate what I have already said: an audiobook is a different entity from a printed book.
*
For me, the act of interpretation is specifically that of thinking with the book. It requires stops, pauses, flicking through the pages, making notes in the margins. The book takes on markings, layers that are missing from digital products, which are perpetually new.
We can browse with our eyes but not with our ears, as my partner, who works with sound, would put it. The ear is more sensitive to chaos and clamor than the eye. Sound operates like a one-directional timeline, a surge that is hard to control. A detailed auditive perception of a large space is simply impossible.It is to these very layers that I return when trying to form an understanding of the kind of book I am reading. I can easily locate markings I have made by flicking through a book, even if it is a book I read 20 years ago.
The various temporal strata of my home library provide a shadow story of what has touched me and who I have been throughout my reading life. Last summer I awoke to the immeasurable value of these little scribblings when going through my grandmother’s estate after she died at the age of 100. From the collection of religious books, treatises and notebooks, I saved those in which my grandmother had left some kind of mark—and exclamation mark, a line under a section of text, or a Biblical verse in the margin. These markings reveal not only what touched her and who she was; they also say a lot about where I have come from, what kind of supra-generational reality I carry with me.
New works from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives will finally be published, starting next year.
By Dan Sheehan
June 23, 2021, 11:21amThe publishing giant HarperCollins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s entire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historically important and vital literature in American history.”
As reported by Publishers Weekly earlier today< read below > , the mega-deal gives HarperCollins world rights “to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.”
Given the significance of the books in question, it seems strange that a deal like this one wasn’t made sooner, but this is welcome news nonetheless.
More welcome still is HC’s assertion that it will hire a dedicated archivist to oversee the project, and “engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.”
Way back in 1958, HC’s predecessor company Harper & Brothers published Dr. King’s very first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, which detailed the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and described the conditions of African Americans living in Alabama during the era.
The first MLK titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
HC Inks Deal with MLK Jr. Archives
By Rachel Deahl | Jun 23, 2021In an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., HarperCollins has acquired world publishing rights to the archives of the civil rights leader. The publisher said the collection features some of the "most historically important and vital literature in American history."
Judith Curr, president and publisher of HarperOne Group, negotiated the deal with Amy Berkower, president, Writers House and agent for the King estate; and Eric D. Tidwell of Intellectual Properties Management, manager of the King estate. The deal gives HC world rights to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.
HC said it plans to hire an archivist who will oversee the material in the archive and make it "available to all HarperCollins editors globally." HC added that it intends to "engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life."HC also has history with King. A predecessor company to HC, Harper & Brothers, published King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, in 1958.
All current his King titles, including those published by Beacon Press, will continue to be publishing by their current rights holders.
“We are thrilled to be the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives,” said Curr in a statement. “We view this as a unique global publishing program."
The first King titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
SOURCE ARTICLE
Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, Books for Palestine, and an Intro to Booktok: This Week in Book News
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/06/25/kobo-emerging-writer-prize-books-for-palestine-and-an-intro-to-booktok-this-week-in-book-news/
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“I Probably Modeled Him on Something I’d Heard on The Wire”
The audiobook industry is collectively squirming through the cultural debate on representation and casting.
BY LAURA MILLER
Twenty years ago, Grover Gardner began narrating a series of comic mysteries whose title character is a white lawyer named Andy Carpenter. In the series—written by David Rosenfelt—Carpenter also has a partner, Willie Miller, who’s a Black ex-con, which means Gardner had to voice Miller too. Back then, he hardly gave any thought to the fact that he was a white narrator voicing a Black man. “I probably modeled him on something I’d heard on television, on Hill Street Blues, or The Wire,” Gardner said. Today, 14 books later, he’s still voicing Willie—but he’s changed his approach. “I’d think very hard about doing that kind of accent now,” he said.
In an era of heightened sensitivity to issues of representation and misrepresentation, it’s no longer acceptable to cast a white actor as a character of color in a movie or TV show. But audiobooks play by different rules. It’s customary now in the audiobook business to try to match a book’s narrator to the gender, race, and sometimes sexual orientation of a novel’s author or main character. Yet most novels feature characters with an assortment of different backgrounds, and this can require narrators to voice characters with identities very different from their own.
When audiobooks first rose to popularity in 1980s, the field was overwhelmingly white. Gardner, who has been an audiobook narrator for four decades and also works as a producer, recalls that, for the first couple of decades of his career, “the whole industry was geared toward middle-aged white businessmen” who listened to “books on tape” while on the road for work. There were hardly any narrators of color, and few female narrators back then, Gardner said. “I recorded Scott Turow’s [1990 novel] Burden of Proof. The narrator of that book is a Latino lawyer,” he told me. “I did it. We did whatever they sent us back then. But I wouldn’t do that book today. You would find a Latino narrator to do it.”
Apart from the amused response to the cartoonish accents Ronan Farrow rolled out when narrating the audio version of his 2019 exposé Catch and Kill, the audiobook world has so far been largely free of the sort of scandals that have triggered reckonings about representation in other creative industries, like magazine publishing and television. This is partly because it’s a low-profile, unglamorous field that doesn’t attract a lot of attention from the press. But many who work in the industry still feel the tensions around casting acutely. Amid a publishing boom in literature by writers of color, nonwhite narrators are being offered more work than they once were. Meanwhile, like most narrators, they find themselves getting asked to voice marginalized characters from backgrounds that bear no resemblance to theirs. January LaVoy, a biracial narrator who identifies as Black, said that cross-cultural audiobook narration is freighted in different ways for white narrators and narrators of color. “For many white narrators, it’s difficult because of fear [of backlash]. For many narrators of color, it’s difficult because of the weight of responsibility.” The industry is grappling with these issues daily. “It’s difficult for everyone,” LaVoy said.
Although some publishers have audiobook divisions, they usually function separately from the print division, and the audio rights for many titles get sold to separate companies such as Brilliance or Blackstone. The producer of an audiobook, who is employed by the publisher, acquires the rights and oversees casting and other big-picture decisions, such as opting for multiple narrators on a novel that often switches points of view.
Michele Cobb, a producer and the executive director of the Audio Publishers Association, told me that she and her colleagues have tried to figure out how they can sensitively ask narrators to provide producers with information about their backgrounds—such as gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability—that can be helpful when casting. Cobb explained that it’s an ongoing challenge to cast appropriate narrators for books by authors of color, while avoiding typecasting. In her own company, which publishes romance audiobooks, “I’ve definitely had authors come back and say, ‘Well, this character is white so I wouldn’t go with a Black narrator,’ ” a choice she feels obliged to respect.
Traditionally, both a director and an engineer, usually both freelancers, work on the recording with the narrator. Director Simone Barros outlined an exhausting list of tasks to me, from making sure the narrator doesn’t skip or add words to researching accurate regional pronunciations and maintaining continuity. “You can get to the last page of the book, and it will mention that a character had a German accent the whole time,” said Barros, speaks with the mile-a-minute lucidness of a person whose job is anticipating every contingency. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.*
In the case of some first-person narrators, such as the one in Charlie Kaufman’s Antkind, an audiobook Barros directed, the book is “written so much within the perspective of the first person that the ethnicity of other characters are specifically heard from the narrator’s perspective of them. More specifically in Antkind, the author’s very point is this shifting, mutable and even unreliable perspective, to shine a light on how too often minority characters go unseen, or only seen or heard through a bias cipher.” But with a book written in the third person, she and her narrator will work up a full voice profile—a cache of recorded dialogue and biographical information—for each speaking character. That way, if, say, a villain appears in a novel’s first few pages only to disappear for several chapters, the narrator and director can remind themselves of what he sounds like. Such profiles are particularly helpful with recurring characters in sequels and series, which may be recorded years later.
In the past, it was largely left up to the professionals behind the scenes to anticipate and head off any problems. Ten years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for a book’s author—the person most intimately acquainted with a title—to have no input at all in the audiobook production. But as audiobooks became a more mainstream and high-profile format, authors began seeking more oversight. Today, writers often get the final say on casting, and are often invited to choose a narrator from a selection of sample recordings and encouraged to provide crucial information about how characters ought to sound. Nathan Harris, a Black writer whose debut novel, The Sweetness of Water, is set at the end of the Civil War, knew the accents of his multiracial cast of characters, who include freed slaves, would be a challenge. “You can go down a very precarious road with how they sound,” he said. “That’s why I didn’t want to do it myself.” His publisher presented him with an audition recording by William DeMeritt. “They told me they could go in all sorts of different directions if that’s what I wanted,” Harris said. “But he just nailed it.”
Over the past few years, the crew of professionals who work on a given book has increasingly been whittled down to a bare minimum, putting greater pressure on narrators’ judgment—even though a narrator, who is in most cases a freelance contractor, doesn’t have much time to carefully screen a book for potential stumbling blocks before agreeing to the job. The exploding demand for audiobooks with the advent of digital downloads and, most recently, an increasing number of home studios built during the pandemic also means that more narrators have ended up doing most of the production work and key decision-making on their own.
Some narrators say they now turn down jobs when they feel unsure about voicing major characters. Cassandra Campbell—narrator of, among other things, Delia Owens’ bestseller Where the Crawdads Sing, a novel featuring several Black supporting characters—recalled narrating the first two in a series of books, which made her the automatic choice for the third. But when she discovered that the third book was told from the point of view of a young Burmese boy, Campbell, who is white, bowed out. “I just didn’t feel comfortable with it,” she said.
A multitude of minor characters can turn an audio book into a minefield for its narrator. Edoardo Ballerini, who was profiled in the New York Times Magazine last year as “a go-to voice for intelligent, subtle but gripping narrations of books,” says he’s now most often asked to narrate books requiring European accents. (His father is an Italian poet, and he was raised in New York.) Still, challenges do arise. “Take a James Patterson book,” he explained. “Let’s say it’s set in New York City and the detective is hard-boiled, an Italian-American. I can do that. His partner is a feisty woman and I think I can handle that.” But then the minor characters start showing up, sometimes slotted into uncomfortably stereotypical roles: “They get in a cab and there’s the cabbie, or they run into a perp who happens to be Black, or whatever it is. You have to voice them as well. And there’s really no way for anyone to say, ‘Well, I’m not going to do this book because there are a handful of lines by an Indian cabbie.’ ”
Meanwhile, many narrators of color—extra-conscious of the weight of representation—find themselves engaging in a lot of extra, unpaid work researching characters and voices that they may ultimately decide they can’t do justice to. Recently, LaVoy bowed out on a title in a children’s series she narrates about a group of middle school students who travel the world with their eccentric professor, encountering mythical creatures from the cultures they visit. “When we did one that took place in the Pacific Northwest,” she said, “we got a Native American linguist from the Muckleshoot tribe to work with me. I felt really comfortable,” she said. “But this one particular book took place in Cuba, and it was very heavily written in Spanish,” a language LaVoy doesn’t speak fluently. When she got to a part where the whole group begins singing the Cuban national anthem, she decided to pass. “They needed someone with a different mouth,” she concluded.
A character’s accent can be an evocation of her origins and identity, but it can also be—as was the case with Apu, the Indian-born convenience-store clerk on The Simpsons, voiced by white actor Hank Azaria—a mocking caricature. (Azaria recently announced that he would no longer voice Apu and expressed a desire to “go to every single Indian person in this country and personally apologize.”) “Actors love to do accents!” Campbell told me. “It’s fun to do vocal gymnastics, but we have had a moment of recognizing that there are certain accents where you’re appropriating someone’s culture.”
The one motto that nearly every audiobook professional I interviewed repeated to me when I asked about their strategies for dealing with accents is “less is more.” Kevin R. Free—a Black theater actor who began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago and has become the voice of both a soap opera–addicted cyborg in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series and of Eric Carle’s iconic picture books (The Very Hungry Caterpillar, etc.)—laughingly recalled reporting for his very first recording session armed with a set of theatrically bold character voices, only to be told by his director: “I don’t want you to think of doing this book as doing a solo show. … There’s no reason for you to go all the way there.”* That holds especially true for cross-cultural accents. If Ballerini feels that “maybe I’m not the right person to give a voice to this particular character, let me just do it as plainly and as simply as I can. I think that’s a general trend that’s happening in the industry.”
Campbell explained that when voicing characters of color, she uses an acting technique that focuses on the character’s intentions rather than on more superficial markers of identity like accent. “What does the character want from the other person in the scene? What is the conflict of the scene? Play that fully without relying on cultural stereotypes.” In Campbell’s recording of Where the Crawdads Sing, she audibly dials the rural North Carolina accents of the Black characters further down than the accents of the white characters they interact with.
Sometimes, however, an accent shouldn’t be underplayed, because it serves a crucial role in the story. That can create conflict with the production or postproduction staff, if they’re not familiar with or sensitive to the cultural context of a book. Barros directed the audiobook of Simon Han’s 2020 novel Nights When Nothing Happened, about a family of Chinese immigrants living in Texas. The wife in the book becomes annoyed when her husband leaves an outgoing message on their answering machine pronouncing the family’s surname as “Chang,” as the Texans around them say it, rather than using the Mandarin pronunciation, which is closer to “Cheng.” When narrator James Chen’s recording went through a postproduction process called quality control, or QC, Barros and Chen received orders for “pickups” (short rerecordings edited into the final audiobook to correct errors) on every instance of the family’s name, instructing them to pronounce it the Anglicized way—as the Texans do. This was, as Barros put it, “not only totally wrong,” but a literal replication of the assimilation that so bothers the main character’s wife. In that instance, the producer backed Barros and her narrator, but that’s not always the case; January LaVoy wincingly recalled the time that, at a director’s insistence, she recorded pickups replacing her correct pronunciation of Latinx with latinks.
Deciding whether to use the Anglicized or loanword pronunciations can be fraught for bilingual performers. Emily Woo Zeller, a Chinese American narrator, has sometimes clashed with directors and QC over whether to Anglicize the pronunciation of words taken from other languages, such as tofu or kung fu. She is also one of the few narrators I spoke with who took the step of contacting the author of a book that she found objectionable. “I won’t name names,” she told me, “but it was a white author,” and the scene involved what Zeller called “misplaced comedy,” in which the author “mixed up Chinese and Japanese culture, and the comedy was about the way characters looked and the fact that wanted to do kung fu and they were Communists.” Deciding “this can’t come out of my mouth,” Zeller brought her concerns to the author, who, she said, was “very apologetic and willing to change it.”
Hers was an unusual move. Audiobook narrators tend to see their role as strictly interpretative. Their job is to convey the book from the author to the reader in a way that remains true to the author’s intent. This includes texts like classics, books whose authors can’t be appealed to for changes, and books that contain words, passages, and characters that are now deemed offensive. There also remain plenty of contemporary authors who, as Cobb tactfully put it, “haven’t caught up yet,” and narrators will continue to have to figure out how to perform those books.
For Grover Gardner, four decades in the audiobook industry have taught him that “where there’s ignorance, you fall back on the only things that you’ve seen or heard, and chances are very good that, if you’re an older person, you’re drawing on a stereotype.” He’s had to work to transform some of his ongoing roles from vocal clichés into full characters. In the case of the former convict Willie in the Andy Carpenter mysteries, for instance, he has consciously tried to lean less on an exaggerated accent as an actorly crutch. “I’ve tried to focus more on attitude,” Gardner said, “on the real person.”Correction, June 23, 2021: This article originally misstated that Simone Barros is Black. Barros is of Cabo Verdean descent and identifies as Black.
Update, June 23, 2021: This article has been updated to add additional comments by Barros about the narration and perspective in Antkind.
Correction, June 22, 2021: This article originally misstated that Kevin R. Free began narrating audiobooks five years ago. Free began narrating audiobooks 20 years ago.How Stories Change When They Move From Page to Voice
Laura Lindstedt on the Different Ways We Read a Book
By Laura Lindstedt, translated by David Hackston
June 14, 2021To all intents and purposes, a psychoanalyst’s couch is in fact a bed—after all, it lacks a back and armrests. And yet, this item of furniture must be called a couch. Nobody would offload their traumas on a psychoanalyst’s bed unless, that is, they were in a relationship with said psychoanalyst.
In October 2019, I found myself sitting in the Silencio recording studios, headphones over my ears, reading aloud my novel My Friend Natalia, which had been published in Finland six months earlier.
“‘Natalia’ was one of my first clients to lie on her back without prompting,” I read and continued: “When I showed her round my office, which I had rented in an apartment next to my house, I told her about the couch.”
These two consecutive sentences are from the opening chapter of the novel. Reading these sentences aloud irrevocably sprained something in my brain.When one reads a book aloud as an audiobook, the visual aspects of the text all disappear. Of course, one could read the word couch, which appears in italics, in a slightly different way, perhaps by holding a short, artistic pause before the word. But this is not the same thing. Italics are not the same as a short pause.
The therapist, the book’s narrator, gives the patient the code-name “Natalia.” Under the cover of this anonymity, the therapist then proceeds to divulge intimate details of Natalia’s life to the reader, then at one point removes the inverted commas from Natalia’s name “as I might remove the safety catch from a gun”. When read aloud, this sentence is absurd: the listener cannot hear the inverted commas around Natalia’s name.
*
Let’s be clear: I am very skeptical about the practice of turning works of literature into audio recordings.
If audiobooks become the primary way in which we interact with books, it would be strange if at some point this did not have a direct impact on how people write literary works.
Will writers—either consciously or subconsciously—start writing books so that they sound good when read aloud? The succinct speech between Me (the writer) and You (the reader) works well when spoken aloud, so the current appetite for autofiction is unlikely to dwindle any time soon. A linear narrative, in which we already know (or think we know) something about the end point, is also easy to listen to. For this reason, celebrity autobiographies and so-called true stories make for successful audiobooks.
However, complex narrative structures, shifting perspectives, narrative polyphony, long, meandering sentences and the visual aspects of a text find themselves increasingly under threat from a medium that relies solely on hearing. If linear narrative becomes the only acceptable form of complex literary expression, our thoughts will be the poorer for it. Imaginary worlds and possibilities will shrink because such worlds and possibilities are not “content” that can be detached from “form,” they are not statements, suggestions or questions isolated from their rhetorical devices.*
That being said, I’m not a militant opponent of audiobooks. To my mind, it is simply important to recognize that there is a significant difference between the printed book and the audiobook. Written material turns into vibration, letters become sound waves. They always come from a concrete source that guides our interpretation, a source that is completely different from the reading process heard through our “inner voice.”
A new element appears between the book and its recipient: a voice that shapes how we receive the text. It is a sound born of a human body in a unique way and that is (generally) readily identifiable as the voice of a man or a woman.
In the audiobook of My Friend Natalia, this unavoidable fact becomes a poetic problem in its own right. Throughout the text, I have scattered conflicting clues as to the sex of the therapist, the novel’s first-person narrator, but I was careful never to define the therapist as either a man or a woman. With certain exceptions, in many languages a writer and a translator can easily disguise or at least avoid the matter of the narrator’s sex. A writer can also play with this ambiguity, as is the case in my novel My Friend Natalia.
Some readers have been convinced that the narrator is a man, others have considered the therapist a woman. Several readers have told me that their perception of the matter changed as they were reading. Readers always read a text through the prism of their own experiences, preconceptions and cultural stereotypes.
For this reason, I wanted to read the Finnish audiobook of My Friend Natalia myself. I am a woman, but because I am the book’s author my voice is above all an authorial voice, and in this way I feel I managed to resolve the dilemma described above.But my relief was somewhat premature. I was once again forced to confront this matter in early 2021 when Penguin Random House Audio began to produce the English-language audiobook of David Hackston’s translation of My Friend Natalia (W.W. Norton/Liveright).
PHR Audio’s producer kindly sent me a number of audio samples to listen to. All these samples were very professional and of the highest quality, but still they were unsuitable for my novel’s narrator. I started to lose hope. Was it at all possible to find an actor whose voice was neither that of a man nor a woman, a voice that wasn’t too young as it should be a voice that conveys the therapist’s wealth of professional experience? The voice also needed dash of pompous embitterment, stemming from the fact that nobody seems to value the therapist’s subtle genius.
But we were lucky, and eventually we found an excellent voice, that of the actor TL Thompson, who identifies as non-binary and whom I chose as the English-language reader for My Friend Natalia.
Thompson’s voice is characterful, mesmerizing and unforced. To my own ear, Thompson’s voice sounds more masculine than feminine, or perhaps it’s the whisky baritone of an elderly lady. However, the voice is not remotely “gender-neutral,” a voice-type that we tried to look for at first and whose very existence I have seriously begun to doubt. Thompson’s voice made every sentence oscillate between the two. I have not written such oscillation into my novel, let alone a gender-neutral narrator’s voice: the question of the therapist’s identity opens up—if, indeed, it opens up at all—when readers find themselves indulging in assumptions that the text does not affirm.
I can say quite whole-heartedly that I love Thompson’s reading. Yet in the same breath, I must reiterate what I have already said: an audiobook is a different entity from a printed book.
*
For me, the act of interpretation is specifically that of thinking with the book. It requires stops, pauses, flicking through the pages, making notes in the margins. The book takes on markings, layers that are missing from digital products, which are perpetually new.
We can browse with our eyes but not with our ears, as my partner, who works with sound, would put it. The ear is more sensitive to chaos and clamor than the eye. Sound operates like a one-directional timeline, a surge that is hard to control. A detailed auditive perception of a large space is simply impossible.It is to these very layers that I return when trying to form an understanding of the kind of book I am reading. I can easily locate markings I have made by flicking through a book, even if it is a book I read 20 years ago.
The various temporal strata of my home library provide a shadow story of what has touched me and who I have been throughout my reading life. Last summer I awoke to the immeasurable value of these little scribblings when going through my grandmother’s estate after she died at the age of 100. From the collection of religious books, treatises and notebooks, I saved those in which my grandmother had left some kind of mark—and exclamation mark, a line under a section of text, or a Biblical verse in the margin. These markings reveal not only what touched her and who she was; they also say a lot about where I have come from, what kind of supra-generational reality I carry with me.
New works from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives will finally be published, starting next year.
By Dan Sheehan
June 23, 2021, 11:21amThe publishing giant HarperCollins has reached an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to acquire world publishing rights to the late Civil Rights leader’s entire archives—a collection which contains some of the “most historically important and vital literature in American history.”
As reported by Publishers Weekly earlier today< read below > , the mega-deal gives HarperCollins world rights “to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.”
Given the significance of the books in question, it seems strange that a deal like this one wasn’t made sooner, but this is welcome news nonetheless.
More welcome still is HC’s assertion that it will hire a dedicated archivist to oversee the project, and “engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life.”
Way back in 1958, HC’s predecessor company Harper & Brothers published Dr. King’s very first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, which detailed the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott and described the conditions of African Americans living in Alabama during the era.
The first MLK titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
HC Inks Deal with MLK Jr. Archives
By Rachel Deahl | Jun 23, 2021In an agreement with the estate of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., HarperCollins has acquired world publishing rights to the archives of the civil rights leader. The publisher said the collection features some of the "most historically important and vital literature in American history."
Judith Curr, president and publisher of HarperOne Group, negotiated the deal with Amy Berkower, president, Writers House and agent for the King estate; and Eric D. Tidwell of Intellectual Properties Management, manager of the King estate. The deal gives HC world rights to publish new books from the archives across all formats, including children’s books, e-books, audiobooks, journals, and graphic novels in all languages.
HC said it plans to hire an archivist who will oversee the material in the archive and make it "available to all HarperCollins editors globally." HC added that it intends to "engage prominent Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists to help bring Dr. King’s works to life."HC also has history with King. A predecessor company to HC, Harper & Brothers, published King's first book, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, in 1958.
All current his King titles, including those published by Beacon Press, will continue to be publishing by their current rights holders.
“We are thrilled to be the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives,” said Curr in a statement. “We view this as a unique global publishing program."
The first King titles to be published by HC are scheduled to drop in January 2022, coinciding with Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
SOURCE ARTICLE
Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, Books for Palestine, and an Intro to Booktok: This Week in Book News
https://kobowritinglife.com/2021/06/25/kobo-emerging-writer-prize-books-for-palestine-and-an-intro-to-booktok-this-week-in-book-news/
: Getty/Emma McIntyre https://t.co/2BJLT0JDN3" / Twitter
