- Major funding for the series, "I Am More Than” was provided by caring for Denver Foundation.

Additional support for this program was provided by the Colorado Health Foundation and Demi Fund.

[Music] - My name is R Alan Brooks.

I am more than your expectations of blackness.

I am an artist, I am an intellectual.

I used to listen to Prairie Home Companion, I love the Twilight Zone, but I also love funk, love James Brown.

I dance to James Brown all the time.

I have a whole, full human experience and a soul that cannot fit into that narrow perception.

[Music] [Music] Hello, everyone.

My name is R Alan Brooks.

I view myself as a sensitive, creative human being who wants to do whatever I can to make the world better.

I create comic books and graphic novels as a writer and a visual artist, and I'm a professor in a couple of master's programs that teach writing.

I love it.

I love that my parents are here with me to enjoy it, you know, that they can like fly into town and see my stuff in the museums because they cultivated those interests.

My father got me into comics, my mother supported it, put me in drawing classes, told me about a comic book convention.

And the fact that they did all of that and that they get to see the fruit of it, it almost makes me want to cry.

It's really beautiful.

I can't believe I messed up the first take.

There's something so beautiful about art where you're trying to like grab onto these intangible things, right?

And so, the process of writing, figuring out who these characters are, what's important to them, what it is that I want to say with these characters, the journey, I love that moment of just being completely in a creative space and being able to like weave together a story that means something to me.

Oh, we want it to be clean.

That's good.

I'm just kidding.

[Laughter] Comics are highly collaborative.

It's possible to do one by yourself, but it takes forever.

And I'm very slow when it comes to the drawing part.

It is one of the most labor intensive mediums of all, right?

Because if a page has-- The squares on the page are called panels, so if the page has six to eight panels, that's six to eight original pieces of art.

And if a graphic novel is 100 pages, you know, you're like somewhere between 700 to 1000 original pieces of art.

The hardest thing for me is encouraging people past their dysfunctions because I know so many brilliant artists of all different disciplines, in fact, who the world will never hear of because they can't get over themselves and finish something.

And that to me is a tragedy.

Like, there's so much beauty that the world is being denied because the person who's creating it doesn't believe that they're-- that they are creating beauty.

I dance at least three times a week if I can.

Yeah.

It's super cathartic to me, especially when I'm deep in that artistic process.

I'll be like in the middle of my Michael Jackson spins or whatever.

And then I'll be like, oh, that's it.

And I'll step off the dance floor and make a note of my phone and then go back to dancing.

But it's something that's like purely cathartic.

It's a good fitness for me.

My soul feels free when I'm dancing.

It is definitely the number one thing that helps me feel renewed.

Too much.

I was born in Ithaca, New York.

My parents met at Cornell University and got married.

They got divorced when I was five.

He took a job at the Philadelphia Enquirer.

So, I would go see him in the summers.

Then, when we were eight, my mom moved to Atlanta, where she's from.

And that's really like where I grew up.

It was a beautiful thing to look and see everything be black, you know, judges, lawyers, businesses, whatever.

Like, that was a really beautiful thing.

I was always doing well in school.

So, my mom wanted me to go to private school to get more opportunities and also to learn how to deal with people who weren't black.

And I went there for eighth and ninth grade.

And then, I begged her to go back to public school because I wanted to be back around black people.

And in 10th grade, I took the PSAT, and I scored the highest in my school.

So, all these colleges started writing me.

And one of them was like, you can come right now.

And I hated school.

I did great, but I hated it.

So, I was like, I can knock two years off the sentence.

And so, I left 10th grade and went to college.

So, I don't have a high school diploma.

I entered college when I was 16 and came out with a liberal arts BA degree when I was 19.

My second year of college, so I was 17, I was an RA.

And we were having a dorm meeting, but it was during final exams.

And I guess I'll just warn you ahead of time, the story gets dark.

So, I'll just hit you with it.

So, we're having our dorm meeting, but nobody came because it's final exams.

And they were like, why are you scheduling something during final exams?

So, it was basically me, the other RAs, and the resident director.

And one student showed up.

And that student was, his name was Wayne.

He was in my hall.

So, when he came in, I was like, "Yeah," representing my hall and gave him dap or whatever.

I went upstairs, got a phone call from a friend that he was acting across campus.

So, I ran top speed across the snowfield campus and made it.

And when I got there, everything shut down because Wayne shaved his head, took an assault rifle, and started walking through the snow and shooting anybody across his path.

So, I'd just been with him a few minutes before.

He killed two people and injured maybe two more.

We weren't allowed to go back to campus for a few days.

And so, we had to, like, just find places to stay.

Like, we stayed with off-campus students and stuff like that.

The night it happened, this is when we still had calling cards, cell phones weren't ubiquitous.

So, I called my mom, woke her up, told her what happened, told her I was OK. And I did not call my father.

I think I thought that they would talk.

When I finally got back to my dorm room, I heard on my answering machine, when we still had answering machines, my father had seen the report come across the wire USA Today of my school and that there was a shooting there and hadn't heard from me.

And so, like, I can still hear the worry and desperation in his voice, even, you know, 30 years later.

People can be around you and have a whole storm going on inside of them that you know nothing about.

Because, you know, like, when Wayne came into that meeting, I joked with him, he laughed, you know?

And I think recognizing the preciousness and potential brevity of life, it really made it important for me to make sure that at every point of my life, everyone who I love knows that I love them.

Big expressions of emotion sometimes put you in danger, honestly.

Anything that makes you stand out, cops, you know, like, if you're too loud, too big, that kind of stuff.

It's part of why I left the South.

I remember one time I was walking out of church, and there was an older sister that, you know, we weren't close, but she had known me since I was maybe 13.

And at this point, I'm maybe 22.

And I just had my hair in a twist.

And she's on a cane and trying to hit me, like, "Get that stuff out your hair.

You got good hair,” you know.

It's only as an older, more mature person that I can recognize that their reactions were the trauma response.

Like, they're from a generation where somebody would have been murdered outright for looking like I did, right?

Like, so it comes from a place of protection, but it certainly didn't feel like protection to me, you know?

And I was, like, 27, I had a big afro.

I was getting pulled over by cops, like, all the time.

I felt like if I stayed in that environment, that my soul would die.

There was a dude I worked with who was maybe 10 years older than me at the time.

And he was a guy who kind of, like, used to like comic books and used to like hip-hop.

But he would just, he just kind of walked around the office like a zombie.

And I was, like, if I stay here, I'm going to be this dude in 10 years.

So, I just knew I had to get out of the South.

And fortunately, I made some friends here in Denver.

So, that's how I ended up here.

This is a super geeky reference, but Dragon Ball Z cartoon back in the day, there was a character named Piccolo who would train his-- go to another planet with heavier gravity to train in martial arts so that when he came to Earth, he was strong enough to, like, throw a car.

That's what I felt like growing up under the racism in the South.

It was like the heavier gravity holding me down.

And then, when I moved here, like, things were lighter.

There was a lot more I could do.

I wasn't getting pulled over by cops every four weeks.

So, I guess those are some of the differences.

In the South, if a white person is racist, they will burn down their house to stop you from getting their house.

Here, if a white person is racist, largely, they just won't help you with things.

When I'm in Atlanta, the perception is, he talks like a bougie person, but he dresses like a bum.

So, I don't, you know, like, those are the extremes.

I don't think either of those things are right, but those are the perceptions.

And so, those are the things that I have to work around.

When I'm in Colorado, where I'm largely around white people, the perception is whatever that white person has associated with blackness, that is what they're dealing with often first than they are in terms of seeing me as a human being.

It's a weird thing because, you know, black culture is like commodified.

It's cool to be cool.

So, a lot of people buy into black culture more than they buy into black people.

So, they will relate to me based on the dreams that they've been having about meeting a cool black dude.

And it has nothing to do with me as a person.

And the weird thing about it is that on its face, it looks like adulation.

It looks like I'm being treated famous.

But as soon as I go far enough outside of their expectations, then it turns to spite.

You know, so it's just an opposite side of the racism coin.

You know, like, even though they're excited to see me, they're not excited to see me.

They're excited to see what they think they're seeing in me and my potential to fulfill whatever their black hopes and dreams are.

The word I would use to describe my growth is unpredictable because I sure didn't see this coming.

I was pretty much giving up.

And all of this stuff has happened.

After a whole life of trying to accomplish the things that I'm doing now, I really was at that point of like, well, I'll just be broken, make stuff because it's fun to me.

And now suddenly, people all over the world have interacted with the stuff I've created.

When I was a kid, my dad wanted to encourage reading, so he got me into comic books when I was around five.

And that immediately engaged my love for drawing and words.

And so, I was drawing comics from maybe the age of five till maybe like 13 or something.

And then, I got super into hip hop, and girls responded more strongly to hip hop.

So, I got waylaid by hip hop.

And so, I started doing a lot of battles, and freestyles, and trying to work on albums with people.

And that took up all of my 20s, stuff like that.

I was always trying to find the right combinations of words to capture whatever intangible things that a human spirit and make it rhyme.

So proportionally, I never got back what I put into it.

Around 2012, I kind of burned out and was like, for all this aggravation, I could work a square job and make some money.

And so, then I started selling insurance, obviously.

[Laughs] That was the squarest job I could think of, I guess.

I don't know.

So, I will say the years in insurance actually helped me because like a lot of the organization around treating my art like a business, that structure came from the insurance stuff.

So, how do I reduce my expenses in such a way that I can make very little?

So, when I decided to leave insurance-- and the comic book stuff, I had been reading them all my life, but I had never really tried to make them or make a living at it.

So, I was like, I'm going to quit insurance and I'm going to make comic books.

Maybe I'm just going to write comic books and be broke.

And so, I was like, but I'll be happy.

And so, I kick-started this book.

It's called The Burning Metronome.

This artist, Dion Harris and Matt Strachbein worked on it with me.

Somebody at Regis University reads it in the master's program.

They offered me a job teaching in their master's program.

I had never taught before.

So, my kick-started book made me a professor.

Then, people left the Denver Post, started their own paper called The Colorado Sun.

And they were like, do you think you could do a comic for our new paper?

And I was like, yes, even though I'd never done it.

And so, I figured out, I thought about like, what could I do on a weekly basis that would engage the world and politics and stuff like that?

That comic is called What I Miss.

I write that, Corey Redford draws it.

That's been going on for five years.

We won three journalism awards for it, which is hilarious because I didn't know I was a journalist.

So, all of that happened.

Then, I got the opportunity to do a TED Talk, which I did during lockdown to an empty room.

And so, I was like, people are going to hate this.

But that TED Talk is almost at three million views.

And people from all over the world have written me.

It's led to a lot of other opportunities, speaking and stuff like that.

And then, during 2020, somebody reached out to me about doing a comic for the Denver Art Museum.

And I was like, yeah, you know, I can do that.

That was cool.

After I did it, I sent it to them.

I was like, how long is that going to be up?

Because I'm thinking like three months.

And they were like, at least 10 years.

I was like, what?

So, it's part of a permanent exhibit that's at the Denver Art Museum.

So, this comic book thing, which was my first love, has led to me being a professor, led to me being in museums, led to me doing a talk that people all over the world have listened to.

Like, that was all the stuff I was trying to do with hip hop.

Maybe not the professor thing, but, you know, I mean, just have people engage with my work in a way that's meaningful.

And so, I feel so tremendously like it feels surreal, but it's so wonderful that all of these things I've been hoping for, even though they didn't come to me through music, they came to me through the first thing that I loved, which was comic books.

What's most important to me in the world is as much as it's possible that every human being be treated decently.

And it doesn't feel like that's such a tall order, but for some reason, it is.

Whenever we can say, like, this group does this, that is the first step to dehumanizing them, turning them into creatures, monsters, lumping them all together.

But as long as we hold on to the idea and recognition of each other's humanity, that is the beginning of connection, and understanding, and love.

And so, that specific thing drives so much of my work.

Society is not set up for men to be vulnerable.

Like, men have to decide to be vulnerable, and then particularly black men, there's a whole other layer of it, right?

[Music] For me, it is an act of defiance to show up as my full self, to be happy and whole because all the things that try to destroy me in society, in the world, these are like people, elements, institutions that do not respect or value my humanity.

So, why am I going to let them shape me?

So, I really feel like skip them.

That's the TV version, but I'm saying like, you know, like they don't deserve to have the significance to shape who I am.

So for me, it's like, what is my full self without regard to these people and institutions?

And every day that I can connect with that full self and walk in that full self is a victory.

I do fundamentally believe in the ability of art to communicate the subtleties of life, honestly, in a way that many other things can't.

You know, people have a lot of defensiveness if you're like, you need to think about this.

But when you communicate it through art, people can absorb it in a whole different way.

It's important to me to be mindful of how I'm expressing black humanity, to not go for the easy and familiar tropes, like to allow a story that is not what you're used to.

[Music] When I had an agent, literary agent, for a few years, he took my stuff to publishers and major publishers, and they would all write back like, "Alan's clearly a very compelling figure, but--,” and then just fill in the blank, whatever the but was.

And after a while, the agent was like, "You know, Alan, this is embarrassing to me to admit, but I think because you're black, they expect you to write about your own suffering.” And I write about all kinds of suffering in the world, but I'm not trying to write about white people being mean to me.

That's just not interesting to me, right?

It's like they think black is like a genre, right?

So, like there's fantasy, there's sci-fi, and there's black.

And if I don't fit into that limited scope of what they imagine my humanity to be, then they can't even imagine it.

They can't even understand it, you know?

The weekly comic that I do for the Colorado Sun, one of the main characters is black man is like 20.

The artist for it is Corey, who is a white woman.

And when we're talking about how to depict him, I wanted his body language to be vulnerable to make it clear that he is a full, and vulnerable, and open human being.

The full scope of your humanity means that you can express joy when you have it, and you can express anger when you have it, and you can take care of your business, but you don't have to be this like narrow echo of a human being because if you smile, that means you're weak or whatever, you know?

In order to exist in that space as a black man in this world, especially this country, it is an act of choice, because if you're not making that choice, then you're going to be herded into this sort of narrow expression of, well, that's what's really black, you know?

You know, I write and draw comic books, but I think of myself more as a writer than an illustrator, and I take a long time with the illustration.

It's all digital now, so if I put the pressure on myself that this was going to be like representative of who I am as an artist, then I would turn it around so you couldn't see it.

But I intentionally did not try to think in a hard way about it.

I just wanted to experience it.

It was great because, one, I've never done anything abstract.

This has sort of an abstract background.

I've never tried to use paint and texture as feeling, and trying to combine that with more illustration, like line work, the stuff that I'm used to doing was fun.

I just felt the word graphic, and I thought, well, what word feels like it goes?

And this is just kind of the word.

And I think probably just a mixture between the illustration and the rough paint texture.

Graphic was it.

You know, obviously graphic has multiple meanings, so I think people can pull whatever they want out of it, but that's what spoke to me in that moment.

So, it is really cool to be able to play around with texture and what emotions work with something, and then what the graphic elements on top of that, what they can do.

So, for me, this is like, even if I don't use traditional paint, these ideas of texture and color combined with the more graphic illustration stuff, that's something I'm going to explore more.

Although I express a lot of what I think and feel through my art, it's rare that I have somebody asking me those real, like, what do you think?

Let me see your soul type questions.

And I'm able to express it in a way that I can feel resonate with a group of people.

Like, even when I speak, public speaking, it's just not that same kind of thing.

So, there was something beautiful and rewarding in sharing my most essential self and having it valued, heard, and respected.