Art in Action -- Christian Cooper returns to comics with digital "It's a Bird"

News stories reporting on digital-only comic by Christian Cooper. He is taking his real life experience as a launching point for larger discussions...

NY Times photo by Brittainy Newman shows Cooper in Central Park

NY Times

Central Park Birder Turns Clash Into Graphic Novel about Racism
by Sarah Maslin Nir
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/09/nyregion/christian-cooper-amy-comic-graphic-novel.html?referringSource=articleShare
The impressionistic novel from Christian Cooper features a Black teenager who looks at birds through binoculars and instead sees the faces of Black people who have been killed by the police.
Excerpt:
"...But before that Memorial Day encounter, Mr. Cooper was well-known in a different realm: as a pioneering comic book writer. Now, Mr. Cooper is using his experience in Central Park as the inspiration for a graphic novel, “It’s a Bird,” published by DC Comics.

The slim, 10-page story is impressionistic, without a real plot. It is the first in a series called “Represent!” that features works of writers “traditionally underrepresented in the mainstream comic book medium,” including people of color or those who are LGBTQ, Marie Javins, an executive editor at DC, said in a statement. It will be available online for free starting Wednesday, at several digital book and comic book retailers."

Washington Post

Christian Cooper has written a comic book partly inspired by his viral Central Park moment

Cooper, a former Marvel Comics editor, is releasing his first comic in two decades, this time for DC Comics.

By David Betancourt

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2020/09/09/christian-cooper-comic-central-park-birding/

Excerpt:

"Cooper’s 10-page comic book, “It’s a Bird,” became available digitally Wednesday. Illustrated by Alitha E. Martinez, inked by Mark Morales and colored by Emilio Lopez, the comic is the first issue of “Represent!,” a digital series from DC Comics that will showcase writers and artists from groups that are underrepresented in the industry.

“It’s a Bird” features Jules, a teenager given a pair of binoculars by his father and told to explore his surroundings. Jules, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of birds, is quickly harassed by those threatened by his presence as an unannounced Black man in an open space.

That and other moments of hostility evoke racial profiling that Cooper and other Black birders have experienced, but the story turns slightly mystical when Jules begins using his binoculars and sees images of Black people who have fallen to police violence, including Amadou Diallo, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd.

Cooper works as a senior editorial director at Health Science Communications and didn’t think he would wind up back at one of the superhero publishers so quickly, but here he is.

“I really appreciated it when [DC Comics] came to me and said do you want to do this comic, because I did have something to say,” he said in an interview. “It’s interesting how it slips into maybe this space in the DC Universe that isn’t normally occupied. It is a very magical-realist tale. There is something fantastical that happens in the course of the story. But it’s not capes. It’s not superheroes.”

“I haven’t been sitting around thinking I’m going to get into comics again,” he added, “But when this opportunity [was] presented I was like, ‘Oh, hell yeah. I want to do this”