
“I’m a Magpie”: In Conversation with Ho Che Anderson
I first came across Ho Che Anderson’s work in The Beguiling in Toronto in 2008. I was escaping the weather or I was killing time or I have never needed an excuse to dip into a comic bookstore.
I first came across Ho Che Anderson’s work in The Beguiling in Toronto in 2008. I was escaping the weather or I was killing time or I have never needed an excuse to dip into a comic bookstore. I was flipping through the rows of comics when I pulled out a copy of I Want To Be Your Dog, which caught my attention because of The Stooges reference. What kept my attention was the story: I had never come across anything like that, before or since. I Want To Be Your Dog is a short series published by Fantagraphics in 1996, and the plot looks at the interplay within and between S&M relationships in the Black Canadian community in Toronto. I started looking for Anderson’s work, and at another comic book store I found Scream Queen. By then, I was caught up with Anderson’s publications, and pre-ordered the sequel, a stunning thriller called Sand & Fury: A Scream Queen Adventure.
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In the comic book/graphic novel world, Anderson is probably known best for King, a subversive epic biography of Martin Luther King comprising three volumes that took over a decade to complete, and began when Anderson was 19. Most recently, Anderson has released Godhead (Fantagraphics, 2018), the first volume of a narrative that explores the intersections of technology, faith, and violence. There are robots, army veterans, and boardroom politics. Godhead is a story of our time, and what it does as a narrative is not only showcase Anderson’s storytelling techniques, but it also reveals more about us as a people than we might care to know. In 2010, I sent Ho Che Anderson one of the three pieces of fan mail I have ever sent out in my life. I finally met him in person at the 2018 Toronto Comic Arts Festival, where he was one of the featured artists. He agreed to an interview, and a month later we met in the upstairs room at the Imperial Pub near Yonge-Dundas Square, close to where Anderson attended filmmaking school. In 2018, he received funding from Telefilm for his first feature-length movie, which is currently nearing the end of shooting. It’s called Le Corbeau, about a thief-for-hire partaking in one final gig. Here is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.
Godhead, by Ho Che Anderson
Nehal El-Hadi: Why don’t we start with when we met? Because you said something to me that was really interesting, that you didn’t see Black women at comic book conventions. Why? Ho Che Anderson: It’s a rare and wonderful thing. I don’t do a lot of conventions or appearances of that sort, so maybe it’s not as uncommon as I perceive it to be, but I gotta say, I was at TCAF for three days, and I saw maybe four Black women, and one of them was a cartoonist, so she had to be there. It’s a very rare thing. It’s something that I lament. I wish ... it used to be that it was solely white guys in the comic stores and the conventions, and slowly women started to come into the scene. I see white women, I see Asian women, but I almost never see Black women. It’s something that is just not promoted along Black female readers that get into comic books, it appears to me at any rate. Kinda sad. NE: Why comics as your medium? HA: Comics are not my only medium, but they’re the base medium. They’re the one I started with when I was a child. I’ve always been obsessed with visual storytelling in general—comic books, movies, TV—but the thing that was the easiest to access as a child was comic books. And the things that were the easiest to mimic as a child were comic books. If you want to make a film, you at least have to have somebody that you know or your parents bring a camera into the home, but every child’s got a pencil and a piece of paper guaranteed. So, it was just an easy thing for me to get into and practice and gravitate toward. And I just love the medium, I love the immediacy of them, I love the personal nature of them: the fact that it’s me in a room communicating, unfiltered. I love that. I love that about it. NE: You do all your own writing, all your own illustration. Do you work with other artists? HA: I haven’t up until now. Not that I haven’t had the desire to, it just hasn’t really worked out. I got into it out of desire to control most of the elements myself, and I spent a lot of time developing the various skills necessary to produce books by myself. It wasn’t really something I was especially eager to do earlier in my career. And I think I developed a rep just as this lone wolf, coz most of the stuff that I’ve been offered over the years—to the extent that I’ve been offered anything—has always been writer/artist. So I would like to work with another artist at some point. And I’ve worked with many writers over the years, but it’s mostly turned out that it’s me writing and drawing my own stuff and that seems to work out okay. And the thing about comic books is if I want to collaborate, I’m involved in the cinema world as well and that’s pure collaboration. So, if I have the urge to collaborate, and I frequently do, I just go and do movie stuff. But if I’m doing comics, I feel like that is my medium to just be a complete control freak in. And I like to indulge in that power when I have the opportunity to. NE: I wanted to ask you about your film work, because when I read your comics and graphic novels, I’m picking up on filmic references, shots, and details. How do comic and films intersect in your life? HA: Absolutely. The base reason that I got into this in the first place was Star Wars. My mom took me to see Star Wars in 1977. I was one person when I went into the cinema. I was a totally different person when I came out of the cinema—and to my parents’ chagrin: I was constantly bugging them for Star Wars comics, toys, paraphernalia of any sort. Then that fed into the comic book obsession I already had at that point, and the two built upon each other. The screen has been an influence right from the start. When I was first doing comic books, as much as I love the medium strictly for what it had to offer, I couldn’t take away the fact that I was so influenced cinematically. So that cinematic staging of scenes and cinematic approach to dialogue informed my entire approach to comics. I try to bring in what is native to the medium as much as possible, but it’s impossible for me to not be thinking of just the way a camera views a scene, and the way movement is achieved through a camera. It’s just in the DNA. And I thought when I actually started making stuff, making short films—and now I’m finally going to get to make a feature—I thought once I started doing that, then that influence would start to go away from the comic books. But it’s still in there, so I don’t even try to fight it, I let it be what it is. NE: One of the things that’s interesting for me about your work is that your panels start after the action has started. Like, you’re just there. In it. It’s like a movie if you took the first five seconds out of a scene, where you don’t ease into it. HA: That’s true. I feel like, first of all you don’t want to waste the reader’s time. We live in a very tensive society, and there’s a lot to accomplish in any one day. And somebody’s taking the time out to read whatever ramblings you’ve chosen to put down on paper. I don’t want to waste their time or give them something where they’re like, get to the goddamn point. And also, storytelling is best when it works efficiently. I think it was William Goldman who said the scene should start as late into it as possible and end as early as possible. Get to the meat of it. Give me the stuff that is actually nourishing and then let’s get on with it. And if we need to pause for a little while to service the greater good, that’s great. We’ve got things to do man, let’s keep it going. So that’s my philosophy. I just want to keep it going.
Godhead, page 16
NE: What do you read? HA: The last two books I read, was one called—and this was research for a film project I was working on—it was a Roméo Dallaire book: They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children. I’m working on a story about a child soldier, and this is a fascinating book, and a disturbing book. It goes into the reasoning behind using child soldiers, which they call “weapon systems.” They depersonalize these children to the point that they’re viewed as tools of war rather than children. In certain ways we endorse it, we support countries through the UN that sanction the use of child soldiers. We could put sanctions against them. We don’t, we just let it lie. You don’t have to feed them very much, they’re eager to please, they’re an easily renewable resource—in some countries there’s more children than anything else—and their minds aren’t formed fully enough so they don’t have a sufficient sense of fear, so they wade into battle like it’s fun. Like killing people is fun. What they do to these children, they completely deny them their childhood. At any rate, that was one of the last books I read, and before that it was Rendezvous With Rama, which is an Arthur C. Clarke science fiction book about the first contact with an alien race, and it doesn’t happen in the way that you might think. It is one of the most evocative books I’ve ever read. It’s so great. NE: That’s similar to some of the themes of Godhead? The idea that you have this technology/faith/human thing, and especially because of my own interests which look at technology, and specifically how does technology mediate what it means to be human, especially for racialized and gendered bodies. And then the conversations we have about robots is both the fear of: did we create gods? And the smugness of: we are gods, we created life. This bizarre tension. HA: Well we’ll resolve it when the AIs rise up and take over. Then it will be resolved for us, is my suspicion. NE: Will they be violent? HA: I tend to think of it as a benign takeover. I don’t think there would be need for great violence—this is all theorizing, of course—but their ability to self-replicate presumably, and their leaps in terms of intelligence, would make us obsolete after a while. I think they would take over and there would not be need of a violent revolution. That’s how I think things would play out, but who the hell knows? NE: That’s such an anthropocentric idea, that the robots would even bother with us. HA: Exactly. Maybe we’ll be beneath their concern. Who knows? I would tend to think that they would want to assume some sort of stewardship of our planet for the sake of keeping it going, we’re clearly doing a horrible job of that. NE: You’re speaking of robots with some sort of morality. HA: Yeah, man. I think of this new intelligence as having a superior morality than we’ve been able to foster. We pay lip service to having a great morality. Why do you disagree?
Le Corbeau
NE: Tell me more about the feature film you’re working on. HA: We [my business partners and I] finally got some funding from Telefilm. I’ve written about twenty film scripts since I started writing, and the first ten were just terrible. But you’ve got to write the crap out. And then the next ten were starting to get pretty good. I’m working on a movie called Le Corbeau, which is my least political story ever. This is a balls-out action/adventure story. It’s about a Nigerian safe cracker who comes to Toronto to crack a safe, along with two other thieves. They do the job, it’s successful, but my man is a little too smart for his own good, realizes that the two thieves are actually cops who are thieves on the side. And he points this out to them, and rather than taking it as the innocent observation that I think he intended it as, they take it as a threat. The rest of the movie is basically a run for his life. Buried in the subtext are examinations of race and class. You’ve got two white cops chasing after this Black man and using language like, we should have lynched him when we had the chance. At the same time, because of Godhead, I got the opportunity to create a television show for Time Warner, which I’m very excited about. It was in about the space of six weeks it was like, you wanna do this, you wanna do this, you wanna do this? I was like yes, yes, yes, and yes! I was getting a little greedy, but hey man, it’s been a struggle for the last 20 years, so finding a little success coming my way, I’m just going to grab it all as fast as I can. I’m creating a show called 1033 which is about US cops who go over to Israel to train, and they learn apartheid-style policing tactics when they’re training in Israel with the IDF. And when they come back home, they bring that training with them. It’s an examination of why there’s so much police violence and the rise of the police state in America, and in Canada by extension. The reason it’s called 1033 is for the well-known program in the States that allows excess military equipment to be distributed to police agencies for use locally. You’ve got military-grade equipment being deployed on the streets, which is crazy. It’s a cop drama about that kind of stuff, martial law, it’s going to be cool. And the other thing that’s going on is I think there’s going to be a Godhead TV show, because people have been reaching out about doing a show about the book.
Godhead, page 82
NE: What’s the deal with you and global politics? HA: It’s just the world that we’re living in. We’re living in a globalized society and the influences of the world are coming to bear at home. I grew up in the ’80s, and the South African apartheid era was at its height, back in the mid ’80s. That was something that was going on daily in the news, and that affected me even though it wasn’t something that I was experiencing. We’re experiencing a very low-grade version of that here at home, but not as overt as what was going on over there. At any rate, it was something that was on my mind a lot. I bought into the propaganda that apartheid ended in South Africa and therefore everything is hunky dory, only to discover as I become a bit more aware, that kind of mindset is being perpetrated even today. And it’s something that I want to explore. It gives me an opportunity to delve into the roots of it and see and understand how it evolved, why and how it’s being perpetrated today. And hopefully, if not to provide an understanding of how we can avoid these kinds of things, but at least shed a light on it to make people a tiny bit more aware that it’s going on. As much as people want to think that the grander political world doesn’t have any bearing on their everyday life, it does. It totally does. NE: Would you ever work on Canadian social issues? HA: Absolutely, yeah. The reason this is set in the States is because it was Time Warner that came to me. But if the CBC came to me and said do something politically minded, I would be thrilled to do something along those lines. It would probably examine a lot of the same stuff because what’s going on with the cops is something that’s been bothering me quite severely over the last several years. I was really grateful that this opportunity came out of the blue, because it allowed me to take a very deep dive into a subject matter that I’ve been wanting to examine to some extent or another for the last five years or so. It would probably be more of the same, just cops out of control. In Toronto. NE: It feels like your work is intensely personal, you write about what you’re interested in and what you want to explore more. How personal is Scream Queen? HA: That was very personal. I’m a different person then I was when I drew that book. There was something going on with me at that point that I needed to exorcise (laughs). Here’s the thing about that story: Scream Queen was originally short little stories, like 30 pages or something like that. It was just intended to be an interesting psychosexual horror story. Then I did Sand & Fury. I had a fair bit of cash in the bank for some work I’d done that year, and I had some time that I could do my own thing for a little while and not have to worry about raising cash for a little bit so I said on a whim, I’m just going to do this story. So, I sat down on my couch on a Monday morning and I just started writing. I didn’t have much of a plan. I had vague notions and I just started writing. And I always plan my stories out very thoroughly before I script them but this one, I just went at it. And a week later I had this finished story. I’ve always liked dark, sexy, scary, nasty stories and I just wanted to tell one. I just wanted to get that thing out of my system and do it. And I had never seen a Black female figure in a horror film like that before. I wanted to see what that would look like. It’s difficult for me to examine what my motivations were, because it just poured out of me so fast.
King, by Ho Che Anderson
NE: King, to me, is a work of documentary, and you had mentioned once that you had done journalism: how does that inform your work? HA: I’d always been fascinated by journalism. One of my earliest interviews was with a gentleman from the Toronto Star. I remember him asking me questions, and writing notes, as you’re doing and there was something about it that I found so captivating. I love the idea of rather than doing research to support a story, I like the idea of researching and then letting the research form the story. So when I got the opportunity to do King, I realized that this was the chance to dive into that water a little bit. I would have to do all this research and figure this guy out, and he wasn’t going to be one of my creations, even though I think that ultimately when you do this kind of work they do become your creations. But he didn’t start off as a creation, he started off as a real person that I was trying to learn about. I really wanted to practice journalistic standards to a certain extent when I was working on King, even though I understood that a certain point I would have to become a dramatist again and subvert the facts to fit the narrative, because it is a comic book. But it was great to do that research. It was great because when I did that book, and I had to do all that reading and I had to interview people, when I finally got the chance to be a journalist, I felt like I’d already done the training. King was my j-school. NE: Speaking of research, there are so many references incorporated into Godhead: there’s the Bible, there are movies, there are a few tributes snuck in there too—how do you organize it? HA: I’m a magpie. As much as I like to engage in the real world as much as humanly possible, I’m also just a pop culture magpie. I’ve been absorbing science fiction references and action movie references since I was a child. So the stuff’s in me. One of the many benefits of doing Godhead was that it was a playground to regurgitate things that I had appreciated over the years. I was constantly layering Easter eggs, other films that I’ve liked, shots from certain science fiction films, props from other films, lines of dialogue. Just little things here and there that I grabbed and put into my personal mélange. I’m curious to see who catches what, you know what I mean? It’s a litmus test for who they are and what they’ve experienced. A few people have come up with stuff that I didn’t actually intend!
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Ho Che Anderson (b. 1969) is a Canadian cartoonist living in Toronto. Anderson was launched into the comics scene with the publication of his erotic story I Want to Be Your Dog in 1990. Next, he embarked on the project he is best known for, King, his comic series on the life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. His other works include the graphic short story collections Young Hoods in Love (1995) and Pop Life (in collaboration with cartoonist Wilfred Santiago, 1998), and the graphic novel Scream Queen (2005).
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In the comic book/graphic novel world, Anderson is probably known best for King, a subversive epic biography of Martin Luther King comprising three volumes that took over a decade to complete, and began when Anderson was 19. Most recently, Anderson has released Godhead (Fantagraphics, 2018), the first volume of a narrative that explores the intersections of technology, faith, and violence. There are robots, army veterans, and boardroom politics. Godhead is a story of our time, and what it does as a narrative is not only showcase Anderson’s storytelling techniques, but it also reveals more about us as a people than we might care to know. In 2010, I sent Ho Che Anderson one of the three pieces of fan mail I have ever sent out in my life. I finally met him in person at the 2018 Toronto Comic Arts Festival, where he was one of the featured artists. He agreed to an interview, and a month later we met in the upstairs room at the Imperial Pub near Yonge-Dundas Square, close to where Anderson attended filmmaking school. In 2018, he received funding from Telefilm for his first feature-length movie, which is currently nearing the end of shooting. It’s called Le Corbeau, about a thief-for-hire partaking in one final gig. Here is a condensed and edited version of our conversation.

Nehal El-Hadi: Why don’t we start with when we met? Because you said something to me that was really interesting, that you didn’t see Black women at comic book conventions. Why? Ho Che Anderson: It’s a rare and wonderful thing. I don’t do a lot of conventions or appearances of that sort, so maybe it’s not as uncommon as I perceive it to be, but I gotta say, I was at TCAF for three days, and I saw maybe four Black women, and one of them was a cartoonist, so she had to be there. It’s a very rare thing. It’s something that I lament. I wish ... it used to be that it was solely white guys in the comic stores and the conventions, and slowly women started to come into the scene. I see white women, I see Asian women, but I almost never see Black women. It’s something that is just not promoted along Black female readers that get into comic books, it appears to me at any rate. Kinda sad. NE: Why comics as your medium? HA: Comics are not my only medium, but they’re the base medium. They’re the one I started with when I was a child. I’ve always been obsessed with visual storytelling in general—comic books, movies, TV—but the thing that was the easiest to access as a child was comic books. And the things that were the easiest to mimic as a child were comic books. If you want to make a film, you at least have to have somebody that you know or your parents bring a camera into the home, but every child’s got a pencil and a piece of paper guaranteed. So, it was just an easy thing for me to get into and practice and gravitate toward. And I just love the medium, I love the immediacy of them, I love the personal nature of them: the fact that it’s me in a room communicating, unfiltered. I love that. I love that about it. NE: You do all your own writing, all your own illustration. Do you work with other artists? HA: I haven’t up until now. Not that I haven’t had the desire to, it just hasn’t really worked out. I got into it out of desire to control most of the elements myself, and I spent a lot of time developing the various skills necessary to produce books by myself. It wasn’t really something I was especially eager to do earlier in my career. And I think I developed a rep just as this lone wolf, coz most of the stuff that I’ve been offered over the years—to the extent that I’ve been offered anything—has always been writer/artist. So I would like to work with another artist at some point. And I’ve worked with many writers over the years, but it’s mostly turned out that it’s me writing and drawing my own stuff and that seems to work out okay. And the thing about comic books is if I want to collaborate, I’m involved in the cinema world as well and that’s pure collaboration. So, if I have the urge to collaborate, and I frequently do, I just go and do movie stuff. But if I’m doing comics, I feel like that is my medium to just be a complete control freak in. And I like to indulge in that power when I have the opportunity to. NE: I wanted to ask you about your film work, because when I read your comics and graphic novels, I’m picking up on filmic references, shots, and details. How do comic and films intersect in your life? HA: Absolutely. The base reason that I got into this in the first place was Star Wars. My mom took me to see Star Wars in 1977. I was one person when I went into the cinema. I was a totally different person when I came out of the cinema—and to my parents’ chagrin: I was constantly bugging them for Star Wars comics, toys, paraphernalia of any sort. Then that fed into the comic book obsession I already had at that point, and the two built upon each other. The screen has been an influence right from the start. When I was first doing comic books, as much as I love the medium strictly for what it had to offer, I couldn’t take away the fact that I was so influenced cinematically. So that cinematic staging of scenes and cinematic approach to dialogue informed my entire approach to comics. I try to bring in what is native to the medium as much as possible, but it’s impossible for me to not be thinking of just the way a camera views a scene, and the way movement is achieved through a camera. It’s just in the DNA. And I thought when I actually started making stuff, making short films—and now I’m finally going to get to make a feature—I thought once I started doing that, then that influence would start to go away from the comic books. But it’s still in there, so I don’t even try to fight it, I let it be what it is. NE: One of the things that’s interesting for me about your work is that your panels start after the action has started. Like, you’re just there. In it. It’s like a movie if you took the first five seconds out of a scene, where you don’t ease into it. HA: That’s true. I feel like, first of all you don’t want to waste the reader’s time. We live in a very tensive society, and there’s a lot to accomplish in any one day. And somebody’s taking the time out to read whatever ramblings you’ve chosen to put down on paper. I don’t want to waste their time or give them something where they’re like, get to the goddamn point. And also, storytelling is best when it works efficiently. I think it was William Goldman who said the scene should start as late into it as possible and end as early as possible. Get to the meat of it. Give me the stuff that is actually nourishing and then let’s get on with it. And if we need to pause for a little while to service the greater good, that’s great. We’ve got things to do man, let’s keep it going. So that’s my philosophy. I just want to keep it going.
We live in a very tensive society, and there’s a lot to accomplish in any one day. And somebody’s taking the time out to read whatever ramblings you’ve chosen to put down on paper. I don’t want to waste their time or give them something where they’re like, get to the goddamn point.NE: What was the last film you watched? HA: The last film that I watched on the big screen was Infinity War, which I loved. It took me a minute to get on board with it but when I did, I loved it. And before that it was mother! That’s one of my favourite films of the last year, Darren Aronofsky. Have you seen that movie? NE: No, but it’s on my Netflix watch list. HA: It’s pretty fascinating. It gets really crazy and it gets insane with the allegory, and then it reaches a fever pitch at the end. It’s quite fascinating to watch. NE: Mother-daughter relationships are the weirdest in the world. HA: So I’ve heard. It’s going to trigger a few things. NE: Star Wars was obviously formative as well as informative. What other things have been really huge for you? HA: If we’re talking in the storytelling realm, there are certain touchstones. Star Wars was the biggie as a child. When I was 17 years old, I came across Martin Scorsese’s great urban crime horror film, Taxi Driver, and it was the first time that I, as somebody approaching adulthood, realized almost the full extent of what cinema could offer. It didn’t just have to be kids’ entertainment. And there’s deeper psychologies than what I was getting from network television, for example from something like the A-Team or whatever was popular on TV back then in the mid ’80s. Taxi Driver was something that tapped into something deep and primal and scary in urban society. And it thrilled me and it scared me and it galvanized me. Another one was Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing. That was my first exposure to overtly political filmmaking. I think of that more as a subtly political film, because you can view it on the surface as a neighbourhood comedy if you’re so inclined, but obviously there’s so much more going on in terms of police brutality and cultural oppression, there’s a whole range of things that were going on in this film beyond just the surface. That was another before-and-after moment. Spike Lee would go on to be a real influence for me because he was the first filmmaker of colour that had ever reached that kind of prominence before. Certainly there had been filmmakers of colour before who had entered the conversation, but not to the level Spike Lee had. And that was exciting for me as someone who was aspiring to do that kind of work, to see that that was possible. And that you could do work that was so aggressive and in your face and so point-of-view driven, and still have it be acceptable. Or if not acceptable, at least produced and out there for people to see. That was exciting.

NE: What do you read? HA: The last two books I read, was one called—and this was research for a film project I was working on—it was a Roméo Dallaire book: They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children. I’m working on a story about a child soldier, and this is a fascinating book, and a disturbing book. It goes into the reasoning behind using child soldiers, which they call “weapon systems.” They depersonalize these children to the point that they’re viewed as tools of war rather than children. In certain ways we endorse it, we support countries through the UN that sanction the use of child soldiers. We could put sanctions against them. We don’t, we just let it lie. You don’t have to feed them very much, they’re eager to please, they’re an easily renewable resource—in some countries there’s more children than anything else—and their minds aren’t formed fully enough so they don’t have a sufficient sense of fear, so they wade into battle like it’s fun. Like killing people is fun. What they do to these children, they completely deny them their childhood. At any rate, that was one of the last books I read, and before that it was Rendezvous With Rama, which is an Arthur C. Clarke science fiction book about the first contact with an alien race, and it doesn’t happen in the way that you might think. It is one of the most evocative books I’ve ever read. It’s so great. NE: That’s similar to some of the themes of Godhead? The idea that you have this technology/faith/human thing, and especially because of my own interests which look at technology, and specifically how does technology mediate what it means to be human, especially for racialized and gendered bodies. And then the conversations we have about robots is both the fear of: did we create gods? And the smugness of: we are gods, we created life. This bizarre tension. HA: Well we’ll resolve it when the AIs rise up and take over. Then it will be resolved for us, is my suspicion. NE: Will they be violent? HA: I tend to think of it as a benign takeover. I don’t think there would be need for great violence—this is all theorizing, of course—but their ability to self-replicate presumably, and their leaps in terms of intelligence, would make us obsolete after a while. I think they would take over and there would not be need of a violent revolution. That’s how I think things would play out, but who the hell knows? NE: That’s such an anthropocentric idea, that the robots would even bother with us. HA: Exactly. Maybe we’ll be beneath their concern. Who knows? I would tend to think that they would want to assume some sort of stewardship of our planet for the sake of keeping it going, we’re clearly doing a horrible job of that. NE: You’re speaking of robots with some sort of morality. HA: Yeah, man. I think of this new intelligence as having a superior morality than we’ve been able to foster. We pay lip service to having a great morality. Why do you disagree?
I think of this new intelligence as having a superior morality than we’ve been able to foster. We pay lip service to having a great morality.NE: Makes no sense. Do we care if ants pollute? HA: I don’t care. But the thing is an ant is not causing irreparable damage to the planet, as we are. NE: I have no clue. Obviously, I spend a lot of time thinking about it. HA: It’s happening, these things are the forebears. NE: Have you read Asimov’s “The Last Question”? They create the computer and ask it what the meaning of life is, and the computer’s like “go away and come back.” They keep on building bigger and better computers and then the singularity happens, and then the collective consciousness finally responds and says, “Let there be light.” The other thing that I was thinking about when you were speaking about the child soldiers was Ender’s Game. HA: I don’t like Ender’s Game very much. I have not read the book, I didn’t like the movie. And I read a comic book adaptation. I don’t want to give Orson Scott Card any money, fucking homophobe, I don’t like that guy. NE: OK, how do you separate the art from the artist? HA: That is the eternal question. I’ve been grappling with that lot lately. I do not know. NE: Who are you grappling with it for? Which artists? HA: For myself. Oh I see. Well there’s the obvious ones like Roman Polanski, I’ve loved a lot of his films but he’s an irredeemable piece of shit. Or many of the films that the Weinsteins put out over the years, I love a lot of those films, but whenever I see Harvey’s name come up, it turns my stomach. I guess it’s up to you to determine where the cut-off is, how much the art means to you, and whether that meaning outweighs what this person’s actions are in the real world. And it’s always a balance, in some cases I can say whatever, I’m willing to put that aside, in other cases it’s ... I don’t know, dude, I don’t know. I don’t care enough about Orson Scott Card, or Ender’s Game, or his world to fight for it. The thing is, to some extent, most of us are kind of crappy, does that mean we are supposed to dismiss everything that’s created? Is there some sort of moral absolutism that we’re supposed to adhere to? NE: OK, well think about it as an artist. Does it affect your behaviour? HA: Absolutely. NE: You should be a decent human being anyway. HA: I try to be a decent human being, but I don’t know anybody who’s a saint. I’m sure as hell not, and I’m sure that if I were to examine some of my own behaviour as a younger man, I would be less than impressed at what I came up with. I think if what is going on culturally right now is making a lot of guys take a pause and examine their mindsets and try to make a course correct, I think that that is only a good thing. You gotta have wake-up calls, man. NE: I don’t want your redemption if you’re scared of the consequences. HA: I agree. Listen, you and me are on the same page. Sometimes it takes people a slap in the face to realize that they need to be a decent human being. And if that’s what it takes to be a decent human being, I’m not going to complain about that. Yes, we should all be decent human beings for sure, but you and me live in the world. NE: I’m working through it. I’m not sure if it’s morally defensible at all to engage in artists’ work that have done it, but I still do it, and now my problem is that I find myself doing something that I find morally indefensible. HA: We’re all complicit. I don’t know what the answer is.

NE: Tell me more about the feature film you’re working on. HA: We [my business partners and I] finally got some funding from Telefilm. I’ve written about twenty film scripts since I started writing, and the first ten were just terrible. But you’ve got to write the crap out. And then the next ten were starting to get pretty good. I’m working on a movie called Le Corbeau, which is my least political story ever. This is a balls-out action/adventure story. It’s about a Nigerian safe cracker who comes to Toronto to crack a safe, along with two other thieves. They do the job, it’s successful, but my man is a little too smart for his own good, realizes that the two thieves are actually cops who are thieves on the side. And he points this out to them, and rather than taking it as the innocent observation that I think he intended it as, they take it as a threat. The rest of the movie is basically a run for his life. Buried in the subtext are examinations of race and class. You’ve got two white cops chasing after this Black man and using language like, we should have lynched him when we had the chance. At the same time, because of Godhead, I got the opportunity to create a television show for Time Warner, which I’m very excited about. It was in about the space of six weeks it was like, you wanna do this, you wanna do this, you wanna do this? I was like yes, yes, yes, and yes! I was getting a little greedy, but hey man, it’s been a struggle for the last 20 years, so finding a little success coming my way, I’m just going to grab it all as fast as I can. I’m creating a show called 1033 which is about US cops who go over to Israel to train, and they learn apartheid-style policing tactics when they’re training in Israel with the IDF. And when they come back home, they bring that training with them. It’s an examination of why there’s so much police violence and the rise of the police state in America, and in Canada by extension. The reason it’s called 1033 is for the well-known program in the States that allows excess military equipment to be distributed to police agencies for use locally. You’ve got military-grade equipment being deployed on the streets, which is crazy. It’s a cop drama about that kind of stuff, martial law, it’s going to be cool. And the other thing that’s going on is I think there’s going to be a Godhead TV show, because people have been reaching out about doing a show about the book.

NE: What’s the deal with you and global politics? HA: It’s just the world that we’re living in. We’re living in a globalized society and the influences of the world are coming to bear at home. I grew up in the ’80s, and the South African apartheid era was at its height, back in the mid ’80s. That was something that was going on daily in the news, and that affected me even though it wasn’t something that I was experiencing. We’re experiencing a very low-grade version of that here at home, but not as overt as what was going on over there. At any rate, it was something that was on my mind a lot. I bought into the propaganda that apartheid ended in South Africa and therefore everything is hunky dory, only to discover as I become a bit more aware, that kind of mindset is being perpetrated even today. And it’s something that I want to explore. It gives me an opportunity to delve into the roots of it and see and understand how it evolved, why and how it’s being perpetrated today. And hopefully, if not to provide an understanding of how we can avoid these kinds of things, but at least shed a light on it to make people a tiny bit more aware that it’s going on. As much as people want to think that the grander political world doesn’t have any bearing on their everyday life, it does. It totally does. NE: Would you ever work on Canadian social issues? HA: Absolutely, yeah. The reason this is set in the States is because it was Time Warner that came to me. But if the CBC came to me and said do something politically minded, I would be thrilled to do something along those lines. It would probably examine a lot of the same stuff because what’s going on with the cops is something that’s been bothering me quite severely over the last several years. I was really grateful that this opportunity came out of the blue, because it allowed me to take a very deep dive into a subject matter that I’ve been wanting to examine to some extent or another for the last five years or so. It would probably be more of the same, just cops out of control. In Toronto. NE: It feels like your work is intensely personal, you write about what you’re interested in and what you want to explore more. How personal is Scream Queen? HA: That was very personal. I’m a different person then I was when I drew that book. There was something going on with me at that point that I needed to exorcise (laughs). Here’s the thing about that story: Scream Queen was originally short little stories, like 30 pages or something like that. It was just intended to be an interesting psychosexual horror story. Then I did Sand & Fury. I had a fair bit of cash in the bank for some work I’d done that year, and I had some time that I could do my own thing for a little while and not have to worry about raising cash for a little bit so I said on a whim, I’m just going to do this story. So, I sat down on my couch on a Monday morning and I just started writing. I didn’t have much of a plan. I had vague notions and I just started writing. And I always plan my stories out very thoroughly before I script them but this one, I just went at it. And a week later I had this finished story. I’ve always liked dark, sexy, scary, nasty stories and I just wanted to tell one. I just wanted to get that thing out of my system and do it. And I had never seen a Black female figure in a horror film like that before. I wanted to see what that would look like. It’s difficult for me to examine what my motivations were, because it just poured out of me so fast.
I’ve always liked dark, sexy, scary, nasty stories and I just wanted to tell one. I just wanted to get that thing out of my system and do it. And I had never seen a Black female figure in a horror film like that before.NE: I also don’t really want to know either. It’ll change the story, and it’ll be weird. HA: It’s always weird. NE: At the end of Scream Queen: Sand & Fury, you shout out Nalo Hopkinson for calling you out for not doing your research. What’s the story behind that? HA: I love Nalo Hopkinson, she’s so smart and cool and awesome. I published the original Scream Queen and I was at a signing when Nalo, bless her heart, came up and said hi to me. She mentioned the phrase “bean-shìdh.” And I was like, what is that? I’d never heard that combination of words before. And she gave me a funny look, [like] it’s your character dumbass. It’s the Gaelic phrase for banshee. And I felt like I should know that. I’m pretty good with my research. I don’t like to write until I’ve really sat down and done research. This one I didn’t really care, I knew enough about banshees, I just wanted to use it as a vehicle. It never really occurred to me that I should have delved deeper into the folklore. When she said that, I was like, goddamnit. I felt like I had betrayed myself and my ideals. That’s why I wanted to let her know that I appreciated her having called me out because that taught me a lesson. Always do the research. Even if you want to make it up, that’s great, but you should have the foundation of research to build upon. So, thank you Nalo.

NE: King, to me, is a work of documentary, and you had mentioned once that you had done journalism: how does that inform your work? HA: I’d always been fascinated by journalism. One of my earliest interviews was with a gentleman from the Toronto Star. I remember him asking me questions, and writing notes, as you’re doing and there was something about it that I found so captivating. I love the idea of rather than doing research to support a story, I like the idea of researching and then letting the research form the story. So when I got the opportunity to do King, I realized that this was the chance to dive into that water a little bit. I would have to do all this research and figure this guy out, and he wasn’t going to be one of my creations, even though I think that ultimately when you do this kind of work they do become your creations. But he didn’t start off as a creation, he started off as a real person that I was trying to learn about. I really wanted to practice journalistic standards to a certain extent when I was working on King, even though I understood that a certain point I would have to become a dramatist again and subvert the facts to fit the narrative, because it is a comic book. But it was great to do that research. It was great because when I did that book, and I had to do all that reading and I had to interview people, when I finally got the chance to be a journalist, I felt like I’d already done the training. King was my j-school. NE: Speaking of research, there are so many references incorporated into Godhead: there’s the Bible, there are movies, there are a few tributes snuck in there too—how do you organize it? HA: I’m a magpie. As much as I like to engage in the real world as much as humanly possible, I’m also just a pop culture magpie. I’ve been absorbing science fiction references and action movie references since I was a child. So the stuff’s in me. One of the many benefits of doing Godhead was that it was a playground to regurgitate things that I had appreciated over the years. I was constantly layering Easter eggs, other films that I’ve liked, shots from certain science fiction films, props from other films, lines of dialogue. Just little things here and there that I grabbed and put into my personal mélange. I’m curious to see who catches what, you know what I mean? It’s a litmus test for who they are and what they’ve experienced. A few people have come up with stuff that I didn’t actually intend!
I’m a magpie. As much as I like to engage in the real world as much as humanly possible, I’m also just a pop culture magpie. I’ve been absorbing science fiction references and action movie references since I was a child.NE: What was the starting moment for Godhead? HA: It came from two different sources. This was around 2000, 2001, and at that point I was splitting my time between being a comic book artist and being an illustrator. I was doing posters and magazines and stamps—I did a couple of stamps I’m proud of—just a bunch of shit. I wanted to get into corporate illustration. My plan was to put together a mailer, a little printed booklet that would have examples of your work and you could send it out to various art directors. I was going to put together a thing called Corporate World, maybe 10, 15 corporate-style illustrations. At the same time, I realized at that point that it had been eight or nine or 10 years since I had created a story of my own from scratch. I was getting that urge, I’d been working on my King book for a long time, and some other commissioned stuff that I’d done. So, I was getting that urge to create again. I was thinking I would do a crime story that I was going to call “Morris Minor.” And I knew that it was going to be a ’70s, New York City-inspired, Blaxploitation style story. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but I lost interest in doing the corporate mailer because that corporate element and the crime element started to come together into the same project. I started thinking about that, and at the same time, September 11 happens and North America’s thrown into chaos, and suddenly there’s this huge martial atmosphere going around. We’re about to go off to Afghanistan and then we’re going to go off to Iraq and there’s all this footage on the news all the time of mujahedeen training. There’s an image that made it into Godhead of the mujahedeen running up a mountain without their shirts on. In the snow! And they’re doing somersaults in the snow to prove how tough and manly they are and shit, and I’m like whoa, these guys are crazy. Those three things were in my mind. I’ve got this idea about this guy, a young Black man, he’s involved in some shit, he’s involved with this corporate guy, I don’t know what the hook is though. I was having a shower, and I thought: a machine to talk to God. Those words popped into my head. I immediately rejected them. My grandparents were heavily Christian. And they tried to instill Christian dogma in me from childhood, and I’d always rejected it because if they had not been so overt about it I might have embraced it a little more, but they were always like God! God! God! God! God! I had to back away. I immediately rejected the idea, but it was one of those ideas that once it’s in your brain it won’t go away. So those were the elements that were swirling around, and eventually Godhead emerged. I had loved science fiction my entire life, but I’d always done stuff that was either very contemporary thriller-based crime, political stuff, or historical stuff, recent history. But I had never indulged that science fiction thing. I mean it was Star Wars that brought me into this—I need to do a spaceship or a robot or something. So I thought this was a perfect opportunity to indulge, and that’s what I did. It was great fun.
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Ho Che Anderson (b. 1969) is a Canadian cartoonist living in Toronto. Anderson was launched into the comics scene with the publication of his erotic story I Want to Be Your Dog in 1990. Next, he embarked on the project he is best known for, King, his comic series on the life of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. His other works include the graphic short story collections Young Hoods in Love (1995) and Pop Life (in collaboration with cartoonist Wilfred Santiago, 1998), and the graphic novel Scream Queen (2005).