In 1999, when Jiba Molei Anderson set out to self-publish his Afrocentric superhero comic The Horsemen, he knew the strikes against him. “I’m a black-owned, independent company doing a comic book about seven African and African-American characters,” he says. “I should have failed.”
The comic book industry hasn’t been kind to African-American characters and creators, stereotyping the former and marginalizing the latter. There’s been intermittent progress since the 1990s, with the success of black heroes like Spawn and Blade and the founding of the Milestone imprint (which DC Comics recently revived) by a group of black artists. But black character/creator combinations remain rare in an industry that, despite the growing diversity of its audience, still pitches much of its content to white, middle-class teenage boys.
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After graduating that same year, Anderson came to Chicago to study visual communication at the School of the Art Institute. The Horsemen began as part of his MFA thesis: an illustrated history of African-American superheroes and their connection to African mythology. “I was studying the religion of the Yoruba and how it survived the slave trade in Cuba and Haiti, with Santeria and so forth,” he says. He named each chapter for a Yoruba god and depicted the gods as superheroes. “I was like, ‘These concepts are too cool to throw away.’”
Anderson signed with the William Morris Agency in hopes of developing Horsemen as well as other properties. Nothing came of it. He worked with companies including BET on making a Horsemen film, but those deals fell through. In 2005, LA-based Spacedog Entertainment hired him as head writer and art director for Hip Hop Chronicles, a comics adaptation of rap hits that was shelved indefinitely after failed development deals with Universal Pictures and Vibe magazine (which folded last week).
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