Cory Thomas, Trinidad's most successful comic book illustrator, is talking to the T&T Guardian from his home in Atlanta, Georgia. It's a city that has become a vibrant hub of cool America with its hip hop scene producing artists like 2 Chainz, the New York Times calling it "hip-hop's centre of gravity" and the notorious reality TV show Love and Hip Hop bringing lots of attention to a city rapidly expanding and subsuming the suburban sprawl.
But Thomas doesn't see much of that."They call it Black Hollywood, but I'm mostly home so I don't really know," he chuckles. "It's the best of both worlds I guess–a combination of metropolitan cities like New York with a southern, slower pace."Does he miss out on seeing the grit and glamour because he's chained to his desk drawing comic strips?
"It's a combination of that and me just being a homebody," he laughs again. His soft-spoken shyness is precisely what one would expect of someone immersed in the world of comics. While the term comic book nerd doesn't exactly apply to Thomas, he certainly gives the impression of happily retreating into the fantasy cartoon world that his characters occupy.
He's produced a rich range of characters to occupy those imaginary worlds. His piece de resistance, Watch Your Head, ran for ten years in US newspapers, farmed out via syndication companies. Now he's taken the series online on his own Web site where the strips appear twice a week, along with a full archive of the originals.
Watch Your Head is the tale of five young college students ("composite characters" of his friends) at a historically black university, and their awkward negotiations with becoming young adults on campus. The three boys and two girls–of black, white, mixed and Latino ethnicities–get themselves tied up in failed romantic situations, pratfalls, misunderstandings and hopelessly calamitous attempts at student social life.
One of the main characters from the original strip is clearly part autobiographical–his name is Cory: "a hyper-exaggerated nerdy version of me"–a big-hearted young man who finds himself perpetually besotted with girls just out of his in bigger, cooler guy's arms at the school dance.More recently, Thomas has linked up with bestselling novelist, James Patterson, and has illustrated his children's book Public School Superhero.
This is Patterson's new direction after selling over 300 million thrillers and romantic novels for adults and breaking the world record for becoming the first writer to sell over one million e-books.Thomas doesn't visit Trinidad that often; he's not the perennial Carnivalist. All that exhibitionism just isn't his idea of a good time. And he doesn't appear to have any plans to move back any time soon. He seems happy to become a permanent part of T&T's drip feed brain drain though he seems surprised to be told he has an American accent.
"It's half and half really," he protests. "See when I go back home, surrounded by everybody, then my natural Trinidadian accent comes out."
His move to Atlanta–whose Caribbean community, and indeed food, can be found in a neighbouring suburb city called Stone Mountain–happened when he got accepted on a postgraduate degree course in illustration and graphic design at Savanna College of Art and Design (Scad). After he'd completed his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering from Howard University in Washington DC in 2001 he realised that his childhood dream of drawing comic strips was something his talent could turn into a reality.
The engineering had been intended for a career in oil and gas, but he was already betrothed to the drawing pen and the artists' sketchpad.
Back in Trinidad in his school days, Thomas' father, a policeman, would come home after long shifts with comic books for the young Thomas to read. He used these as inspiration to imitate the styles and make his own comic creations for his friends in class at Presentation College, San Fernando.
Batman is his favourite comic series, but his days of collecting back issues are over now; his mum cleared out his old copies a long time ago but he still finds himself poring over the online forums and message boards like an obsessive.
"I'm not really sentimental about that [physical] stuff," he says of his now departed collection. "If I want to read or buy something I'll get a digital copy. There's a comic store five minutes from my house but I've never even been there. I just download them and delete them when I'm done with them."
Another statistic of the digital revolution, Thomas is completely bought into the technological age (although he does hang on to music tapes and CDs from the 90s). DC and Marvel copies have online versions and subscriptions, he says. You can even access them for free if you know where to look, like all illegal file sharing piracy.
"Growing up in Trinidad we had all the American stuff and all the best of the European like Tintin and Asterix.So my dad would bring home anything he thought I would like and eventually when I got my own money I started buying my own."But what Trinidad lacked was dedicated comic stores. Instead they had their own sections in bookshops and drugs stores. Perhaps slightly less romantic for enthusiasts but just as exciting for kids.
On his website, seethomas.com, he explains how as a child he "substituted comic books for friends and quickly became one of the pre-eminent six-year-olds in my field with the introduction of my ground-breaking Comet Cat comic series."There were other anthropomorphic characters like Micro Mouse which Thomas would draw in panels, ripping out the centre pages of his school exercise books.
But with just six or seven other classmates who were into comic books, Thomas wasn't reaching the kind of audience he would later achieve."My parents encouraged me to draw. They bought me supplies and if I needed more I would ask them for it. They didn't really care what I was drawing but they encouraged the talent," Thomas says.
And although his art teachers supported him, Thomas says it was never presented to him as a professional possibility, more of a "fun hobby. Something you do on the side. Growing up in Trinidad nobody's telling you to become an illustrator, you wanna be a doctor or lawyer or engineer."The realisation that he could make a living from drawing and reach a sizable audience came at Howard at the school newspaper.
"They wanted someone who could do editorial cartoons and stuff like that."It became popular and, with a friend's encouragement, he began compiling a portfolio and sent them out to the syndicates to get wider circulation and have his work in multiple newspapers. At his peak he was appearing in the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune and Boston Globe as well as smaller regional papers.
Now he has stopped doing newspaper work and sees the way forward as children's illustrations.The amount of time one invests in drawings is time better spent on publications than on daily sketches.I ask how long it takes him to draw strips and he laughs.
"For me it takes longer than most," he says. "If you look at a lot of comics they're how I started out–less details, more simplistic–meanwhile I think I use a more detailed style, different camera angles it takes more brainstorming rather than just like a Dilbert of four panels with characters looking at each other. It takes me about a day."
Perhaps an element of moving out of national newspapers is the problem with establishing the kind of fame and recognition when the long-standing strips never change.Peanuts, Doonesbury, Dennis the Menace and Blondie are all still going in the US. Andy Capp, Fred Bassett, Hagar the Horrible are still going in the UK.
"That's a major conversation here," says Thomas. "Blondie started in 1950-something. The original creators sometimes die and the children carry it on so people ask is their room for new people with fresher ideas. It was hard for me and it's hard for newcomers now with all of these legacy comics clogging up the space."
He puts it down to the older demographic of newspaper readers to whom editors try to cater for their tastes. The lack of black faces in comic books and superhero series is another thing Thomas and other black and Latino artists recently protested."I was straight up told that certain editors wouldn't want black characters because there aren't black people in their demographic."
But Thomas isn't looking back. The future is an exciting place. He's currently working with the publishers of Patterson's children's books to make his own original idea.And he's taken control of the digital model with Watch Your Head."There's more control over who reads it. I can sell merchandise. There's direct interaction with my audience. Newspapers put it out there and hope for the best but this way I get an audience that's more enthusiastic."
