How I first got selected for doing this specific issue of the Oregon History Comics is because Sarah and I both - independent of each other – went to a talk with Jules Boykoff, Martha Gies, Kent Ford and Percy Hampton, in March 2010. That was my introduction to the history of the Panthers in Portland, and I found their story really interesting – especially in finding out about the social services that they set up and ran. I grew up in a time and place where if you ever heard of the Black Panthers it was presented in the context of them being a racist militia that wanted to overthrow the government and subjugate whites – I was savvy enough to know that description sounded like propaganda to discredit the group, but I didn’t know what they were really about, what they represented, or the hows and whys of their existence.Once it was clear that Sarah and I were working on the Black Panthers piece, we received some really helpful information from Jules Boykoff and Martha Gies, and we found some good resources poking around online. The most important experience for us as a whole, though, was getting the opportunity to go over to Kent Ford’s house and sit down and talk to him for an hour and a half. That conversation frames the whole book, and a lot of his narrative from the conversation appears in the book. Sitting with Kent was a huge help for me, because I really had the chance to study his facial movements and his expressions. He’s also one hell of a nice guy.One of the things that makes me a slow cartoonist is that I get downright obsessive about details. For the two-page spread depicting life on Williams Avenue, for instance, I found a photo of the intersection from 1934 and another from the 70s and worked off of those. You can find those pictures on the City of Portland’s Archives site, and if you look at them, you’ll see that the buildings I’ve drawn were really there. I’m pretty sure that I could have just drawn some random buildings and everyone would have been fine with it, but it would have bothered me a lot.

There’s also all sorts of other details that I try to work into the book, or make an honest effort about. I went to the Portland Police Museum in order to get an idea of what the police uniforms looked like (they aren’t entirely accurate in the book), and to try and figure out what type of cars they used for police cruisers. I couldn’t figure out what the PPB was using as a police cruiser during the late 60s, so I went with a Plymouth Satellite, which I had learned was a car that the LA police had used. I’ll probably find out the actual make and model someday and it will drive me nuts, just like every other anachronism or inaccuracy I notice months from now.
What kind of obstacles did this project present to you?

The biggest obstacle I encountered in making this piece was in thinking about the aspects of race and racism that exist today and how I might be subconsciously complicit in those attitudes, which is a difficult thing to self-examine about yourself. I’m a white guy drawing a book whose main characters are African-American, and I spent a lot of time being concerned about this. I think all cartoonists, at some level, are caricaturists whether we like it or not. I have a deep dislike for caricature, because I feel like it’s about exaggerating physical details of a subject and that’s a path that leads directly to racial stereotypes, so I was really self-conscious about how I was drawing people. I finally realized that in my drawing style, I’m more concerned about portraying people’s personalities and emotions than their physical attributes, and I hope that is what came through. Towards the end of drawing the book, I read an article that talked about how people have a difficult time drawing members of different races because our brains are wired to focus on the most obvious differences between the faces of individuals, which leads to that “they all look the same to me” attitude towards members of different races. I think I’ve been successful in avoiding that problem, but it’s still something I worry about.

Another big difficulty is that I’m drawing pictures of people who are still alive, and since I’m controlling their facial expressions and body language, I get uncomfortable about how that person might feel about how I drew them. It’s a big reason why I generally won’t draw pictures of friends of mine – it ends up being more of a reveal about how I see that person than of what they actually look like or how they see themselves. It’s a lot easier with my “City of Roses” comics: city founder Francis Pettygrove’s been dead for over a century, so he’s not going to care how accurately I drew him reacting to a situation. Saying that I overthink this sort of stuff is probably a major understatement.

This isn’t really an obstacle, but one of the things I realized towards the end of drawing the booklet was that we probably could have easily doubled the length of the book and still had parts of the story that we had to leave out. Hopefully people will read the book, and want to go find more out on their own, because there’s a lot of really fascinating events and details to be learn more about.

What do you think can be learned from revisiting the Black Panther Party? Why is it important to keep stories like this one alive?