Interview: Mike Sales – Creator of Southside Nefertiti

As soon as independent comic creator and publisher Mike Sales (AKA M Torez) said the words “single mom superhero”, I had to buy all three issues of Southside Nefertiti. Didn’t need to preview it or look past the cover because Nefertiti Jones was already a superhero I could get behind.

Sales was at Comicon 2007 with The Antidote Trust, an organization of indie creators in the comics industry. Here, Sales talks about Southside Nefertiti, the influence of hip hop on his work, and race in the comics industry.

Mike Sales: Southside Nefertiti is the story of a woman who is a single mom and a superhero and how she struggles with trying to balance being a mom and her family responsibilities with being a hero. How she tries to deal with her ambivalence toward being a hero because she didn’t seek it. It was kind of put on her because her mother was a superhero and when her mom died it was expected that Nefertiti carry on with the mantle.

PRG: What was the inspiration for Southside Nefertiti?

MS: My mom, who was a single mom when I was younger. And a lot of my friends’ moms, who were single moms. I grew up kind of blue collar in my hometown and a lot of my friends didn’t have dads or only had dads later as we got older. But there was period when I was a young kid where single moms were my biggest influence in my life and a lot of my friends lives.

As I got older and started seeing people with kids, struggling with raising kids, I thought back to those single moms in my childhood who took care of their kids and me and all our friends at the same time and I had so much respect for them. It struck me that they were heroic in how they were able to make ends meet, make kids happy and provide for our needs by themselves.

PRG: Do you write and draw your books?

MS: At the beginning I wrote and drew the comics. But as my responsibilities expanded I couldn’t do it all, so I hired artists. I’ve put out three issues and found that each artist brings different skills to each issue. One artist was really good at showing the dramatic and angsty side of Nefertiti’s life, particularly with the conflict between her and her aunt. Nefertiti’s aunt thinks she can raise her son better than she can. My latest artist was very good at action. I brought him in to punch up the action and blend his manga style art with the hip-hop style of art.

PRG: Do you work off of a full script?

MS: I do a full script. In my writing process I start with a plot script but my artists get a full script. I send them the plot script first so they can start researching for reference art and I’ll put in notes about the tone. But the final script they get is full with dialogue.

PRG: Who have you looked up to in this industry as you were growing in your skills?

MS: I would say a lot of people. Because I’m kind of a left brain-right brain person, I have one set of people I look to for writing and another for art. From a writing standpoint I’d say Brian Wood, Mark Millar, Bendis, those kind of guys who write more dialogue influenced stories. Stories that are a little more dramatic even though they’re superheroish. From an artistic standpoint, it these artists who do hip-hop underground comic art like Jamar Nicholas. Also Dawud Anyabwile who did a story called Brother Man about 15 years ago. He was a huge influence.

PRG: How about outside comics?

MS: I listen to a lot of hip hop music and I get stories from songs, usually older songs and a lot of more politically influenced hip-hop like Ice Cube or Public Enemy. What ends up happening is that I weave these political themes with semi-feminist themes into my stories dealing with gender issues. One example is Nefertiti’s partner, who is a man. Because she’s one of the strongest people in the community, he gets picked on a lot and called her pet. He doesn’t have any powers, but she does and they both go out and fight. It’s sort of inverse in that Nefertiti is the Batman and the guy is the Robin. So he’s a guy that everyone looks at as if, if it weren’t for Nefertiti, he wouldn’t even be out there fighting.

Stuff like that is stuff I pull from the intense gender back and forth that’s always going on in hip-hop. Some stories have a political or economic slant. Some of the stuff I used to listen to from Public Enemy dealt with economic and social tension. In Southside Nefertiti, there’s a storyline about people starting to worry that they’re getting pushed out of their neighborhoods because the city is becoming prosperous again after a long downturn. So the people in her neighborhood want her to do something about the rising real estate.

As a superhero who normally doesn’t deal with things like that, her thing is bigger than fighting people and beating people up. They want her to be a superhero and they want her to be an activist and they want her to take care of their kids, so it’s a much different departure. My stories have more a human, grassroots aspect that I get from hip hop.

PRG: What you’re talking about reminds me a bit of Chuck D and his projects. We want him to continue making music, but he’s also grown a whole new audience for his activism and politics with his Air America Radio show…

MS: Sometimes I try to pull myself back because there was a point where we all used to love Chuck D and then there came a point where he started to sound like our old, angry uncle who was just fussing at us all the time.

It’s tricky as a storyteller because you don’t want to become that guy. I have to remind myself that people are looking for entertainment from my comics first. It’s good that I can weave these storylines in, but people want to be entertained. They want good art and an entertaining story- if they can get that then they may take some preaching and politics on the side too.

PRG: How are you distributing your books? Are they in Diamond?

MS: We’re about to approach Diamond. My distribution right now is very grassroots. I literally call black book stores, do my pitch, and send them a press kit and they do consignment deals with me. I also speak at public libraries and art festivals. Thats the main way I’ve been promoting. I’ve noticed that the reception in those places is a lot stronger and a lot more positive than in the mainstream comic shops right now. There’s not really anything like this in the mainstream shops.

PRG: That’s what caught my eye about it.

MS: As I’ve gone back and revisited the comics industry, I’ve noticed that sometimes there’s a resistance to change in terms of people being receptive to new stuff that’s challenging. I’m going to approach Diamond, and I will be very interested in seeing how the reception is. I mean, People were mad when they killed Hal Jordan! People don’t like a lot of change in their comics. Or something different or challenging.

PRG: How much of it is change? I’m looking at this whole line and am reminded of Milestone [Media]. They had some big names behind it and it seemed like DC didn’t know what to do with something that wasn’t cookie cutter, mainstream, superhero stuff.

MS: I agree. That’s the other thing that scares me about approaching the mainstream comic market. There’s a lot of hands that touch a project from the time it leaves my hands to the time it reaches the consumer at the comic store. It’s gotta go through Diamond, its gotta go through the comic shop owner who’s going through Previews. They’re used to Batman, Superman, Justice League. It may take me a while to penetrate with something new that they should give a chance. That’s one of my goals- to penetrate that barrier and give them something new and fresh that could bring them a whole new audience to their shops. When I go to arts festivals, kids eyes get wide because they don’t even know that comics like this exist.

PRG: It seems like female characters don’t make it in the market and black characters don’t either. The only black character I can think of who has his own book right now is Black Panther.

MS: Black Panther was controversial when Reginald Hudlin started writing it. From a businessman’s standpoint, I know it’s important to me to touch as many markets as I can, so I want this market too. But, characters of color in the mainstream market have had a hard hard time. The reality of the situation is that it costs money to go through Diamond. So as a businessman and independent guy, I have to weigh how much money that may cost against my potential success.

PRG: Gay comic creators court the “pink dollar” and market directly to gay bookstores and other friendly outlets. Is your grassroots promotion similar and, if so, is there a big enough market for that or do you have to turn to the web and sell individually?

MS: There’s another gentleman named Korby Marks who put me on to this. Black expos. Black Greek organizations. At those conventions, they snatch the books up. Part of it is that there is an excitement for them about a black person doing comics because in their minds, that doesn’t exist. Black guys who take their stuff to the expos – and I’ve been told this by every veteran who’s doing it – they sell 10, 20, 30 times what they sell here at Comicon. There’s not a normal infrastructure like with the mainstream industry. But there is an underground business establishment of people who still appreciate art and reading. It’s the same people who supported Tyler Perry and Zane and all these black artists who had to find alternative ways to sell their stuff because the mainstream didn’t believe there was an audience for it. And there is.

You find that every person who does something new gets told the same stuff and they go out and do it. Terry MacMillan was told the same stuff – black people don’t read novels. So she had to do the same stuff I’m doing. They call it the Chitlin Circuit. She had to do the literary Chitlin Circuit – black expos, book fairs, black Greek stuff. When she started selling a lot of books, people started to notice and found her and wanted her to sign with them. Tyler Perry was the same way. People said black church goers don’t watch theater. So he did these black plays in Atlanta, Houston, DC., all these black cities and they sold out. He started doing movies and, the next thing you know, he’s doing a sitcom on TBS.

It’s probably gonna be the same with us. For us, Milestone is the example of what the reception would be for us. We may be wrong because that was a decade or two ago. We’ll do mainstream, but we’re not putting all of our eggs in that basket. It’s a market for us, but we’re also trying to explore this other market that we know works because we’ve seen people do it.

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