Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The Journey Hometown journal.
[00:00:01] Speaker B: I also do want to tell stories that I know can impact culture in some way, shape or form, and also to appeal to a broad audience.
[00:00:10] Speaker C: Welcome to the hometown journal. I'm Mark Edwards. More than 24 million units of comic books and graphic novels were sold in 2024, with sales projected to reach more than $3 billion by 2032.
On this Edition of the hometown journal, we're going to meet a graphic artist that not only wants to use the medium to sell his stories, but but to introduce historical figures to a new generation through comic book animation. Dr. Baron Bell is a professor in the Liberty university school of communication and digital arts. His work, sound of the trumpet was featured recently in an exhibit in the university's art museum.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: I first got interested in graphic novels as a youngster, as most people have when you really don't have much else to do back in. I think it was the early 80s.
This is way before the Internet, so I really wasn't a great reader of books. But I love comics.
My mind was. Was open to new worlds, to superheroes like the x men and Superman and Batman. And as an artist, the colorful pages and the just wonderful layouts that kind of inspired me as an artist to want to do that myself.
And it was kind of like the beginning of a journey. It was like the spark that was lit in my spirit and in my heart to really want to do that for myself.
[00:01:51] Speaker C: How did that desire then lead you.
[00:01:53] Speaker D: To the project that were talking about today on the hometown journal, and that is the graphic novel titled sound of the trumpet. And this is really about the work and the life of Frederick Douglass and then that relationship that he had with John Brown.
[00:02:13] Speaker B: Yeah. For many, many years, I'd been working in comics, doing all sorts of different types of Types of stories.
I think that after a certain point of doing, I would say not really Christian focused projects, there's something in my heart that was tugging to say, you know, you really want to be a blessing to the world. My wife had a part in that discussion, and I really wanted to start doing projects that I would consider legacy to leave something behind after I'm long gone.
And part of that was to determine, well, lord, I do want to tell stories that are God honoring, but I also do want to tell stories that I know can impact culture in some way, shape or form, and also to appeal to a broad audience.
And at a certain point in time, I think it was 2018, I started reading Frederick Douglass's autobiography. He wrote three of them. And I read all of them, and they're like page turners. I couldn't put them down. And I'm like, wow, this man.
How did I not know about this man?
I'm sure somewhere in my education I heard his name, because, of course, everyone kind of knows the name, but you don't really know the man unless you actually read his own words.
And it began another journey, many journeys that really kind of led me to want to somehow introduce Douglass to a new generation.
And I partnered with the Frederick Douglass Leadership Institute, probably like in 2021.
And we just kind of started this conversation about how do we. How do we do this? At the time, the. The leader of the Leadership Institute, his name was Dean Nelson, and he has since passed away. His dear friend.
And he, he. He himself had his first experience learning about Frederick Douglass through a comic book.
And that's where we found kinship.
And we partnered together on a project called the Runaway Plot, which is a chapter in Douglas's autobiography that we made into a mini comic.
And that was wildly successful. They're using it for outreach to this very day.
And then, of course, I wanted to expand more because I eventually want to do a whole, you know, three volume graphic novel set of his whole entire life.
But, you know, picking at it at the corners is fine too. Eventually I'll get there. That's in my heart to actually do that.
I ran across a friend of mine, Jim Morrison iv, and he's a producer director in la.
And he and his friend Dustin Green was actually there, were working on a John Brown Frederick Douglass movie pitch.
And I said, oh, that would kind of make a great graphic novel.
And so we all got together and, you know, I told them they. And they know, listen, I. I'm a believer. I'm born again believer. I love Jesus. And so anything I do has to, has to be from a Judeo Christian perspective.
And both of them agreed. You know, I think they both are on their individual journeys as well. And so we partnered together and I brought in a longtime collaborator, Daniel Hancock. He. He is my dear friend as well, and really my Bat the Robin to my Batman, or Batman to my Robin, either way, depend on the project, I guess. And he's like, yeah, let's do this. So he's collaborated on other graphic novels that we've worked on.
And yeah, we all four of us just put the shoulder to the plow and we were starting to do it.
[00:06:42] Speaker D: Where does it stand right now as far as the publication process? I know you had the display at.
[00:06:48] Speaker C: Liberty University where people were able to.
[00:06:51] Speaker D: Come by and view a lot of the artwork, the panels of the graphic novel.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: Yeah, that was a huge, a huge blessing to be invited to share.
We were actually at Liberty a few weeks ago doing a forum talking about impacting the culture through art and entertainment. And so we flew out there, the whole Sound of the Trumpet team, and we were able to interact with the students and the staff, faculty. And then later on that evening, we were there for the opening of the Sound of the Trumpet exhibit, which is absolutely amazing.
The project is currently still in production. We've finished about almost 25 pages of the book and the students have been really kind of like the driving force. They're my interns from Liberty, from all different schools and graphic novel, I mean graphic design, illustration, even 3D modeling. I have some students also in the the loss, the law school talking about contracts and all that other good stuff. And so it's a real good way to get them involved in a real life process that is actually going to bear some tangible fruit in publishing.
We have been in discussion with a distributor and a larger Christian publishing house that we're in conversation with right now to actually acquire it and then release it on their schedule. Those talks are still kind of ongoing, so the actual publication date is to be determined at the moment.
[00:08:41] Speaker C: You're listening to the Hometown Journal. And this week we are discussing the lives of Frederick Douglas and John Brown as told through the graphic novel Sound of the Trumpet. We'll be back with more of our conversation with the project's creator, Baron Bell.
[00:08:56] Speaker A: It's good for your family.
[00:08:57] Speaker B: That's a big thing too. Oh, yeah, I have kids.
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[00:09:10] Speaker B: We listen to it all the time.
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Now back to more of the Journey Hometown Journal.
[00:09:17] Speaker C: Mark Edwards back with you along with our guest, Dr. Baron Bell, a graphic artist and professor in the Liberty University School of Communication and the arts. Dr. Bell is the creator of a graphic novel still in production titled Sound of the Trumpet. The project is a telling of the life of Frederick Douglass and his working relationship with John Brown. Students in the school have been working with Dr. Bell to bring these historic characters to life in graphic novel form.
[00:09:47] Speaker D: What's been the reaction of the students that have been working on the project? Whether that's in the design, the writing, and what they have said to you about what they've learned about Frederick Douglass?
[00:10:04] Speaker B: It's been amazing.
My team has become almost kind of like a little family. We all, we meet once a week to have team meetings, to go over new artwork, to discuss strategies, and they ask questions. I oftentimes invite the executive team from LA and Brandon Hollingsworth, he is a dear friend of mine, actually. He is one of the members, one of the owners of Brainy Pixel Studios. They're a Christian animation studio based out of Alabama.
And they are also part of our advisory board along with Douglass leadership.
Another gentleman, his name is Kevin McGarry.
He is with Douglass leadership and also with an organization called Every Black Life Matters and he's based out of California.
And so they often will chime in and come into our team meetings and really help to mentor the students. The students love it and they really are learning a lot about the process. But I think one of the other blessings for me is like you were alluding to is learning about the history of Frederick Douglass and John Brown.
One of my interns mentioned the fact that she was talking about Douglass to her grandchild and there was deep, really good discussion about who this man was. And I'm like, that's the point. That's the point. We're passing it on to the next generation and then they can pass it on to the generations after that. It's been an all around wonderful experience. The students really are getting, I think, way more than they bargained for.
And I let them know, if you show me that you work really hard and you work well with a team, there's no way that you wouldn't be able to find work outside of this. If I have it to offer.
[00:12:09] Speaker D: When you look at graphic novels, you look at comic books, where are they right now as far as popularity among.
[00:12:18] Speaker C: Readers as a medium?
[00:12:20] Speaker B: Well, it's a complicated question. I think. I think of it in two ways. Number one, many companies consider graphic novels as intellectual property to mine for new ideas.
If you look at many of the top selling movies, Marvel, DC and even with, you know, Disney, DreamWorks and other companies, many of their top selling movies, they were either based on or a spin off from a graphic novel publication. I want to make the distinction between comics and graphic novel. A graphic novel is basically a very long, thick version of a comic. They're the same things, but graphic novels are just much, much longer.
It's really been kind of like a gold mine for intellectual property to develop new ideas. I was reading an article the other day saying that comics and graphic novels for these large companies, they're like research and development.
You could they're cheap to produce and you can easily tell where the market is by looking at the, the profit margin of any, any individual title.
So if you look at some of the biggest blockbusters that have come out, you see the Spider Man, Batman, Superman, those are like the top selling comics, you know, in the comic industry.
So that's kind of, you know, in a way it's kind of flipped the idea of what a comic is.
Actually comic sales nowadays, they're very.
You don't really get a whole lot of upside with a comic book sale.
And so that part of the industry has not been lucrative ever since back in the 90s when there was this massive speculation going on with comic book sales and you always buying the number one comic and whatever. And so that's kind of like it changed ever since the bubble burst. And then, ever since then, comics have been trying to just really ip, produce production.
Except for when you consider manga.
Manga is the top, the apex predator of comics these days. And if you really want to make a lot of money, you produce manga.
I think in terms of culture, you can just kind of see and you can see in our culture where comics have been diverging away from culture, I mean, and from traditional values, traditional ideas, and you can see that. I think that's part of the reason there may be like a backlash with comics. You can do that for only a short amount of time before a company starts to make concrete business decisions, saying this isn't a good business decision because people don't want this. We're kind of, I think, at a shift in the tide, in the change of the tide, I guess, where it's now washing backwards to the middle. And a lot of companies are starting to realize that if I want to make actual money in this medium, we probably need to listen to our fan base a little bit better.
[00:15:44] Speaker C: Today on the Hometown Journal, we are highlighting an upcoming project on the life of Frederick Douglass. The graphic novel Sound of the Trumpet is still in production, but the artwork was featured in an exhibit at the Liberty University Art Museum in February. When we come back, we'll have more with the project's creator, graphic artist and professor Dr. Baron Bell.
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[00:16:32] Speaker C: Welcome back. Mark Edwards with you along with our guest, Liberty University professor and graphic artist, Dr. Baron Bell. Dr. Bell is the creator of a soon to be published graphic novel on abolitionists Frederick Douglass and John Brown. It's a project he hopes will open conversations not only about history, but some of the challenges our society faces today.
[00:16:53] Speaker B: The one thing I want readers to understand is the Sound of the Trumpet or any book that I work on. I want it to be entertaining, of course, because no one wants to read a textbook. There's tons of them out there and I don't want to read a textbook when I'm reading a comic.
But I think that ultimately to understand that now is a pretty good time to tell a story like this because there's so many different things wrapped up in the story of John Brown and Douglass. They were both Christians.
They both have had a mandate from God, or they felt like they did, but they were coming at it from two completely different directions. Frederick Douglass was the pen, John Brown was the sword. How do you eliminate slavery? Well, that was a discussion to be had in the book is the relationship between a white man and a former black slave at the time was pretty groundbreaking.
They learned how to talk and have discourse, even if they disagreed.
This is a lesson we can learn from right now in this country.
I think that Christians need to be the ones leading the discussion from a Judeo Christian standpoint. That's how healing starts. And so that's what I want the readers to take away from this book. As Christians, how do we engage culture? Where do we meet them? This is not about preaching to the choir anymore. We've done that already.
It's now time to figure out how to be world facing in our discourse, coming directly from a Judeo Christian standpoint and how to do it constructively.
Race, especially slavery discussion engenders a lot of emotion and that's clearly understandable. But how as Christians do we counteract the knee jerk response of some people to want to demonize, call names, or to shut down discussion by calling someone a racist? It's not productive.
So we decided to do this in the form of a graphic novel because of course, graphic novels are more benign than just an all out discussion on, you know, a talk show or whatever. Young people would more likely gravitate to a graphic novel than to a textbook. Like I said before, and even in some graphic novels, you know, I've seen them written about Douglass or Brown. They do read like textbooks they're just sharing bullet points in times of his, in the time of history, without really putting flesh and bone on that particular person and making him feel like he's alive. We write Sound of the Trumpet as though it's an exciting adventure, but at the same time, really delving deep into these issues and these policies that were of great discussion at the time. It's time to have discussion. It's time to talk to non believers, to people who disagree with you in a very constructive way. And that's really what we're trying to get across.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: That is Dr. Baron Bell, the graphic artist and creator of an upcoming graphic novel on Frederick Douglass and John Brown. The work is titled Sound of the Trumpet. I'm Mark Edwards. Thank you for joining us for the Hometown Journal.
