Artist

Dawud Anyabwile (Formerly David Sims)

Hometown

Philly, PA (now residing in the ATL)

Bio

Dawud is best known for creating the Brotherman series with his brother Guy. The comic took off selling more than 750,000 copies worldwide in the early 90s. Brotherman, which showcased a hero of African-American decent, was more Mad magazine than Marvel choosing to satire the average comic rather than emulate. This book set the foundation for Dawud’s multimedia company, Flipbook Productions, as well as opened the door to numerous ventures including work with Cartoon Network, MTV and Nickelodeon. Dawud is currently building up his productions and continuing to develop his “Drawing From The Soul” art direction series aimed at young children. Dawud is an old school head at heart preferring the sounds of PE to the radio of today and dabbles in a little beat making of his own.

Notable Works

Comics: Brotherman

Animation: Daria (MTV), Wild Thornberrys (Nickelodeon), Harvey Birdman (Cartoon Network), Drawing from the Soul (Flipbook)

Website: Flipbook Productions

What you been up to man?

I’ve been freelancing doing stuff for Cartoon Network and various other jobs here and there as I rebuild my operation. Cartoon Network is based here in Atlanta and all the cable stations like CNN, TNT, TBS etc. are under Turner so I’ve done stuff for Turner Studios. [I’ve done] commercial spots for TNT Thursday Night basketball, a lot of those little spots that you see on Cartoon Network for Dexter’s Laboratory and Powerpuff, and just recently I started working on Harvey Birdman as a storyboard artist. I just completed my first episode about the Jetsons, so if you see a future episode where they meet up with the Jetsons I storyboarded that. I just finished that last week. I have to wait for them to get the scripts before I start up on the next show. So it’s been cool. I learn a lot of things but I’m still trying to build my own empire.

So how did you get started in comics?

I first started airbrushing shirts in Philly where I’m originally from. I used to airbrush in the malls and then after [that] I had my own airbrush shop. Throughout the 80s, we had a few shops in North Philly and Chester, Pa and I was doing that for a while. Brotherman evolved in 1989. I had an airbrush shop in East Orange, NJ. The black expos started up in New York in ‘88 and I wanted to be there the following year. I was just trying to think of something different to do and I noticed no one had comic books. I figured comics would be a good avenue to go because a lot of people had the same ole same ole and I started working on the Brotherman comic book. Brotherman was a character in one of my sketchbooks. Me and my brother was running the shop in Jersey and we was like let’s see if we can get this comic running up here. When we came out with the comic book it took off right away. I kinda had all my market research done in the 80s doing airbrush and I felt all a comic book was encapsulating all the [that] stuff in book form. With the growth of Brotherman thru the 90s, we got to the point where we moved over 750,000 books and that was on our own without major distribution. Our distribution consisted of black book stores, comic book stores, black book store distributors, and individuals on the street who had stores under them. We were using our own tactics.

For people that don’t know what is Brotherman?

It started as a parody of comic books because I wasn’t a comic book fanatic. The last time I really collected comic books was when I was in elementary school. By the time I hit like 7th grade, I had burned my comic collection. In 6th grade I recognized how the stereotypical images were in comics, my father hipped me to all of that, and at that point I didn’t know how to draw black people. I had “How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way” and copied out of comic books. I didn’t realize I didn’t know how to draw black people. My father kinda challenged me on that. I was angry at myself like I don’t even know how to draw my own mom. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t do it. I would look at the features and I couldn’t figure out why they still looked white. Then finally, when I started recognizing all the stereotypical images it didn’t have any more value to me. My father had the fire going one night and I just threw them all into a fireplace. I was up to about a 1000 comics man. I had Inhumans # 1, Defenders, all that stuff and I just didn’t care. I had Superman vs. Muhammad Ali but it didn’t have any more value to me. I looked at it deeper than the comic book work. By that time hiphop was coming around in ‘77-‘78 and Parliament Funkadelic’s “Flashlight” album came out and I saw the Overton Lloyd artwork. That’s how you do a comic book to me. That’s when things change. When I got into high school, I started djin and established my own style. I moved beyond comic books and started getting into fine art illustration and drawing my friends. When we’d go to parties certain things would happen in Philly. Like say you went to a party one weekend and someone had their equipment stolen or it was a wild scene I would remember coming back to school and draw it frame by frame like this is what happened and everybody would just be laughing. That to me was the early stages of how I conceptualized doing comic books because it had nothing to do with super powers it was just telling our stories with pictures. I always like graffiti but it wasn’t really formulated like a story. So basically years later when Brotherman came around I was already doing stuff like that but it was my first time packaging it, printing it and selling it for two dollars each. Over the years, I started to establish the direction of Brotherman. Brotherman is basically about a man battling social apathy in this fictitious city called Big City. When it was started off as a parody we were looking at things like how in comic books you always have your hero and he’s always an upstanding citizen and battling villains and all that. [So we were like] let’s have this guy be so upstanding they don’t even take him seriously but he’s not playing. That’s how it started. It was more human related initially and by the time it got to the 10th and 11th issue the story became more about how Brotherman’s, who’s name is actually Antonio Valor, father was a activist in Big City and he observed his fathers actions. He saw his father get locked up for doing the right thing and stuff like that. His father was a major influence in his life and he wanted to be like him. But in his era times changed and he liked comic books so he was like I’m gonna do what my dad did but I’m going to actually put on a costume and go out there and try to correct the things that are wrong in the city. There’s even more development than that that’s going on now that didn’t come out in issue # 12 where we stopped. #12 was supposed to show the link from when he was a teenager to when he became Brotherman. Those things I can’t disclose yet because we signed an option for a movie deal so I don’t want to disclose it because the movie may be where the final story is told.

What can you tell us about that?

We don’t have any release date or anything yet. We are in the early stages. The deal was pretty much just signed a couple months ago so we are in the story development stages. What we are doing now is translating the concept to film and we’re trying to get a good script for it. That’s a challenge right now because Brotherman has to go Hollywood but still retain the whole concept of the comic book.

Do you have any actors in mind to play any of the characters?

Initially I was always thinking of it as being a lot of unknown people to make it feel surreal but at the same time if a big name actor wants to be involved, I’m not going to say no. I haven’t really thought of who is going to be who [though]. As far as Brotherman is concerned, I can’t think of any actor that can play him. I think he will have to be an unknown the way I picture it.

Can people still get the old issues?

A lot of them are sold out so what I have is 2,5,8,10 and I just sold out of 11. It gets kind of expensive reprinting old books and I’m trying to focus on new product development so I didn’t reprint the books. I’d rather invest in a compilation book that has all the books in one and then resell that with a new illustrated cover and the history of Brotherman, like all the things that was going on [at the time] because we got into a dispute with Toys ‘R Us. We got a lot of news clippings on that.

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Posted by Halftime on Sunday, December 14th, 2003 and is filed under SLICK TALKIN'.