EPISODE 227: Get Shooked Part 1 with Rodney Barnes
TRT 33:42
CLIP I shall curse you with my name you shall be Blacula!
Blacula rises from the grave yet again and just in time for Black History Month.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to listener supported KPBS Cinema Junkie, I'm Beth Accomando.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Writer Rodney Barnes has resurrected William Marshall’s vampire from the 1972 Blaxploitation film for a new graphic novel, Blacula: Return of the King. Barnes is a writer and producer with TV credits for The Boondocks and Everybody Hates Chris, and comics such as Killadelphia. He has also earned top honors from the Peabody Awards, American Film Institute, Writers Guild of America, and NAACP Image Awards. He will be appearing on a panel about horror at Black Comix Day on February 12 so I thought it was a perfect time to sit down with him to discuss his career and horror.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Even as a kid Rodney Barnes was attracted to the idea of tackling Blacula and remaking it to allow the character to develop in new ways. Barnes will be appearing on a panel called Get Shooked: The New Masters of Horror with fellow writers John Jennings and Kevin Grevioux. All three will have stories in a new horror anthology called Shook. So I am doing a three-part podcast featuring each writer.
I need to take a quick break and then I will be back to speak with Rodney Barnes about all kinds of vampires, Black horror, and juggling a multi-hyphenate career.
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BETH ACCOMANDO Welcome back to Cinema Junkie. Today we are going sit down with Rodney Barnes, whose latest work is Blacula: Return of the King. But Barnes is a prolific artist who has navigated a career that encompasses TV, comics, and films. So I wanted to know how he juggles all that.
RODNEY BARNES It's a good question. I get up at three in the morning to juggle those three things, ask myself the same question. I think a lot of it had to do with the order of how those various worlds open. For me, opportunity wise, I wanted to be a comics writer first. That's what I tried, but I wasn't able to get that door to open, and so I made my way to Hollywood. And what I'm known for primarily is being a television writer, and that was the door that opened first, and then I started doing movie rewrites as well. And so those two worlds were primarily what I was known for and how I, you know, kind of keep a roof over my head. And then probably two thirds into my career, I got an opportunity on the TV show runaways, the Marvel show runaways, and made it known that if the opportunity were ever to become possible, I'd love to write a comic. And the powers that be from Marvel television connected with Marvel publishing and said, hey, we've got this guy. We like what he does. Maybe you should give him a shot. And they did with the falcon. And that was my first comic book opportunity. And it went okay, but it opened the door. And once that door was open, I sort of continued to knock on it, and more opportunities came and so on and so forth. So, you know, the comics world, like virtually the other two as well, are difficult to maintain and to make a living off of. So you sort of make a commitment with yourself that once you're in it, if you love it, you just have to figure out a way to keep going. And I love it, so I keep going.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And what was it about comics that you were so attracted to and made you want that as kind of your primary outlet for your creativity?
RODNEY BARNES
When I was a kid, my mother and this was way before computers and all of that, she was a school teacher, and when she would do her lesson plans, she would go to the public library. And this was before the days of babysitter. She would take me with her and she would put me over in the pen where they would keep the kid books, the baby books. That was maybe four or five years old. And I was never really attracted to Dr. Sue Sakirius, George, or any of those books. And I knew where I don't know how I was drawn to them, but like a weather vein to water, I knew where the comic books were. Don't know how, don't know why, but there was this box full of comic books. And there was something about I don't know if it was like the graphic storytelling, superheroes, whatever it was. And mostly it was Neil Adams artwork. And Neil Adams is like a legendary artist in the medium. And there was something about it that just grabbed me and wouldn't let go. And I started to love going to the library because I wanted to see these books. And for a while, I thought this was the only place where they had comic books. Like, I wanted to come back here again and again and again and fell in love with the idea of superheroes. And it made me want to read. It made me understand story in a very primitive way, but it made me understand story. Like I knew what was going on in the stories in a more mature kind of way, like good versus evil and all of this stuff. And so a love affair was born. And in a weird way, as I was getting older, comics evolved and they went from the sort of, if you remember the Adam West Batman pile band, like Kitty, as my grandfather would call them, funny books. It became more mature and more evolved. The storylines and the themes from those Batman superhero stories to Alan Moore's, more evolved. Watchman Envy for Vendetta and Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories, which were walk with mythology and that type of stuff. And this was happening as I was getting older. So comics were becoming more mature as I was becoming more mature. So there was a reason to keep this connection going as I was moving through life. And so it just stayed. And as I became a professional writer, it sort of was a natural evolution to want to sort of make them now instead of just being a fan.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And you are going to be on a panel called Shook, which does focus more on horror. So what is the attraction of the horror genre and what do you feel you can do within horror that maybe you can't do elsewhere or that just attracts you?
RODNEY BARNES
Well, in the comic book space, I think if there's a name that I've made for myself, it's mostly as a horror writer. My biggest book in the horror space independently is called Philadelphia for Image comics that I write and created along with Jason Sean Alexander, who illustrates the book. And I also have another book out right now called Blacula, who is from the legendary Black exploitation character from my own company, Zombie Love Studios. And I always felt like in a horror space, the African American culture was never really represented on an equal footing. I grew up loving the Hammer films and the Universal monsters, and I never really saw that representation until a little bit with the Black exploitation of films, but never really until now. We're getting into this sort of renaissance period with Jordan Peele films. And maybe here and there in different places, lovecraft country, even though that's as much fantasy as anything else. And so when Shook came along, it was like this was an opportunity to work with a bunch of accomplished writers to lend my services, guys who've written horror before and love it like I do as well. And hopefully add something substantive as well to their works and hopefully do some.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Quality stuff and talk about Philadelphia just for people who may be not familiar with what it's about.
RODNEY BARNES
Yeah, the primary storyline in Philadelphia, I think the thing that probably stands out above all others is there's a father son relationship where it takes place in Philadelphia. The father is a homicide detective who is on the trail of a serial killer. He gets killed in that process. His son, who is a Baltimore, he's estranged from his father, he's a Baltimore beat cop. Comes home to close out his father's fairs, finds his father's journal as a kid, wasn't allowed to read his father's journal, finds his father was reading his father's, reading his father's private thoughts and notes his father was keeping notes about the serial killer. Comes to find that his father believed that the serial killer was a vampire and thinks his father was crazy but wants to one up his father since his father is dead and decides to close out the case. That his father or solve the case that his father couldn't solve, goes down that rabbit hole and comes to the same conclusion that maybe this is indeed a vampire. But if my father was killed by a vampire, there's a good chance that my father is a vampire too. He digs up his father, opens up the coffee, spoiler alert, and his father says, what took you so long? And the two of them now are on the trail of a vampire serial killer who happens to be John Adams, the second President of the United States, who's looking to overtake America and change it into the face of what the Founding Fathers at one point hoped America would be and not the oligarchical dynamic it has become.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And then you are returning to vampires in a very different way with Blacula. And what was the attraction of kind of going back to this 70s Black exploitation film? William Marshall was great as Blacula. What was the attraction of tackling it there? And what kind of things, what kind of themes were you hitting differently within that vampire genre?
RODNEY BARNES
Well, Blaxploitation in general, if you look at it, there's a romantic aspect to Black exploitation in the sense that it was the first time you saw Black actors carrying the narrative in a lot of different genres. But a lot of times it didn't have great scripts or great budgets, and they had to make the best of what they had to work with. And so there were some really cool ideas in Blacula, but there were some problematic elements as well. And I think William Marshall and some of the other actors in there were really great actors, and they made the best with what they had. Even as a kid, when I saw the movie, I always said, if I ever had the chance to do this again, I would take out this, I would do that. I would change some things around. And underneath Black exploitation, there was this subversive idea of what was happening in society that was like the civil rights movement and the pan African movement. There was this feeling of revolution that was under all of them with the afros and the fashion and the music and just there was this tone that was there and if you look at what's happening in American society right now, there's a similar thing with the Black lives matter movement and a lot of the things that are happening within our society at this moment. It might not be as cohesive, but there's still an element of discourse within our current dynamic. And so I felt like if there was a way to speak to a little bit of what's happening today and build a bridge between yesterday and today, there was a way to make some really cool ties between the past and the present.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now, Blacula, sorry, your version of Blacula. Oh, my goodness. Sorry, your version of Blacula has not come out yet. I haven't had a chance to read it. But the film had some interesting ideas to it in terms of how he's turned into a vampire and the fact that he is this, like, African it looks awesome, but he was an African king. And there were these layers to it in terms of history that kind of gave Blacula a very different kind of context than what the Dracula legend that Brahm Stoker had created was. So how is that kind of playing out in your comic?
RODNEY BARNES
Well, in the movie, and that was the thing that I dug about it the most. The idea that you enter with as prince mama Waldi comes to count Dracula, who is a dignitary and says he doesn't know he's a vampire. And he says, can you help us stop the slave trade? We need resources. And instead of helping him, count Dracula says, not only am I not going to help you, I'm going to turn you into a vampire and kill your wife and all these bad things, and I'm going to slap this name on you, Blacula, and your curse forever. And then the movie makes this turn into now you're going to be this predator, and I'm going to send you. You're going to ironically end up in South Central, and you're going to start biting people, and you're going to have this pristine cape on, and your afro is going to get bigger every time you become feral. And you're going to be this cool guy, that beginning idea of him with Dracula and the politics that are under, that always thought was really cool and something that could be built off of. And I sort of get into that place. I sort of go from there in his revenge on Dracula and sort of being haunted by the idea. With my vampires both in Philadelphia and in Blacula, the part that's human, the faded memory, the echo of who you were as a human being still remains. It's like the body is almost like a prison. And even in immortality you're haunted almost how I think trauma haunts us, the childhood trauma haunts us as adults and we carry it through life. I think in my vampires I try to do a similar thing. You're haunted by the idea of who you were as a human being, even though you need that. You have this thirst for blood and you're going through I always felt like the whole vampire mythos and movies I know books have done it for a while, that you're kind of leaving a lot on the cutting room floor of just having this entity want blood. And I know there have been a million different ways to do vampires. Some do karate, some are really cool, some go to the sexy store and get leather and dance. But to be able to get into more of a psychological thing with the Anne Rice ones have done that at times as well. And I love those and I love the new AMC show as well. I try to go more into that path of a psychological, spiritual thing of where we're haunted by the people that we were and the things that we become. And it's hard to really shake the people that we are because I think oftentimes we wrestle with life and we wrestle with the people that we are trying to overcome ourselves. And being a monster and having immortality kind of like being rich doesn't help you overcome yourself.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Now something like Blacula taps into a little bit of history and a little bit of the real world. But you have a new book coming out, Crownsville, which really sounds like it's tapping into kind of what I would call real world horrors that kind of feed into the horror genre. So talk a little bit about kind of how real things in the world that are horrific can feed into horror writing and how you can kind of deal with those things.
RODNEY BARNES
Yeah, I think a lot of your classic ghost stories come from real stuff and real history. And it's hard sometimes because certainly when you're dealing when you inject race into it, it becomes difficult sometimes because you don't want to exploit the idea of what people went through for entertainment purposes. So you have to add a degree of empathy into the storytelling in order to bring a purposefulness to it. But in the case of Crownsville, crownsville is a real mental hospital, or was a real condemned now, but was a real mental hospital right outside my hometown in Napoleon, Maryland, one of the first Black mental asylums, where there are a couple of thousand unmarked graves of some of the Black mental patients that were there. And it's a ghost story of what was happening, what happened to a lot of people who unfortunately were, I want to say incarcerated there because many weren't treated there. They were experimented on. It wasn't like a mental when you hear the word hospital, you think treatment, you were treated to get better and to be released as a better version of yourself. But back during that period of time, many were exploited. And what happened was I was always intrigued by this place. And I went and spoke to a couple of people who worked there and some of the security staff, and they would tell me about things that they heard that went bump in the night and buildings they wouldn't go into and things that they saw. And it was intriguing to me because I like that kind of stuff. And so when I started to look at some of the case files of some of the people and things that they saw that correlated with things that they talked about, I was like, there are some stories here. And so when I looked at stories like The Shining or stories that were sort of mired in history, I was like this sort of the haunting of Hill House or some of the other classic ghost stories. It was like, this walks right within the tradition of that. So why not take a stab at telling that type of story?
BETH ACCOMANDO
And it seems like doing something like that can also use comics or films or television to kind of open people's eyes to things that they may not know about. Because I know that in Lovecraft Country, especially the TV version of it, there were things that were brought up that I think a lot of Americans are not aware of or at least not aware of from a Black perspective.
RODNEY BARNES
Yes, I think certainly for Watchmen as well, which was another HBO miniseries, a lot of people didn't know about the Tulsa Race rides or that in World War II when the Nazis were dropping leaflets about to the Black soldiers, trying to get them to use racism as to why they shouldn't fight them. And, you know, just little anecdotes about history that we don't get in the school system. And history is such a hot topic right now, again, within the politics of today that anytime you can invoke that type of subject matter within pop culture and within entertainment, it sort of adds, as you were saying, a little more of some layers to it and makes it a little more substantive. It's just sort of disposable fast food type throwaway entertainment. And so to me, it's fun when it works and it's good and it gives them something to satisfy, but it also makes it the type of work that makes it feel like it's purposeful and makes you feel good about the work that you do well.
BETH ACCOMANDO
It also seems that people can often be resistant to ideas or information that come at them in certain ways where it's more preach to them. And when you do it through an artistic way or creative way, it seems like people are much more open to hearing some of those messages or getting some of that information.
RODNEY BARNES
Yeah, I think probably if you present someone with 1000 page book and you say, here, this is all the history you need to know, a lot of people probably wouldn't read that book. But if you make it a TV show with the music and actors and all of this and humor in it and some things that sort of make it easier, you can kick back in your chair with some popcorn. Probably got a better chance of having people digested.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And you are going to be at Black comic's day here in San Diego. Can you talk a little bit about the panel itself and your co panelists? Do you have any idea what kind of ground you might cover or what are you looking forward to possibly talking about?
RODNEY BARNES
I don't know, I just look forward to sitting there. I know Kevin Grevioux and Keithan and my good friend, the legendary John Jennings is on there. I look forward to sitting next to him and I think everyone just being able to sit there with a bunch of guys who do what it is that you do. Talking about this subject matter, I mean, I really appreciate it. I had fun writing the story that I wrote the last March, unique story. I don't know how much I can talk about it. It hasn't come out yet so I'm afraid to give any spoilers but I've seen a lot of the work. I think it's a beautiful book and I look forward to folks to see it and I look forward to being there at the panel and talk to me.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And this is being crowdfunded correct.
RODNEY BARNES
It is being crowdfunded. I think it's closed now.
BETH ACCOMANDO
It seems like there's more avenues for artists to get their work done and out there and by having a project like this crowdfunded, do you feel that it gives you guys a lot more freedom to kind of create exactly what you want?
RODNEY BARNES
Oh yeah, it's one of the reasons why I started my own company as well. It's like anytime you don't have to ask someone for permission to do a thing and you can just sit down and create however you want to create and tell your truth. You're more apt to just that idea of expression in and of itself doesn't mean it's going to be more tardy or more bold if it were to come from a different publisher. But there is an idea of freedom that represents what all of this is supposed to be about. And I think when you talk about Black creatives coming together in an idea of making something that's honest, you would like to think that they had a free, open hand at doing this. I mean, literally, that's what I had when the guys reached out to me, when John and Bradley and they all just were like, would you be willing to write a story? Sure. It's like, all right, can you make it twelve pages? Sure. All right. How long do you think it will take? A couple weeks to okay, all right. Get it back to us. I mean, literally, that was it. And no one said like, I'm writing a couple of stories. Like, I do the Mandalorian for Marvel and Lucasfilm. A lot of notes, and nothing wrong with notes. I get notes from everywhere else that I work, but literally, I turn my story in and artwork was sent back to me. And that's not to disparage anyone who does give notes. But there is this thing when you look at the nature of what the goal is, when you're talking about speaking about a subject, when you're talking about race and you're talking about horror and you're putting those two subjects together, and there's a certain sensitivity that's involved. I can see if I were to be with some publishers, that they might be a little sensitive about that idea, what you might say, or that could be problematic, but being able to have a free and open space, to be able to create what you want, say what you want to say. And to see the final product, I think, is a beautiful thing. And I think it speaks to how far we've come as a society and also as a comics community. To be able to be in a place where you can just make a thing and for us to be able to have this conversation and to have created a book that I'm proud to be a part of.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And you mentioned getting artwork back for what you'd written. Talk a little bit about how you work with an artist and do you kind of let them have kind of a go at it first, or do you like to give a lot of instruction in terms of like, hey, this is how I kind of see this looking? What kind of a relationship do you have with those artists?
RODNEY BARNES
I email a script to an artist. That's it. I wish I could say, no, you moved to the student? No, I emailed a script to an art. I know nothing about art other than to say it's pretty I mean, in the world of comics, the thing that I respect the most as much as my name goes first, and writers get the lion's share of credit for stories, and I understand that part. The bulk of the work, to me and the thing that I'm most in awe of are the artists because they create the world. They create the palate. They take you to the place, they physically take you to the place. I might be the tour guide, but they are the ones that create the world. So I would never insult an artist in telling them what I think that they should do. As far as art is concerned. If they're there and the editor hired them and they believe in them, and I signed off and said, that's cool. I believe in them too, in this case. And then really, all of the cases I've been blessed to be in from the beginning of my career to this point been blessed with some incredible artists to work with. And so, no, I don't really put my two cent in very much. Sometimes someone will say, what do you think of this color scheme? Or what do you think of this? Just for my opinion on something. But as far as graphic storytelling is concerned, I might say, splash page here because I want the effect of turning a page and you want the shock of that thing. Like, I'll lead you there within the script, but as far as the actual look of a thing and all of that, no, I let the artists do that thing.
BETH ACCOMANDO
Have you ever been surprised by what they come up with?
RODNEY BARNES
I'm always surprised. They always top everything that I do. There's never been a time when this is not a real word. That's the funnest part of what I do, is you write these words. I have a script in front of me for my book Monarch that comes out in February for Image Comics Shameless Plug for issue five. And I never know when I'm putting these words on a page what's going to come back. I know what's in my head, but you never know what the art. And it's funny. It's a cheat in a way, because I'll say, for instance, Alex Lynn is the artist for this book. And I'll say something like, it's an alien, and the alien is going to a world. And I'll say something like, we're on this planet and we're at the top of a vast mountain, and he looks out into this world that is a myriad of colors and shapes and sizes that looks like the Amazon rainforest or something like that. That was twelve words. And what comes back is the sprawling universe. You know that this person has sat down for days and drawn and crafted and colored and whatever, I'm going to get credit for that. But this person with all of this talent drew this masterpiece of art. So who am I to come in and say, no, that tree should be to the left. No.
BETH ACCOMANDO
And you mentioned earlier that there's something of a renaissance in Black horror going on right now. So does this panel feel particularly appropriate? And do you feel like we are at a moment where there's an opportunity for more of these kind of films and books and TV shows to come out?
RODNEY BARNES
Yeah, for sure. I think the whole thing and the beauty of panels like this and conversations like this and just conventions in general and things like this is it's a way to get us all together and talking about this so that the world knows that we all exist creatives. Black men, Black women. That we know we exist, that we form alliances and that we're able to support one another and across the board, certainly in general, comics creatives, not just of color in general, but in particular, if that matters. I want everyone to be able to be supported. But I do think that there's an emphasis in the moment that there's so many stories that haven't been told that we can uniquely tell. And I love being able to see. I had this moment when I was right in Philadelphia and my daughters came in the room one day and they were watching me write, and I got my comps. And for previous issue, I was flipping through and I was looking at the art, whatever. My daughter looked over and said, what do you think? It's pretty. But it was an unenthused pretty. It was like he was saying, because I happen to be sitting here and I'm their father, and I pay for them to go to school. And I was like, what? I said no. It's really pretty, dad. And I said, there's something there's something there. And I said, well, it's no girls. And I didn't think about it. There weren't any girls. And it wasn't like, purposefully. I said in my mind I wasn't going to put any girls. I just hadn't thought about it. It's like there's this whole John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, there's this guy thing, and father and sons crying in each other's arms as they bleed and this thing I hadn't thought about it. And so I created another book because my daughter said that in my ear that day. Neither Haas Nightmare blog that centered on female protagonists because my daughter said that in my ear that day. And again, I'm sure that had I not been a me and I were a woman, that would have been something that may have been at the forefront of my mind. And so it needs to be more than me, is the point that needs to be women. There needs to be people of other groups. There needs to be people across the spectrum who see things from different points of views and can add those points of views to the conversation. And there needs to be groups cons of all types of people, rainbow colored cons. That everybody gets together within their groups that speak to them, and then we all need to come together and have our groups speaking to one another. And so I think it's a beautiful thing.
BETH ACCOMANDO Well, I want to thank you very much for talking about your work and about the upcoming Black comics day.
RODNEY BARNES Thank you for talking to me and hope to see you there and get you a Blacula.
BETH ACCOMANDO
That was Rodney Barnes, his new graphic novel is Blacula The Return of the King. He will appear at Black Comix Day Sunday Feb 12 for Get Shooked The New Masters of Horror. I’ll be back tomorrow with my interview with John Jennings.
That wraps up another edition of KPBS listener supported Cinema Junkie. Remember to check out Cinema Junkie’s archives including a collection of podcasts highlighting Black films and filmmakers over the past century. You can find videos and more podcasts at kpbs-dot-org-slash-cinema-junkie.
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