I knew I wanted to create things,” Tony Weaver Jr. says of his youthful aspirations. “And I originally started with poetry.” The author of middle grade graphic novel memoir Weirdo (First Second), illustrated by twin creators Jes and Cin Wibowo, had no intention of breaking into the traditional publishing biz.
During his time writing, reading, and reciting poetry onstage at the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts in Stone Mountain, Ga., young Weaver fell in love with performing, which led him to pursue a career in acting. As one of only 16 students accepted into Elon University’s Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting program in Elon, N.C., Weaver expected that he would one day use his talents to tell stories onstage or on-screen.
It wasn’t until he sat down with his peers that he noticed something troubling. “People would ask me, ‘What’s your dream role?’ And I didn’t have an answer,” Weaver says. He attributes this to an overall lack of varied representation of Black youth in media. “The roles I wanted didn’t exist.”
Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Weaver found his way into fiction writing. But even then, publishing his work through traditional channels wasn’t something he was interested in pursuing. In his eyes, the industry perpetuated the problems that it claimed to solve, particularly in terms of diversity.
“The reason there aren’t many diverse characters is because so few acquired works feature them,” he says. It was this thinking that led to the creation of his superhero webtoon The UnCommons, which he publishes online in collaboration with his team at Weird Enough Productions, a community outreach program founded by Weaver.
Then, while giving a talk at a youth conference, he met Jennifer Gates, senior partner at Aevitas Creative Management, who encouraged him to reach out if he changed his mind about publishing traditionally.
“If I was focused on my ego, then I would’ve said, ‘Physical publishing? No thanks. I’m going to prove you wrong,’ ” he says. But if Weaver wanted to put the kinds of stories he wanted to see onto bookshelves around the world, he knew he had to take advantage of the opportunity presented to him. “It was about impact. I couldn’t pass that up.”
With that in mind, Weaver signed with Gates, who sold the script for Weirdo at auction to First Second editorial director Mark Siegel. The graphic novel chronicles 11-year-old Weaver’s struggles with bullying and managing his mental health, something the creator says he knew he’d get pushback on. While recounting an acquaintance’s assertion that the book’s “mature” themes were only appropriate for eighth graders and older, Weaver says, “I attempted suicide in seventh grade. If this book existed when I was a kid, and you weren’t giving it to anyone under eighth grade, it wouldn’t have helped me.”
While ego isn’t his primary motivation, Weaver can’t help but be a little optimistic regarding his future publishing career. “I want my face to be on the Black author Mount Rushmore,” he says, next to writers like August Wilson, Walter Dean Myers, and, of course, Jason Reynolds, the debut author’s mentor, whom Weaver lauds as a titan for kids of this generation.
Plans for future books—including the Weirdo sequel and his forthcoming YA fantasy series The Dream Frontier—are keeping the seasoned speaker busy. “I want readers to be able to find out about my work and grow up with me,” he says. “If a parent is looking for literature that is going to emotionally uplift their child, I want them to be able to walk into a store and find something with Tony Weaver Jr.’s name on it, from picture books all the way to YA.”
With so much on the horizon for Weaver in terms of traditional publishing projects, how have his feelings about the industry—and the space he’s carving out for himself within it—evolved? “As I grow, my passion becomes tempered with wisdom,” he says. “When I was younger, I would look at specific institutions and only see the problems. But the only way the system gets better is if somebody does something to shift it.”
It all comes back to impact, Weaver says. “With the career I’m trying to build, that’s the thing that I’ll create.”
