In middle grade graphic novel memoir Weirdo, educator and speaker Tony Weaver Jr.’s collaboration with twin artists Jes and Cin Wibowo, 11-year-old Weaver faces a gauntlet of obstacles as he struggles with bullying and managing his mental health while attending a new school. Weaver relies on his love of anime, comics, and video games to help him through the worst of it, but as the bullying intensifies, so too do his feelings of isolation. Following a suicide attempt, his parents to send him to a psychologist and a new, predominantly Black school, where he befriends like-minded “weirdos” and soon finds a place to belong. In a conversation with PW, Weaver reflected on how his childhood challenges, his founding of community outreach program Weird Enough Productions, and his experience writing his webtoon The Uncommons influenced his publishing debut.
How has your experience making Weirdo compared to creating The Uncommons?
The Uncommons prepared me to write Weirdo. So often when people say they want to be writers, they don’t think about what it takes to engage a community and what it means to build a readership. Making The Uncommons gave me a crash course in that, because my team and I at Weird Enough Productions think a lot about what our stories mean to the people who read them.
I actually found my agent, Jennifer Gates, through The Uncommons. When I started writing the webtoon, I was under the impression that this was going to be my thing, like Oda making One Piece. I’m just going to write in the Uncommons world forever—that’s the thing that people are going to know me for. But Jennifer heard me do some public speaking and said, “Have you considered writing a book?” I looked at her like she was crazy. I was like, “What do you mean? I’m already writing a book. It’s called The Uncommons.” She really helped me open my mind to some of the other stories I could tell.
In a video promoting Weirdo, you mention that anime saved your life. Can you elaborate on that?
Weirdo is the culmination of a promise I made to myself when I was younger and struggling with my mental health. I had felt disconnected from my community, which is a new framing that I’ve been using to describe how I felt. I think sometimes people say, “My parents didn’t care, and I didn’t have any friends,” and in some cases, that is a lived experience that a lot of people have. But for me, I got so caught up in my negative emotions that darkness shrouded me from the people in my life who would have helped if they knew what was going on. Darkness is very insidious in that way. In the time when I was isolated, anime was the thing that reached out and put a new narrative in front of me and let me know that the obstacles I was dealing with were things that could be overcome.
I vividly remember meeting Rock Lee in Naruto for the first time and thinking to myself, “I didn’t know it was possible for stories to be like this.” I felt like I brushed against my purpose. I experienced firsthand how a story could get someone while they were in the dark, like a rescue team, and I decided that I wanted to spend my life doing that—I wanted to use stories to save other people as an act of gratefulness.
Black youth are often excluded from fandom spaces by other fans and ostracized by their peers IRL for occupying such spaces, both of which you depict in Weirdo. How did these interactions affect your identity as a Black nerd?
It was difficult for me to find other people who looked like me who liked the kinds of things I liked, so it put me in a scenario where I have people who look like me telling me, “Black people don’t like that stuff. You’re not Black enough. Tony doesn’t want to be Black.” But on the flip side, I was too Black to exist in those other spaces. I think that what a lot of people end up doing is they start to embody some of the hate they receive. If somebody gets told they’re not Black enough, they go, “I don’t want to be Black anyway.” And then you get this vocal group of Black nerds who characterize themselves by the fact that they don’t like or fit in with other Black people. It forms its own self-hate. But Blackness is capable of encompassing all things. There’s no such thing as not Black enough. To be Black is to be free. We can be literally anything.
There was certainly temptation for me to go down that path, but I was fortunate enough to find community. Isolation begets more isolation, but community is where we find the answer. As an author, I try to create community with my stories, but there is a part of me that grapples with the question of, “What if the story’s not enough? What if your characters can’t open that door to people’s hearts? What if they still actively make the decision not to relate?” I don’t have an answer to that question, but it won’t stop me from trying.
There are several scenes throughout Weirdo of you attending therapy. Why was it important for you to show these moments?
A question that I get a lot is, “Did Weirdo need to be a graphic novel?” For me, the answer was always yes, because I think it’s important to show the image of an emotionally in tune Black boy going on a mental health journey because for readers who might not be Black, if they struggle with similar things, they have to identify with this kid who’s fundamentally different from them. I think a lot of people go their entire lives without having to empathize with someone who looks different from them or comes from a different life or background than them.
We see that a lot, especially in the anime community. There are so many characters in anime who are widely beloved that I asked myself, “If this character was Black, would they mean as much to the community as they do? Would you have the ability to empathize with them in the same way?” I think about the Forgers in Spy x Family: if Anya was Black, would she still be cute enough to be the anime community’s little sister, or would bias prevent that connection from taking place?
Progress and strength can come from vulnerability. When I go to schools and talk to kids, they’re all sitting there looking at me like, “Who is this guy? He has a cape on. I don’t really want to be here.” But soon, they’re quiet, they’re leaned in, they’re paying attention, they’re focused, and it’s because there’s a connection between us. It’s my hope that by being vulnerable and talking about the places in my life where I struggle, I can help other people who are struggling realize that they’re not alone, we can find common ground in that struggle and be able to connect and relate, even if there are core differences in the way that we look or where we grew up. I think the only way we get to answer those questions is through representation and stories that demonstrate that Black boys are capable of an emotional spectrum, that we deserve the ability to be vulnerable, that we don’t have to be tough all the time, that we need support too.
What were some key variables that led to your collaboration with the Wibowos?
I knew from the very beginning that I wanted the story to be colorful. I wanted to do this motif where, as young Tony’s emotional state changes, so do the colors of the world that he’s in. The twins took that concept and added nuance in ways that I didn’t think were possible. There’s a scene in chapter one where I’m having a conversation with my father, and I’m telling him about the terrible day I had at school. I say something like, “But this is what you wanted, right? You said you wanted me to be challenged.” And my dad is having this moment of, “This isn’t what I want for you at all. I don’t want you to define yourself as a person being challenged. I want you to define yourself as a challenger. It’s not about what’s pushing against you. It’s about what you’re pushing against.”
We went back and forth on the layout for that page five or six times, because my dad’s driving the car. He’s paying attention to the road and I’m in the back seat. And my dad always wore sunglasses, so I needed there to be a moment where I’m looking for my dad in the darkness of those glasses, and I can’t find him because of the separation and isolation I felt at the time. The twins came up with this really cool composition where he’s looking at me through the rear-view mirror, and there’s this metaphorical sense of me feeling like he’s looking down on me because of the way the mirror is angled and the way the light is hitting me. They applied so much rich visual detail and deliberate creativity to every page. They really cared about making sure that the art communicated the message it needed to.
Throughout Weirdo, there’s a motif of guarding your garden—that, without nurturing, people, much like plants, won’t bloom. How would you encourage others look to their own passions to foster strength amid adversity?
The concept of guarding your garden starts with acknowledging that it’s okay for you to be many things. When you think about a lot of media that depicts schools, we put everybody in boxes: popular kids are over here, jocks are over here, goth kids are over here, band geeks are over here, the horse girls go hang out over there. We isolate everybody. I think kids growing up seeing that stuff makes them think, “Which one am I? Which group do I need to be in?” But if you want to guard your garden, you have to first know that you are allowed to be a lot of things. You can love sports and you can love anime, and you can really like rock music, but also really like jazz.
When you look at your existence with no limitations, when you look at things with a broad point of view, you foster a healthy sense of emotional exploration. This world is open for you to engage and find joy wherever it naturally occurs. The first step to guarding your garden is keeping that open mind because, in a lot of ways, we tell kids that that’s not true. We don’t tell them that they get to decide what makes them happy. We tell them that how they do on a test, or what job they get, or what school they get into, is going to be the determining thing. But we have to equip them to think outside of that. The agency has always been theirs.
What’s next for you?
I’m always ideating. When people look at my career, I want them to say, “He’s writing all the time.” Between the books that have been acquired and the books that haven’t gone to acquisitions yet, I probably have six or seven other projects that are in various stages right now. First Second acquired my fantasy series The Dream Frontier—we’re in thumbnails for that right now—and Weirdo was part of a two-book deal, so there’s a kind of sequel in the works. I feel really grateful that I get to live a life that lets me sit down and go, “What story do I want to tell today?” and that there are people to collaborate with, there are people who listen to me and want to know how the writing’s going.
Weirdo by Tony Weaver Jr., illus. by Jes and Cin Wibowo. First Second, $22.99 Sept. 17 ISBN 978-1-250-77286-2; $14.99 paper ISBN 978-1-250-77287-9
