A Quote by Larry Wilmore

It used to be that the black comic figure had to have this bravado and always showed strength. — © Larry Wilmore
It used to be that the black comic figure had to have this bravado and always showed strength.
I used to joke for years that I was a black man. I adopted the black culture, the black race. I married a black woman, and I had black kids. I always considered myself a 'brother.'
Then is when I decided to take it to Archie to see if they could do it as a comic book. I showed it to Richard Goldwater, and he showed it to his father, and a day or two later I got the OK to do it as a comic book.
I used to go to the comic store all the time. I was into comic cards, which are essentially baseball cards for comic book heroes. They have these cool stats on the back. I had collections of these things. I still have a lot of my collection at home.
I used to always say - and I think a lot of artists think of it this way - that when you see a black figure, the way the critical establishment operated, you can only imagine that figure having a sociological value. They never say the ways in which their aesthetics were equally worthy of consideration.
They used to call me Firefly when I was a little girl, and I always tried to figure out why I was being called a firefly. I was really black, black, black from the sun. After being in Jamaica for 13 years, my eyes were really beady and white, and my skin was really black. I must have really looked like a fly. My eyes looked like lights, like stars.
Most people give Kennedy a passing grade, a good grade on the Cuban Missile Crisis handling, but what they don't realize, if he had had strength, if he had showed strength before, there would never have been a Cuban Missile Crisis.
I had a great deal of arrogance and a great deal of bravado, but I think the bravado was brought on by a huge insecurity.
I came in with a very specific idea about what a Doctor Strange movie should be, which was rooted in the comics, and I thought it should be as weird and as visually ambitious compared to modern comic book movies as the comic was when it showed up in the '60s compared to other comic books at the time.
I get paralyzingly nervous a lot of times, so I tried bravado. The way I dress and carry myself, a lot of people find it intimidating. I think my whole career can be boiled down to the one word I always say in meetings: 'strength.'
I remember when Langston Hughes used to write a column in black newspapers around this character Jesse B. Semple. He always used that as a voice, sometimes in comic ways, of having everyday people's voice come through this common folk hero, who was an ordinary working guy. He would talk about anything from police brutality to the Korean War. Those kinds of expression and identification are no longer prevalent in our popular culture.
None of the bravado he usually showed was there. I guess there was "usually" and then there was being held in the grip of a really ripped, really tall, and really pissed off Russian guy.
I always thought that Seth [Rogen] was a fun, caustic, bombastic, sweet, underdog-type of person that I would root for the way you used to root for Bill Murray or John Candy in "Stripes." Seth had something that very few people you encounter have: he had a writer's mind and he had his own comic point of view.
It may be that a majority of superheroes are white males. But that's because they used to all be white males, except for Wonder Woman and Black Canary and maybe one or two others. Now there are Spanish, Puerto Rican comic book superheroes, black superheroes, and women superheroes.
But I always had in built strength. I used to do like push ups for three hours. It's building up that core fitness and stamina.
I had to get used to seeing Samantha Bee around. I had to get used to seeing Jon, like, getting a bagel, and to John Oliver, and all these people whom I had seen on TV. Colbert would sometimes drop by. I had to get used to being a part of this multiple-Emmy-winning machine and being this 22-year-old black girl who was really green.
The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.
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