Belly of the Beast
So … let’s have a chat.
When I started making The Utopian comics back in 2009, I didn’t really think much about the diversity of the cast. I was drawing from a lot of my own experiences at high school in Las Vegas in the 1990s, and many of the characters were based on people I knew, while others were fully imagined but based very much on real experiences. When T-Rex was introduced, it was as a tertiary character, a member of a gang who was fighting with a guy from a rival faction (based on another real experience in school). He happened to be black (the other guy wasn’t). It wasn’t inaccurate to portray a banger as black. But it was stereotypical, especially in a world I’d created where the lead characters were mostly cis-gendered white people.
So when I launched The Utopian Foundation a few years later, I was more conscious of that, and wanted to somewhat course-correct. The cast now better reflects the real world (I’d like to think), and not only features diversity culturally (reflecting my own multicultural upbringing), but also stars a character bound to a wheelchair, which was definitely something I saw lacking in comics outside of, say, Barbara Gordon/Oracle for a while at DC Comics (Professor X doesn’t count; that dude can astrally project and control minds–plus he’s been cloned or healed like a dozen times).
I am also aware that turning T-Rex into the “former gangbanger turned social activist” is cliche as hell, but again, it is inspired by a lot of actual stories I’ve heard and read, including those told in The Interrupters. Plus, much like Nate Aguila going from a one-dimensional meathead jock to a more fully realized person, I wanted to bring more depth to T-Rex, showing him caught between two worlds but never really feeling part of either.
(Also, I was watching The Wire while writing these strips. So, yeah, there’s a lot of David Simon going on here, too.)
Anyway, long story short: I’m just letting these characters tell their stories and trying to be as earnest as possible. And hopefully tell an engaging story(ies) that people of all stripes can connect with. And if not, well, at least I tried.
For people who never read the original Utopian:
1. T-Rex used to run with a gang that sold methamphetamine on campus. He found out that someone was undercutting them on campus, so he gets into a fight with a member of a rival gang that runs heroin.
2. James Douglas (the titular Utopian) breaks up the fight, and later asks T-Rex for time to investigate before it breaks out into a full-fledged war. T-Rex grants it because James comes out to him as the Utopian (who had already done some impressive things).
3. James determines that it’s Coach Johnson undercutting on the meth, slinging drugs to pay off a debt.
4. With a confederate, he watches Nate confront Coach Johnson over selling meth to his younger brother Luis, who pulls a pistol out of the visiting team office desk. In an attempt to save Nate’s life, James jumps in front of the gun just before Coach Johnson pulls the trigger.
5. As James lays dying, he sees Coach Johnson being arrested.
6. The Utopian as a comic ends.
The rest of this happens off-panel:
– T-Rex realizes that the white boy (James) sacrificed himself to make sure that a gang war wouldn’t break out. (This might have happened before the end of The Utopian, but James wasn’t around to observe it so it couldn’t be shown.)
– T-Rex leaves the gang and, using his knowledge of how the gangs conduct business, gets involved with the Utopian Foundation Center for Conflict Resolution.
We don’t have specific information on what his thought process was that caused him to change his mind. Perhaps it was seeing an uninvolved white boy on a mission to keep things from getting worse/improve things that he could improve give up his life to keep the peace on campus, mixed with his knowledge that business is worse when there’s a war going on, that caused him to think that keeping the peace through conflict resolution was the only way to avoid destroying lives that relied on the (illicit) businesses to stay afloat.
(BTW, PJ: there’s no thumbnail for T-Rex showing up in the Characters section? Also, thanks for tagging the characters!)