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Central Park Birder Turns Clash Into Graphic Novel About Racism
The impressionistic novel from Christian Cooper features a Black teenager who looks at birds through binoculars and instead sees the faces of Black people who have been killed by the police.
Christian Cooper became one of the nation’s most famous bird watchers when a video he filmed of his confrontation with a white woman in Central Park went viral. After Mr. Cooper asked her to leash her dog, she had warned him that she would falsely tell a 911 operator that “an African-American man is threatening my life.”
But before that Memorial Day encounter, Mr. Cooper was well-known in a different realm: as a pioneering comic book writer. Now, Mr. Cooper is using his experience in Central Park as the inspiration for a graphic novel, “It’s a Bird,” published by DC Comics.
In the graphic novel, which is digital only, he connects racism’s daily humiliations and deadly police brutality. The same day that he faced the woman, Amy Cooper — who is not related to Mr. Cooper — George Floyd would die in Minneapolis under a police officer’s knee.
The slim, 10-page story is impressionistic, without a real plot. It is the first in a series called “Represent!” that features works of writers “traditionally underrepresented in the mainstream comic book medium,” including people of color or those who are LGBTQ, Marie Javins, an executive editor at DC, said in a statement. It will be available online for free starting Wednesday, at several digital book and comic book retailers.
The main character of “It’s a Bird” is a teenage birder named Jules, who is Black. When Jules tries to peer through his binoculars at birds, he instead sees the faces of Black people who have been killed by the police.
After a white man shoos Jules off his lawn, the illustrator, Alitha E. Martinez, has drawn Jules envisioning Mr. Floyd’s face in place of a warbler in a tree.
In later pages, the teenager confronts a white woman in the park with her dog off leash — here the woman is named Beth and is depicted as heavyset, though Ms. Cooper is not. When Jules faces her, he is backed by the images of several Black people killed in interactions with police. When he turns his back on her, he sees them winged and flying free.
In an interview, Mr. Cooper said the graphic novel “shouldn’t be looked at as any one experience, because it’s not. It’s drawn from a whole bunch of experiences and woven together from that — my own and the ones we keep hearing from news reports.”
“What happened to me is minor compared to the fatal consequences for George Floyd later that same day, but it all comes from the same place of racial bias,” he added. “I am not trying to equate these things. What I am trying to say is: ‘See the pattern.’”
Mr. Cooper said the graphic novel was deliberately not an exact recounting of his May 25 interaction with Ms. Cooper.
“I think that is the beauty of comics, it lets you reach that place visually and viscerally,” he said. “And that’s what this comic is meant to do: Take all these real things that are out there and, by treating them in a magical realist way, get to the heart of the matter.”
In the days after the incident, Ms. Cooper was fired from her job, and pilloried on social media. The Manhattan district attorney charged her with filing a false police report.
Mr. Cooper refused to cooperate in the investigation, and publicly expressed compassion for Ms. Cooper in the face of the consequences that she has suffered.
He has still not heard from her, he said, and does not want to.
“It has never stopped being about the birds for me,” Mr. Cooper said. “From the beginning that confrontation had nothing to do with race. It became about race when she made it about race.”
Mr. Cooper said the Beth character is intended to be a pastiche, not a depiction of Ms. Cooper. (Ms. Cooper could not be reached for comment.)
In the final pages, as Jules and Beth verbally spar, in Ms. Martinez’s images the woman’s words physically diminish.
“You see her words become smaller and smaller, and less important,” Mr. Cooper said. “Because it’s not about her, it’s about the ones we’ve lost and how we keep from losing any more.”
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