Member-only story
Christian Cooper Turned a Racist Clash Into a New Graphic Novel
How the pioneering comic book writer and bird-watcher turned his Central Park encounter into art
On May 25, 2020, Christian Cooper was involved in the now-infamous Central Park bird-watching incident, when he asked a White woman to leash her dog and she threatened: “I’m calling the cops… I’m gonna tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.” The video Cooper made of the event quickly went viral; the incident coincided with the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police and subsequent protests and uprisings around the country.
Cooper was already well known as a pioneering comic writer and editor, responsible for introducing some of the first queer characters in the Marvel universe. Now he has interpreted the Central Park incident into a groundbreaking new graphic novel called It’s a Bird, the inaugural story in a new series called Represent.
“I think that is the beauty of comics, it lets you reach that place visually and viscerally,” Cooper 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.”
