It was mostly through pop culture, through hip-hop, through Dungeons & Dragons and comic books that I acquired much of my vocabulary.

It meant something to see people who looked like me in comic books. It was this beautiful place that I felt pop culture should look like.

Superheroes are best imagined in comic books. The union between the written word, the image, and then what your imagination has to do to connect those allows for so much.

While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.

I'm interested in visual vocabulary, like Warhol was interested in that vocabulary of advertisements and television and pop culture.

Pop culture is like our subconscious.