When Denver writer-rapper-cartoonist-speaker-podcaster-professor R. Alan Brooks — a man rapidly running out of hyphens — recently began to conceptualize his first children’s book, he rode a cresting wave of artistic momentum.
Over the past several years, Brooks, 48, published his first graphic novel, landed a gig teaching that art form at a local university, hosted multiple podcasts, delivered a popular TED Talk, established a weekly comic strip for The Colorado Sun, published a second graphic novel, appeared in a short-story anthology and had his visual arts featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Denver Art Museum — twice.
Lots of other projects, from screenwriting to educational cartoons, filled in any gaps. Those surges of creativity — and income — allowed Brooks to step away from a day job selling insurance to focus full-time on his varied creative pursuits. And yet, to realize this children’s book, a relatively modest passion project inspired in large part by his bond with his young niece, he instinctively turned to crowdfunding.
That his Kickstarter campaign surpassed its $8,400 goal in just five days tells the story of an artist who, having little luck with traditional avenues for monetizing his skills, instead has found financial footing by cultivating an organically grown audience who appreciates his work. And that audience has continued to expand as his artistic range has attracted more and more public recognition.
And though appreciation may have been long in coming for the Ithaca, N.Y., native who grew up in Atlanta before venturing to Denver more than 20 years ago, Brooks has turned hard lessons and timely advice to his advantage.
“The beauty of living in this age that we live in is that I don’t have to depend on a publisher to tell me I’m a writer,” Brooks says. “The beauty of Kickstarter is if I can create something that engages enough people, they will help me create it. And if I don’t engage them, then they don’t have to help me create it — but I’m not waiting on a gatekeeper.”
His experience in pulling together funding in 2017 for his first graphic novel, “The Burning Metronome,” became a foundational lesson in how to approach the business side of his craft that sustains his artistic instincts. Although he hadn’t had much luck previously with crowdfunding, this time his Kickstarter request found its way into a college alumni group.
Some people from his alma mater — he entered Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, at 16 and graduated three years later — posted it on Facebook. Suddenly, names that he hadn’t heard for maybe 25 years started popping up as donors. Before long, he had just about doubled his original goal.
By concentrating on the audience that I know that I can have direct connection to, and building out from there, I can have my needs met while I’m expanding, so that I’m not reaching for deals out of desperation.
— R. Alan Brooks, writer and artist
When his TED Talk hit a million views (it’s now approaching 3 million), he reasoned that at least a million people knew about “The Burning Metronome.” Still, no traditional publishing offers materialized. He tried to leverage the TED success to generate speaking engagements, but potential agents mostly told him to come back when he had a major publishing deal. The traditional mechanisms for career advancement weren’t working for him.
“Basically, I’ve made a living in spite of those institutions,” Brooks says.
He began adjusting his thinking about the business side of his art after hearing some wisdom from Melanie Gilman, a comics creator who advised concentrating efforts on the smaller pool of already dedicated fans instead of aiming to mushroom his following.
“If you have a dedicated 1,000 that will buy three things from you a year, you can make a living,” Brooks says, recounting the advice. “And it sustained me. By concentrating on the audience that I know that I can have direct connection to, and building out from there, I can have my needs met while I’m expanding, so that I’m not reaching for deals out of desperation.”
Also, his life partner, Juan-Nean Young, became his business partner. She felt her background as a life coach with business and negotiation skills might make a difference and capitalize on the TED Talk. Brooks agreed — and soon Young was landing him paying gigs.
“I think he needed someone to be able to really accentuate all of his accomplishments, without it seeming self-centered, so that people can really understand his value,” Young says. “So I’m able to just put it in a different frame, that’s all. His mission, to creatively change the world through writing and art, is something that inspires me to speak on his behalf.”
Young says one facet of Brooks’ talent that may still be underappreciated is his music — both as a rapper and a songwriter.
“A lot of people don’t know how musically inclined Alan is when it comes to rapping,” she says. “He’s really good because he’s a wordsmith. He’s so good at being able to decode messages and to translate those messages in ways that people can understand.”
Seizing opportunities
In 2018, The Colorado Sun approached Brooks about creating a multipanel comic strip that would be a vehicle to address issues important to Coloradans. Brooks responded with a proposal for “What’d I Miss?”, a strip built on the friendship of a young Black man and a middle-aged white woman recently emerged from a 30-year coma. He enlisted local artist Cori Redford to draw and color the strip while he handles the writing and storylines.
It’s now approaching its 300th episode.
Around the same time, Regis University invited Brooks to speak to students about writing graphic novels (a genre of novels written in comic-book format) along with a couple of other writers. Brooks’ presentation stood out, and the university hired him as an adjunct professor of graphic narrative, says Andrea Rexilius, program director for the school’s Mile High MFA in Creative Writing.
She says Brooks melds pragmatic writing advice with motivational topics such as managing impediments like procrastination or personal fears that may get in the way of self-expression.
“What I love about him as a teacher is that he’s just incredibly practical at the same time that he’s visionary and inspiring,” Rexilius says. “He knows how to get the work done. He knows how to keep at it, even when there are obstacles. And that kind of tenacity, I think, is one of the most important things for grad students, or just students in general, to keep in mind.”
Landing two regular gigs in succession reinforced his tenacity to continue following his artistic muse. In 2019, he launched another collaboration — this time with artists Kevin Caron, Dailen Ogden and Sarah Menzel Trapl — with his second graphic novel, “Anguish Garden,” an allegory about white supremacy.
What I love about him as a teacher is that he’s just incredibly practical at the same time that he’s visionary and inspiring.
— Andrea Rexilius, program director for Regis University’s Mile High MFA in Creative Writing
“It was really incredible that this happened,” Brooks says of his turn of fortune. “Because I’ve lived my entire life as a person who was creating art but nobody’s ever wanted to buy it. I never had a lot of support with any of it.”
Eventually, Brooks also started teaching at Lighthouse Writers Workshop, which in turn led to writer and editor Cynthia Swanson offering him an opportunity to contribute to the 2022 anthology “Denver Noir,” a collection of short stories in which his comics-style entry — the only such piece in the local version of the popular Noir Series, and only the third overall — shared pages with a host of established authors including Peter Heller and Manuel Ramos. (He also earned recognition alongside those two writers and others in Westword as a “must-read” Colorado author.)
The project carried prestige, but didn’t come with enough money for Brooks to follow his preferred route of hiring an artist to flesh out his storyline. So he drew it himself, an exercise he says contributed to “finding my feet as far as being able to draw my own stories.”
That process had already begun as he took on some high-profile projects.
Connections on the dance floor
The first museum break came through a Denver dance club.
Brooks and a couple of acquaintances started showing up at Beauty Bar (since closed) on Motown Thursdays, an event thrown by DJ Miggy Camacho. One of Brooks’ friends, who happened to be a fan of comic books, wound up dating a woman who worked at the Denver Art Museum, and introduced her to Brooks at the club.
Later, when the subject of finding a graphic novelist to produce work to complement the museum’s renovated Western galleries came up, she mentioned Brooks. Networking paid off.
“I guess the dance floor is like my version of golf,” Brooks says.
To that point, he hadn’t often drawn his own comics. But he’d also found that collaborating artists sometimes have difficulty keeping on schedule and finishing projects. The son of financial journalist Rodney Brooks (they share the same first name, so Alan goes by their shared middle name, minus the Jr.), Brooks has a healthy respect for deadlines and didn’t want to risk sharing the workload. So he decided to dust off his drawing skills and take on the challenge — he was to create a comic about the legendary Black cowboy Nat Love — entirely on his own.
The permanent exhibit, a web-based creation viewed on a touchscreen in the gallery, drew positive notices from museum visitors, but Brooks looks at it now and sees it as one step in his broader development.
“It’s all right. It’s cool,” he says. “I don’t have impostor syndrome or anything like that. But the places where I was growing as an artist are immediately apparent to me when I look at that.”
His success earned him another project with the museum — a comic book treatment of Balthazar, one of the storied “Three Wise Men,” to provide a bridge from historic artists to the present in the exhibit “Saints, Sinners, Lovers, and Fools: 300 Years of Flemish Masterworks.” Museum director Christoph Heinrich jokingly noted that Brooks was the only living artist in the exhibit.
Lauren Thompson, a senior interpretive specialist at the Denver Art Museum who worked with Brooks, notes that in addition to Brooks’ artistic eye and imagination, his openness to experimentation proved a big plus. She also praises his adaptability to what can be an almost open-ended creative journey for which neither the artist nor museum staff can predict the end result.
“It’s a creative process that we’re in together,” Thompson explains, “and he’s a wonderful partner to do that with. Not everyone can do it well, even if they’re extremely talented in their media. It’s just a different skill set. And he’s got that.”
Last year, Brooks also was commissioned to contribute a piece to the Museum of Contemporary Art’s exhibit “Cowboy,” for which he created a comic book treatment about the town of Dearfield, the largest Black homesteading settlement in Colorado (a topic he also addressed in “What’d I Miss?”). It still seems strange to him that his work has now appeared in museums, given his childhood experience of hearing teachers talk condescendingly about comic books.
“I would get in trouble for reading them,” he recalls. “Everybody talked about them like they were nothing. They weren’t in libraries. I couldn’t find them anywhere except for comic book specialty shops. So if you would have told 10-year-old me that comic books would take me into newspapers, museums and universities, I never would have believed that.”
Taking advice to heart
When Brooks decided to be a full-time writer, he started listening to writing and business podcasts — shows like “How I Built This” on NPR — and took some basic tenets to heart, such as “don’t spend more than you make.” Close attention to his bottom line meant embracing the tools of the do-it-yourselfer.
For instance, he drew the pieces for his museum exhibits in a program called GIMP, an open-source image editor similar to the popular but costly Photoshop. He asked himself: Is my drawing earning enough to justify paying a monthly subscription fee? The answer was no, so he taught himself the free alternative.
Decisions like that have guided him through times when he acknowledges that leaving the insurance business to make comic books “didn’t sound like the wisest move.” He points to landing the Regis University job and then being recognized for his Sun cartoon with an award from the Society of Professional Journalists — coincidentally, the same year that his father won a journalism award — as turning points that cemented the idea with his family and within himself that his commitment to the arts was really happening.
“Thankful to say that I haven’t had a year where I’ve lost money as a business,” Brooks says, reflecting on his artistic rise over the last few years. “But it still feels gradual to me and I think it’s largely because I don’t make any money unless I generate activity. So it’s always like a hustle.”
He’s drawn inspiration from the late Melvin Van Peebles, the Chicago-born actor, filmmaker and writer who once said that he realized he could either do what he wants or have what he wants — and he chose the former.
“I think there’s something to be said about the sacrifice to make things that are good for your soul. It’s a choice,” Brooks says. “And it’s not that I want to live in poverty, but it is a choice to choose what’s important and see how I can expand from there.”
And that brings him back to his latest expansion — a children’s book.
This venture began when the same people who initially connected Brooks with the Denver Art Museum suggested that a comics-style piece might help kids connect with an exhibit of African art. That idea struck a chord with him and rekindled a desire to write for a younger audience — a notion that had gained momentum with weekly Zoom calls he made to his then-5-year-old niece during the pandemic shutdown.
“I was like, OK, how can I make this a piece that means something to me, and allows me to do something meaningful for my niece and children her age?” he says.
The result was “The Masks In Your Dreams,” a 40-page story of how children on a school field trip to an African art exhibit “learn a lesson about how to love themselves, and how to unleash their dreams.” He included English and Spanish versions of the story.
While he was creating the book, he says, some medical emergencies among museum staff put the project on hold. In the meantime, he moved forward on his own, completing the book with the help of fellow cartoonist Lonnie MF Allen, who provided coloring expertise, and launching the Kickstarter campaign to finance the publishing.
Around the Christmas holiday, when Brooks was visiting his family in Maryland, he pulled out his laptop and showed the complete narrative to his now 8-year-old niece, who goes by Dylan G. and served as a model for a character in the story.
“She’s reading it to my mother,” he recounts, “and it was just like this really beautiful, beautiful moment. It was something I created, that had my niece in it, and she could see herself. And she’s reading it to my mother who raised me. It was just … all kinds of feelings.
“Business-wise, it’s just adding another dimension to what I’m able to give to people,” Brooks adds. “So much of it, for me, has been about creating a thing and then just seeing what activities come to me. And when they come, I’m sure going to be ready.”