My Nerdom Stands With You

I listened, I heard and now I'm back to talk about a topic I know a lot about while still spreading awareness. Nerdom is back and we are covering black creators.

The past few weeks I have lead My Mess away from it's normal content to talk about the importance of Black Lives Matter. I strongly stand by this decision but eventually had to ask the question of: what happens next? As we all move forward, I don't want to lose momentum or become silent. In fact, I want to encourage people to take action and support those who need it. In saying that, I had to ask the question of how I could best use my platform to encourage positive change. After talking with friends, family, and strangers, I found that black creators was a group I was well equip to help, using my platform. So, today we will be talking about a particular black creator who has been bringing people together on one of my favorite content sources: Webtoon.

A quick background if you're unfamiliar with Webtoon, this has been my go-to for webcomics for quite a while. I love them because they allow anyone to publish webcomics on their site/app. As an artist you start on Canvas, which is where you can find loads of new content in all genres, and if a comic receives enough attention Webtoon's will pick it up and put it on their featured Originals, where they become paid creators. I have covered quite a bit about Webtoon, if you are interested you can check out past articles here, here, and here.

Now Nerdom, I present to you, Hiashleynine [Ashley-Nine] the creator of Sunflowers are for Dragons [SAFD] which is currently available on Webtoon's Canvas. Ashley-Nine has done an incredible job of bringing together so many creators on Webtoon's Canvas. Back in February, for Black History Month, she partnered with other creators to search out and bring attention to the black creators of Webtoon. Which, incidentally, is how I found her. This project brought attention not only to black creators but also to comics that starred POC. It really brought my attention to how much diversity has been lacking in the webcomic world, and how blind I was to it.

Ashley-Nine does an amazing job of bringing diversity to life in her comic. SAFD 's genre is romance and so far seems to setting the scene for a starcrossed lovers story. In this comic we follow two separate main characters as they find each other and find their fates slowly becoming intertwined. Lee is a demon hunter with a tragic past and an "all walls up" demeanor. Angela is a half demon who also has a tragic past, but is accompanied with a free willed spirit that is leading her to a new path. There are only twelve episodes available on Webtoon at this time so it will be super easy for you to catch up and eagerly wait like the rest of us.

I'm excited to see where this comic goes and I commend Ashley-Nine for all of her hard work both on this comic as well as the collaborations she has been helping with. I'm going to provide her Linktree here as well because she has a wonderful amount of resources regarding different petitions you can sign for different BLM cases. She is incredible and I truly hope to see her on the Originals page soon, because if this is what she has accomplished on Canvas already, imagine what she could do on the Originals platform. I'm excited just thinking about it.

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Thank you so much for joining me tonight. While this was not the topic of today's post, I would like to give one more shout out before I go: huge congratulations to SIU, Webtoon, Crunchyroll and their entire team on the completion of the Tower of God anime's first season. I encourage all of my readers to keep fighting for justice, and don't lose steam! I will continue to use this platform for what I know is right, and will continue to fight and educate myself as well. We will have a guest writer this Sunday for The Mess, I hope you join us for that as well. This is only the beginning, but in the mean time, stay messy, and stay nerdy my friends.