I M A G E A S S O C I AT E S
Larry Stroman & Todd Johnson With the release of Tribe #1, Larry Stroman and Todd Johnson provided the single best-selling comic in history by African-American creators when it sold over 1,000,000 copies. The longtime friends from Detroit designed a black superhero team that dealt in high-tech international adventures in the underworld. Artist Larry Stroman built his career on taking X-Factor (with Peter David) and the cult favorite Alien Legion to both of their sales heights with his ability to render pulse-pounding action, hyper detail and his intricate trademark panel work. Shortly after the release of the first issue, the Image founders voted Tribe out of their company. Larry and his writer, Todd Johnson, continued the adventures of their characters through Axis Comics, their own company, in the mid-’90s. To the present day, this super-hero title remains a fan favorite with readers that eagerly await the day when there are new adventures for Tribe. Larry, when you were illustrating X-Factor, your career was just starting to really kick off, right? Stroman: My career’s always been going. That’s just the first time that everybody recognized who I was. Previous to that, shoot, I was having a great time doing Alien Legion. I was doing that book for about seven years. And I was having a good old time. As a matter of fact, at the point at which I stopped doing Alien Legion, I really started to get into it. That was Carl Potts’ baby, right? Stroman: Yeah. So you had a fun time working on that? Stroman: I had a great time working on Alien Legion. Every time you work on something and people for the most part leave you alone and let you do your own thing and they praise you and everything, you have a great time. But when you’re working on something where every five minutes they’re telling you you’ve got to change this, you’ve got to change that, which was what the experience was like working on X-Factor, you start to kind of stall down a little bit.
When you pitched Tribe to Image, what did they say when they heard what you guys wanted to do? Did you have to get anybody’s approval? Stroman: There was no pitch. I got a call from Jim Lee. Just — “do you want to do a book for Image?” I said sure and that was that. He said you should come out to California. Johnson: No, there wasn’t really any approval process at all. Stroman: At that time it was just the creators and everybody just did — . Johnson: Yeah, pretty much at that time everybody just did whatever the hell they wanted to do. They didn’t care about who your characters were or what city it was based in, they didn’t care about anything for the most part. They never even asked.
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Tribe. ©2007 Larry Stroman & Todd Johnson.