The Humor Mill April 2017 | Page 35

Humor Mill: We are sitting here with Flex Alexander at Hollywood’s Choukair Fashion Store (in Hollywood), and I love this store. Anyway, we’re sitting next to Flex because he has a lot of stuff to tell everybody, and we are going to jump into right now. So Flex, you are jumping into the graphic novel business. Can you please tell everyone what your thought process was to even get behind something like this, especially jumping from comedy to the graphic novel business? Flex Alexander: I’ve been a comic book graphic novel head since I was younger, and I went to High School of Art Design in New York. As a matter of fact, that’s what we did; we sketched, we drew, we talked about comics… A lot of rappers that you know, like Kwame, Organized Konfusion, Prince Poet, those guys are all art design alumni, and that what we did. I collected comics and I would draw the covers and one artist in particular really inspired me, an artist named John Byrne… HM: The X-Men guy… FA: Yeah, his art was just the best to me. So when I got in this position I actually created ‘Joshua Run’ as a series, and a friend of mine was at Lionsgate and he left Lionsgate and I was stuck, as I had this idea. I was stuck, so I talked to Dave Stuart at Lion Forge and I pitched it to him. A friend of mine introduced us, and I thought he did movies, and TV so I pitched that, and he said ‘we don’t do that, we do graphic novels, comic books’ and I said, ‘what would you think about this as a graphic novel?’ 35