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“The West Boca Walk Out:” Tana Ford on Creating Through Collective Grief

By | July 18th, 2018
Posted in Interviews | % Comments

Back in February, days after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, students at nearby high school (and my alma mater) West Boca Raton Community High School held a silent protest in their school courtyard. This protest spontaneously turned into a walk out, where the students then walked ten miles to Marjory Stoneman Douglas in a show of solidarity and made headlines in the process. Artist Tana Ford (“Silk”, “DUCK!”) has been working with some of those students since then to help them create a comic and tell their story. This comic, “The West Boca Walk Out,” debuted this past weekend at Florida Supercon, and Ford was gracious enough to talk to us about the experience of working with these kids.

Read on below for the interview, and make sure to check back for the comic within the next few weeks at TanaFord.com.

What is the concept behind this project?

Tana Ford: “The West Boca Walk Out” is about the first nationwide walk out in the United States after the Parkland shooting. A week to the day after the massacre in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, the students at the next closest school, West Boca Raton Community High School, spontaneously staged a walk out that sparked a movement nationwide. So, remember all of the walk outs that happened in February of this year? This school began that. I was watching the news that day and working on comics, as I do, and I was moved. I didn’t know how to help, I didn’t know how to participate, but I do know how to make comic books. So I reached out to the students and together, over the period of a few months, we were able to put together an actual comic book about their experience doing this walk out.

How exactly did you get involved with the students?

TF: I have a friend that works in West Boca High School as a teacher, and she was my connection. She had been moved to tears about this devastation in our community. Now, we’re also gay women, and the massacre that happened at Pulse Nightclub barely a year before that ripped my community apart. I have been experiencing this rage and frustration and powerlessness, and I needed to do something with that energy. I couldn’t stand on the sidelines anymore. I can’t sit by. And I don’t know how to change laws. But I know how to make comic books. So I figured I needed to try and help these kids find a voice to tell their story.

What surprised you about putting this project together?

TF: The dedication of these kids. And I shouldn’t be surprised. They’re talented and thoughtful. They are hard-working and excellent writers and artists. I was moved. Most comics begin with a script, and since none of these kids have ever written a comic before, I had them do a free writing about that day. What was this day to you? What was it like? There were hundreds of kids, there are 1,933 students in West Boca this year, so almost 2,000 kids were walking out of school. Even if a couple hundred stayed behind, you still have over a thousand kids marching in the streets. So I wanted to know what it was like, granularly, from each of them what their experience was. And out of those free writings, which were beautiful and poignant and hard to read in some cases, just overcome with emotion but beautifully written, we started to develop a framework for our comic book and wove their different experiences together into one cohesive story.

Was this extracurricular? Did students just choose to come out and do it?

TF: Yes, it was all extra-curricular. We would meet after school once a week at a nearby park where sometimes they have soccer meetings or, you know, there were a couple of guys who worked out every day that I think were… wrestling team or something? [laughs] And so we met up at that public park. When it got too hot out, because we had been working on it for a couple of months and Florida is hot, we started moving into air-conditioned, you know, ice cream stores, or we tried the library once, and things like that. And it just came together.

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How many students were there?

TF: In the beginning, we had probably a dozen that had contributed art, photography, writings. Over time, six of them stuck it out and were able to co-author this, I think, important piece of art.

Why do you think comics, as a medium, is uniquely suited to helping these kids tell this story?

TF: There’s a whole art therapy element to it. I think it’s an interesting experiment to try and pair words and pictures alone. When you try to pair words, pictures, and intense emotion, something else happens. Something blossoms. And I was fortunate enough to be able to watch these kids come into their own, really take authorship over their own story, their own voice. We were able to refine what they wanted to say. Kids that maybe haven’t been in an art class in a long time, or haven’t done much drawing, were exercising muscles, drawing muscles, that they maybe had never used or hadn’t used much. And then the artists that I got to deal with, the “art kids,” got to refine their art by working one-on-one with me and sort of elevate what they were already really good at. And over all of this, they’re working together. The theme of the March for Our Lives movement and for this walk out is unity. It is hundreds of kids, thousands of kids, coming together over social media as one. And we are using this comic book as a microcosm of that: many voices becoming one cohesive story.

Was it a variety of students who had a variety of interests?

TF: Yes.

How was working with trying to unify those voices?

TF: The kids had not — a couple of them were friends, like there were pairs of friends, and then a couple of loners. But then I think they all became really close doing this. So you had kids that were drama kids, or art kids, one of them was the salutatorian of her year, the nerdy bookie kids, the music kids, and you get them all together, doing this thing they wouldn’t otherwise work on, together, and they all just sort of connected. It was community building as well as story building, and it was just such a good experience.

What do you hope people take away from the book?

TF: I hope that they see what the walk out was from the inside. I think there is some controversy about whether or not kids should leave school, and I think that in this particular case it was beautiful and necessary. You see the police in the beginning are saying, “No, go back to school,” they’re trying to block off roads, and by the end of it they’re buying water for the kids and high-fiving them and telling them how proud they are of them. Ten miles in the Florida heat, which is how far these kids marched, with no sunblock, no food, no water, heavy backpacks full of school books, tears in their eyes because their friends have just been killed, it’s moving. It moves you as a human being. And I think it moved all of the people in my community. The police, the teachers, the other students, their siblings, me alone working on comics in my living room. What they did was powerful, and so I hope what people take away from that is a sense of community. Of unity. E pluribus unum: out of the many, we are one.

Where can people find this book?

TF: That’s the best question! TanaFord.com. We are going to have digital copies available on the website. I want to do a donate whatever you want, download it for free if you want or pay whatever you want. I am meeting with the kids this Sunday to do the [convention] panel that we are doing on making the comic. The Supercon folks have been gracious enough to let me interview [the students] and talk about our experience here. After that, I am going to be talking to the students about what kind of charity they want the proceeds from the book to go to. Should we go directly to the March for Our Lives project, should we go to Moms Against Gun Violence, should we do some other thing that they want, that kind of thing. But you should be able to download them and you can order physical copies through my website as well. The copies are $5 a piece, plus shipping. And digital download should be available soon!


Nicholas Palmieri

Nick is a South Floridian writer of films, comics, and analyses of films and comics. Flight attendants tend to be misled by his youthful visage. You can try to decipher his out-of-context thoughts over on Twitter at @NPalmieriWrites.

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