Freddy and some (okay a lot) of my Detroit pics (Patreon)

Here are some pictures from my two week trip to Detroit in July. I was there to try and finish up the book about Detroit that Anne Elizabeth Moore and I are working on. We ended up editing what we have...and then deciding we needed to do a bunch more interviews. The series has been published almost monthly on Truthout since early 2017, and it's about water, land, and housing in Michigan.

I had never been to Detroit before, but I've been staring at pictures of it for a long time. I got to see a lot of the buildings and spaces I had drawn...it was pretty surreal. I think I look at buildings differently in general now because drawing them makes me notice all the repetitive lines, and tiny details like that. 

A lot of the stories Anne and I have depicted are not happy, feel good stories. A lot of times it's about people struggling to exist in a city that, as Anne puts it, doesn't seem want them there. I got to meet a few of those people, including Melissa Mays, a Flint resident and water rights activist, who we did a whole story on. We re-interviewed her. She's an incredible person, and her fight is exhausting and is ongoing. 

But I think the thing that most struck me about this trip was that Detroit is more than crumbling, empty buildings, more than $50 houses and blight and poisoned water. There are people living their every day lives there, existing, and it's their reality. I hope that the book will convey that. 

One of my favorite stories was about the half-witch. She lives in a house down the block from Anne. It's a house that you would look at and assume no one lives there- the roof is caved in, windows are broken, steps crumbling...but she's an older white woman (I never saw her) whose mom passed away and now lives alone with a lot of cats. The neighbors call her the half-witch because "if she was a whole witch she'd be able to fix her roof".  But every time the city comes around to inspect her house, one of the neighbors will cut her grass and clean up the yard for her. 

I was lucky to be able to visit and stay with Anne in Banglatown, because she's forged these amazing close relationships with her neighbors. I was an outsider still, but maybe not quite a tourist. So! Here are some pictures.

These are a couple buildings I saw that I'd drawn in the comics: 

 

 

This is a pop-up restaurant called The Pink Flamingo. If you are ever in Detroit in the summer, GO THERE!! It's amazing!!

And this was one of my favorite strips to do, about the couple who started Detroit Hives. I got to meet them finally, they are the best. 

Here's some blight photos...I tried not to put too much of these on social media because you never know if someone might be living in them. There are a lot of empty-looking houses, and also a lot of vacant lots (I learned that some farmers squatted on some vacant land for a while until recently, when the city bulldozed it all.) 

The other thing about Detroit is the absolute bonkers insane extravagant Art Deco architecture. This is the Guardian Building. It's like, a bank and some offices now. 

We also did a three part workshop in Anne's neighborhood in Hamtramck, also called Banglatown. Her neighbors are pretty much exclusively Bangladeshi, and all the kids who ended up joining the workshops were Bangladeshi. We had the run of the space in a house called Squash House, part of a project called Power House Productions. They've gutted a couple empty houses in the neighborhood and created theaters and stuff, as well as a skate park. So the space was pretty much like a big huge empty space, and we invited the neighborhood to come and walk around and draw with us. The first day, we talked about memory, and spent some time drawing what we had eaten the day before (lots of pizza and ice cream!) and also tried drawing our bedrooms from memory. Then we walked around with clipboards and paper and markers and drew. We let the kids pick where they wanted to draw mostly...they were very excited to go to the skatepark, because they don't get to go there much. 

This is Squash House. 

Oh also Anne's neighbors threw a barbeque. They were celebrating because I was there and also because they finished making their yard into a badminton court. It was the best. 

Drawing the ice cream truck, imagining if the neighborhood had a free ice cream store. (this family with the ice cream truck had like 10 more of them in their yard). 

We blew up their drawings and pasted them to the front of Squash House. Sadly the rain washed it all away. But it was good while it lasted!!

The last workshop was a party/gallery opening to celebrate all of our work. 

Banana duck was the star of the mural, to be honest. 

We took votes on what to call the mural. "Unicorn Sprinkles" came in second. 

These are three of Anne's neighbors: Sadia, Nishat, and Saira. These pictures are from when we interviewed them while we took them on a walk to the Bangladeshi sweet shop to try some sweets. We did this interview because we decided the book needed more of them. They are seriously the greatest. I miss them. Oh and the sweets were really good. My stomach is grumbling just thinking about them. 

PHEW ok that's all I have for now. Congratulations on getting to the end of this post. If you have any questions about the book or Detroit or Michigan or Banana Ducks feel free to ask me in the comments!!