https://blacknerdproblems.com/authentic-and-inclusive-iyanu-creators-interview/

The Blerdosphere has been abuzz with anticipation for the animated adaptation of Iyanu. YouNeek Studios and Dark Horse Comics’ Yoruba-inspired graphic novel is about to hit the small screen in a big way. Black Nerd Problems had a chance to sit down with the show’s creators and chat about teaming up with Lion Forge Animation and the road to bringing an all-African voice cast to Cartoon Network and Max. Iyanu is slated to premiere in the United States on April 5th, 2025.

BNP sat with Roye Okupe, the writer and creator of the original Iyanu graphic novel series, and the show’s lead scriptwriters, Kerri Grant and Brandon Easton.

BNP: From across the globe, across the different mediums of comics, television, and film – what brought this particular group together on this project?

Roye Okuye: Man, this, it’s been a long journey. It’s funny, because outside of myself, Kerri, and Brandon have been some of the few people that have been there for almost the entirety, in one way or the other. I’ve known Brandon for, my goodness, it’s over 10 years now. Brandon was one of my first supporters when I first started in the book industry. He didn’t know me from anybody. He just saw one of my projects, and he fell in love. One of the things that I’ll always be grateful for is that a lot of people talk about, “Oh, we need to see more Black content.” But it’s the people who take the next step to either share or use their hard-earned money to support it that get these types of things out there in the public.

Kerri, I met through a producer friend of mine named Erica Motley. She introduced us. We had dinner in LA, and it just felt like meeting someone for the first time, but it was almost like we’d known each other for five years. We had like a two-hour-long conversation, just talking! So, you know, bringing on, you know, Brandon as an editor and then Kerri obviously in the writer’s room was something that for me I felt helped ground the project.

So, we came together through mutual connections. But I think it was primarily because of the admiration of each other’s work that we were able to assemble the team; everybody on this call and everybody at large on the project.

Kerri Grant: I feel like it was Kismet. First of all, ‘Kismet’, fun fact, was my poetry name in college. So, I believe in Kismet, also very tapped in. I met Erica (Motley) through a mutual writer friend who told me about Roye’s project. As soon as I read it, as soon as I saw the graphic novel, I just absolutely fell in love with the character. It was gorgeous, just like stunning, beautiful storytelling. The world-building was so just vast and intricate and really powerful on a, I think, a primal sort of storytelling level. I just feel like it’s an epic tale of a girl coming into her own, a coming-of-age story. Coming into her powers and then fighting these kinds of larger forces beyond her. And as a lover of storytelling and mythology, I was just really drawn to it in multiple ways. Then, when I met Roye and we had that two-hour dinner, it just, like he said, it just felt like we had known each other forever. We connected on so many points. And I just knew from then that I really just wanted to be a part of the making of, you know?

Brandon Easton: Like ten years ago, I would go on to Kickstarter to find Black projects to support. I had stumbled across a few of Roye’s projects and even though I was dealing with some financial struggles, I would always just section off somewhere between thirty to fifty bucks. If I saw something worthwhile, I would take those hard-earned dollars and throw it at another Black creator. Roye’s Exo: Wally Williams story was just extraordinary to me because I’m a tech head. I have an astrophysics science background. The fact that you had a story coming out of Nigeria of Black excellence. Nigeria is the birthplace of many Black engineers and scientists in West Africa. I just had to support it. I had no idea that Roye knew who I was, but I just wanted to support that young brother. I mean, I spent a lot of money on Kickstarters. But the bottom line is, that when I saw what he was trying to do at the time and what he was doing at the time, I had to support him. I had no clue that years later Roye and his producing team would find me. That’s really what started the whole shebangabang, as they say. So the theme is kismet.

Roye: Serendipity. It also goes to show how when you treat people with decency, decorum, respect – you just never know when you’re going to meet people, right? It’s one of the where I always tell people in this industry, you just never know who you’re going to meet in five or ten years. When Erica and I looked at a list of people that we would want to bring in to the writer’s room, Brandon was the top of the list. Brandon, I’ve never shared this with you. I was nervous that he [Brandon] was going to say no. That’s how high I placed Brandon in terms of someone I would want to work with. At that time, Brandon had worked on Marvel. He had worked on Transformers. He [Brandon] keeps on saying that, “Oh, yeah, he [Roye] brought me in.” But we got the better end of the deal with Brandon saying yes. I’m saying that to say – that you just never know.

BNP: To air a show in the U.S., on a major streaming platform, and for it to center the lore of Yoruba is a big deal. Especially now. Why did you decide to center those things?

Roye: For me, there was really no other way, right? I was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. And I’m of the Yoruba ethnicity. So I grew up with the culture. It’s funny that you mention ‘major network’; I grew up on Cartoon Network. I mean, Dexter’s Lab, Powerpuff Girls, Johnny Bravo. Later in my life, Adult Swim as well. That was through my college years, those got me through. I’ve always been an introvert. I never went to college parties. So to be able to create a show airing on the same network is one of the most humbling experiences I could have ever wished for. But in terms of the instructing culture, to me, I’ve always believed that there’s no one like you. There’s no one with your experiences, your heritage, your quirks, your beliefs, your fears, your insecurities. That’s what makes you you, right?

If you can package all of that, as a creator and a writer or a storyteller, into an entertaining package…I think it gives you the most chance of success because to me, that’s what truly defines doing something different. If you can put yourself into your work in a way that’s authentic, it really gives you an edge in terms of storytelling. I’ve always wanted to create these types of stories superhero stories, fantasy stories, sci-fi stories that were inspired by Nigerian culture. With Iyanu specifically, you’re talking about history, culture, and mythology. It’s very deep. It’s very, very vast. Kerri will tell you, because she’s also studied mythology as well, it’s so beautiful and very intricate. It was about taking a lot of inspiration from that in a way that would be very unique, but also feel similar in a way for people that are used to this type of content. I wanted to be authentic, but inclusive. Whereas if somebody was, if a ten-year old in Norway put this on and watched the first episode, I want them to be able to see themselves in it. I also tried to put real-world things that are going on in our world today and integrate Yoruba culture into that so that you get the authenticity, but also you don’t lose people that aren’t from Nigeria or West Africa. Who might not know anything about African history, culture and mythology. So that was always the plan for me.

BNP: Authentic, but inclusive. That’s a glorious concept. So for Kerri and Brandon, so how do y’all translate that into this animated feature?

Brandon: It was a complicated process. In the sense that I wanted to look at what Roye and Godwin did on a page and turn that into visual dramatic storytelling. It was a 2-D comic book page and adaptation is always deeply complex anyway. But one of the core things was to make sure that the core essence of what Roye and Godwin were trying to say showed up in the script. That took a little bit of time. Iyanu was constructed on the page in such a way where the themes came through very easily. A testament to the original storytelling. Because if you look at stuff like Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, or 300, or if you look at Watchmen, even Star Trek – you see the core idea of empathy. The core idea of exploration, the core idea of expanding your world vision, it was already on the page. So I was able to take that and make sure that the first episode, the first twenty-two minutes, encapsulated a lot. And that was not easy, but it pulled it off.

And then Warner Brothers, HBO Max, whatever you want to call them, they were like, OK, let’s do a second episode. Episodes I wrote, and then over the time, we massaged it, and that is what got us greenlit into a series. And the core of that was on those pages in that first graphic novel that Roye sent me so many years ago. I looked at it, and I said, these are what we need to pull out. Just looking at source material and figuring out what works. When I apply that to something like Roye’s vision, which was so Yoruba, which was so Nigerian, which was so African, but we figured out a way to make it universal. That was a testament to not only myself but to the entire writing staff.

Kerri: It was like a well-oiled machine. I think that started with Roye and Godwin and what they put on the page. Then what Brandon took from that and put into the pilot and the second episode. Our jobs were to then expand even further from that. The novel is this kind of two-dimensional work, right? It’s like flat pages. You take it to TV and then it’s like you’re walking through that world. So now you have to figure out where the walls are, where the ceilings are, where the floor is, who the characters are, how they move. Not just how they move physically, but how that translates to how they speak, their relationships with each other. All of that, their mannerisms and all of that just becoming richer and richer with the episodes we created. I love the process of adapting. There was so much material to pull from, graphic novels, and with wanting to keep, the idea – not to create something totally different. It was to expand the already created world and make it tactile and lived in. We worked really well together banging out those stories in that room. And that’s, again, into Roye and Godwin and what they initially created and then Brandon and his encyclopedic knowledge of media and film and structure and just like really putting it down for us all to really be able to shine and make the work sing.

BNP: I am a firm believer that each of us brings our personal histories to the collective experience. So what are each of you bringing with you this project (Iyanu) that you’ve picked up from your past work?

Kerri: Coming into Iyanu, I was just coming out of running a show called Ada Twist Scientist on Netflix, also adapted from a series of books. So that experience of taking from that two-dimensional book world and expanding it out. Always with the intention of keeping a connection to the books, the spirit of it. But not trying to create something totally different. Also, I think the story of a Black girl coming into her powers and coming into her own is something I can speak to as a Black girl, as a Black woman. I’ve always really identified with the outsider perspective. I was born in Jamaica. We moved to America when I was eleven years old, that was kind of a formative age, you know? That’s actually when I started to write, feeling like an outsider. Feeling like I was just mainly observing people and trying to figure out where I belonged in the world. That’s a big theme for my life: belonging. And I think that’s also one of the themes we touch on in Iyanu, that idea of belonging and figuring out where you fit and coming into your powers. And then accepting your powers – and that story is personal and universal. So that’s what I’m bringing to this.

Brandon: I mean, it was kind of an inside joke that I would make these obscure references to cinema from like a hundred years ago. The thing is, I’m a hard, very very hardcore old school cinema geek. You know, I go back to Oscar Micheaux. I go back to the Marx Brothers. I go back to the Three Stooges even. I go back to vaudeville and, you know, my biggest influences are people like Akira Kurosawa or Katsuhiro Otomo or Jean-Luc Godard, or Peter Weir, like even Christopher Nolan, Spike Lee, Antoine Fuqua. Bringing all this, ‘cornucopia of cinema’ knowledge to the show itself.

I’ll give you a great example. People didn’t know this reference, but in the sneak peek that’s available now from Cartoon Network, we have Iyanu going through the trials. In one of the trials, she has to figure out where to step on these particular glyphs, letters, or characters, right? But I pulled that from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, where he had to walk in the name of God, right? So when we were pitching this, we were talking about, “Okay, what would be a trick for for Iyanu?” And we talked about her stepping in the path of the divine. And we do this really cool thing. That movie came out in 1989. I saw it in theaters, but everybody’s not my age. So I bring in other things. Many, many, many different references. We go from Ghost in the Shell to Evangelion, to Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Roye: Evangelion was a big one. That came up at least once every other week.

Brandon: The Star Wars Saga.

Kerri: Star Trek!

Brandon: We look at, like, Anakin and Obi-Wan’s relationship as core. And we didn’t use that. That came up after the fact, after we were well into our synthesis. We looked at a lot of what was going on with The Mandalorian. And then when the Obi-Wan series came out. There’s that moment at the end of Obi-Wan where Ewan McGregor says to Hayden Christensen, “I’m sorry, Anakin. For all of it.” We pulled some of that in, a little bit of it. If you’re a Star Wars fan, you know exactly the deep emotion of him saying, ‘I’m sorry, Anakin, for all of it.’ One of the most pivotal moments in the entire saga. So we were pulling in that emotional weight. I feel like that’s what’s most important with Iyanu.

BNP: What I love about writing for Black Nerd Problems is that we ‘keep it a dollar’ about what’s happening out in the world. I feel like Iyanu is about to hit hard, you know, with its intentional authenticity and culture. And as, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion policies are being scaled back. So, I have to ask, what does this project mean for y’all on a personal level, as a matter of pride, as members of this creative team?

Kerri: People just taking matters into their own hands, you know? I feel like that’s what is needed at this moment. So the show is coming out at this time when it’s gonna be especially potent. I do think the pendulum will swing back you know, that’s a whole other conversation. But yeah, but I just look forward to it for people to be able to watch Iyanu and enjoy it and see themselves in it and get some empowerment and hope out of it, hopefully, as art tends to do for people.

Roye: I’ll address the question in two parts. First of all, gratitude is a big deal for me. I’m always very thankful for any little progress I’m able to make. Not just in my career, just in my life in general, because life is hard, period. Being born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria. To go from being born in a country where there’s little to nothing, at least when I was growing up in terms of an animation industry, a comic book industry; to grow up in that setting, to dreaming about Hollywood, getting a chance to move to the United States. So to look at where I have come from to this moment, my story is literally one in a million. This is not an exaggeration. This is not hyperbole. Regardless of what’s going on in the world, I’m just grateful that I can say that I have created a show that will air on one of the biggest networks in the world. Politics will always be politics. Things are always going to happen externally. I’m a big proponent of, yes, we should always speak up against any form of injustice or things that affect, especially the people, minorities, or whatever the case may be. But you should always try to focus on what you can control. And what I can control now is creating the absolute best show that I can and hope that people will see it for what it is. Yes, is it inspired by Yoruba culture. Nigerian? Yes. At the end of the day, it’s a kick-ass, fantastic action-adventure show, you know, with an excellent protagonist and an excellent group of friends and a magnificent story.

Whatever is going to happen is going to happen, let the chips fall where they may. But no one will be able to ever take this away from any of us. We did what we wanted to do. We did it very well. We did it with excellence. We didn’t take any shortcuts. We didn’t mail anything in. We worked extremely hard to put this together. Every single person that has been on this show has worked extremely hard. And nobody’s going to be able to take anything away from us because we did our best. And when it releases, everybody will see just how marvelous it is. And we can only hope that people love it.

Check out Iyanu on Max when it drops. Get into the vast world Roye has created with YouNeek Studios here so you have everything you need to be up to speed.

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