I’m excited to tell you about the Kickstarter success of The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town, created by award-winning cartoonist Robyn Smith (Nubia: Real One, Wash Day)! The project fully funded almost immediately, and will reprint The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town, a comic “dedicated to exploring the intersection of Blackness and mental health.” I had the opportunity to chat a little with Robyn about her art, her inspiration, and her geek loves. Read on to get to know her a little, and find out more about the Kickstarter below!

Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us! Can you tell us a little about yourself? 

Hey! Of course, Thanks for wanting to chat with me. Let’s see, yeh So I’m Robyn, I’ve been doing comics for a little over 5 years! I’ve done art my whole life but I started with portraits, cuz my dad’s a portrait artist. I wanted to start telling stories though and that’s how I moved more into cartooning. Oh and I have a cat named Benson after Detective Olivia Benson from SVU

I love your art style, and the pink, purple, and gold color palette you use in a lot of your work. Where do you draw your inspiration? 

Thank you! Well the truth is I spent a lot of time as a kid rejecting anything too pink or ‘girly’ because it wasn’t considered ‘cool’. I actually really loved those things and hid my doll collection from everyone.  So instead, now I take every opportunity to jam pack my life with the colour pink. I also just find that pink is extremely versatile and overall the most pleasing for me to look at.

The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town is an autobiographical story about your experience being one of the only Black people in a rural Vermont town. Is this your first autobiographical writing? 

It is! I made it as my first year project while attending the Center for Cartoon Studies. There were things I needed to communicate, to the people around me, that I knew I never would be able to say out loud.
I’ve kept journals my entire life so although this comic is my first autobio, I have technically been writing about my experiences for a long time. Most of the writing in this comic was actually taken straight from the journal I kept my 1st year in VT.

Here at Geek Girl Pen Pals, we match snail mail friends based on their “Top 5 Geek Loves”, the things they “geek out” about. What are your top 5 geek loves? 

Oooo!

Ok so:

  1. High School Musical, All 3 movies, I watch them all at least once a year

  2. Archie Comics, but only between the 50s – early 90s.

  3. Superhero movies especially the Captain America ones

  4. I’m obsessed with Ranma ½

  5. I’m not proud, but the whole true crime genre

We’re ordering pizza! What’s on yours?

I’m so basic omg. A plain cheese slice with red pepper flakes is all I need.

Anything other than the Kickstarter you’d like to plug? 

Yeh! I illustrated the DC comic ‘Nubia:Real One’ and it’s finally in stores and available online!

Where can we find you and your work online? 

Find me across all platforms @ RoBroSmo

Website: https://www.robrosmo.com/

Press Release for The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town:

The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town is an autobiographical comic that’s dedicated to exploring the intersection of Blackness and mental health, created by the award-winning cartoonist Robyn Smith (Nubia: Real One, Wash Day).

The comic was originally self-published by Robyn in 2016 and was named one of the best short-form comics of 2016 by The Comics Journal. Black Josei Press is excited to be reprinting the 32-page comic which features a gorgeous new watercolor cover and bonus process pages.

In The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town, Robyn Smith recounts her experience being one of the only Black people in a rural Vermont town and how that affected her mental health. Her delicate graphite illustrations and poetic words take the reader on a journey through three chapters: Sad, Angry, and Black.

Being a Black girl in a majority white space is to be ignored but constantly observed. Robyn examines this experience of being simultaneously invisible and hyper-visible with such honesty and self-awareness.

With the help of a Kickstarter campaign, Black Josei Press will be able to reprint The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town. The Kickstarter runs from Feb 16th – March 16th [2021]. For more information visit: http://bit.ly/SABGKickstarter 

About the team:

Robyn Smith is an award-winning Jamaican cartoonist known for her mini-comic The Saddest Angriest Black Girl in Town and illustrating DC Comics’ Nubia: Real One (written by L.L. McKinney) and Black Josei Press’ Wash Day (written by Jamila Rowser) and the upcoming Wash Day Diaries from Chronicle Books. She has an MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies and has worked on comics for the Seven Days newspaper, College Humor, and The Nib. She loves cake and cats and holds onto dreams of returning home to the ocean.

Find Robyn: Website | Twitter | Instagram

Black Josei Press is a comic book publisher focused on amplifying stories by and for Black and Brown women. It has published the award-winning comic Wash Day, the sci-fi twerking tale Wobbledy 3000, and the upcoming Egungun. It was founded and is run by Jamila Rowser.

Find them: Website | Twitter | Instagram | Newsletter