David F. Walker

David F. Walker is an American comic book writer and novelist. He is known for creating the fictional DC Universe character Naomi McDuffie, who is the main character of The CW series Naomi. He also created the independent comic book series Bitter Root.

Career

Walker began his career writing about film and comic books in the 1990s, publishing work on his website and the zine BadAzz MoFo, which he founded in 1996.[1] He later began writing for comic book publishers and magazines such as Dark Horse Comics and Giant Robot.[2]

Walker co-wrote the graphic novel Shaft: A Complicated Man for Dynamite Entertainment in 2015. It won the Glyph Award for Story of the Year,[3] and was nominated for the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Diversity in Comics.[4] That year, he also wrote the novel Shaft's Revenge,[5] which was originally published in serialized form as a digital download to accompany the Shaft comics.[6]

Walker and Sanford Greene co-wrote the 2016 revival of Marvel Comics' Power Man and Iron Fist, which featured the characters of Luke Cage and Danny Rand.[7] Walker also wrote for DC Comics' Cyborg during this time.[8]

Walker and Brian Michael Bendis co-created the character of Naomi McDuffie, who debuted in the DC Comics' series Naomi in 2018.[9] A television series of the same name, created by Ava DuVernay and Jill Blankenship, aired on The CW.[10]

In 2019, Walker founded Solid Comix, a crowdfunded comics publisher.[11] Through Solid Comix, he published original graphic novels such as Bitter Root, co-written with Greene and Chuck Brown, and The Hated.[2] The Hated, which follows the bounty hunter Araminta Free through an alternate history of the post-Civil War United States, was acquired by Netflix in 2021. It was announced that Michael Starrbury was attached to write the series.[12]

In 2019, Walker wrote The Life of Frederick Douglass, a historical graphic novel biography of Frederick Douglass, which was published through Ten Speed Press.[13] It was included in the American Library Association's list of "Great Graphic Novels for Teens".[14] His graphic novel with Marcus Kwame Anderson, The Black Panther Party, which contains biographies of fifteen Black Panther leaders, was published by Ten Speed Press in 2021.[15]

He contributed to the anthology series The Old Guard: Tales Through Time.[16] He also currently co-writes Superb for Lion Forge Comics[1] and Victory, a spin-off of Vampirella, for Dynamite Entertainment.[17]

It was announced in 2023 that Walker was writing a new Planet of the Apes comics series for Marvel.[18]

In 2024, Walker and Anderson will retell and illustrate Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a graphic novel titled Big Jim and the White Boy: An American Classic Reimagined. Omitting Twain's negative portrayal of African Americans, Big Jim and the White Boy will expand the original novel by depicting Big Jim as the primary protagonist and Huckleberry Finn as his sidekick. The plot will be about Big Jim and Huck journeying through Civil War-era United States to rescue the former's enslaved wife and children and even becoming Underground Railroad agents, before going throughout the decades as generations of Big Jim's descendants fight for their rights.[19][20]

Awards and nominations

Walker was nominated for the Dragon Award for Best Comic Book and won the Eisner Award for Best Continuing Comic Book for Bitter Root in 2020.[21][22] In 2022, he received another Eisner for best continuined series for Bitter Root, and an Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work for The Black Panther Party: A Graphic History.[23] He received an Inkpot Award in 2023.[24]

External links