NEW YORK (1010 WINS) -- Christian Cooper, the Black birdwatcher whose video of a white woman calling police on him in Central Park in May went viral, has written a graphic novel loosely based on the experience, according to a report.
The protagonist of Cooper’s new DC Comics book, “It’s a Bird,” is a Black teenage birdwatcher who “sees the faces of Black people who have been killed by the police” when he tries to look at birds through his binoculars, the New York Times reported.
Later on in the novel, the teen has his own confrontation with a white woman in a park. Cooper told the outlet the novel, which is “impressionistic” rather than plot-driven, “shouldn’t be looked at as any one experience, because it’s not.”
“It’s drawn from a whole bunch of experiences and woven together from that — my own and the ones we keep hearing from news reports,” he said.
“It’s a Bird” is far from Cooper’s first foray into comic book writing. Cooper was Marvel Comics' first openly gay writer and editor, and has been credited with “bring(ing) LGBTQ heroes to the forefront of the Marvel Universe,” SYFY WIRE reported.
Cooper told the Times his new comic “(takes) all these real things that are out there and, by treating them in a magical realist way, get(s) to the heart of the matter.”
“What happened to me is minor compared to the fatal consequences for George Floyd later that same day, but it all comes from the same place of racial bias,” he said. “I am not trying to equate these things. What I am trying to say is: ‘See the pattern.’”
Amy Cooper, who is not related to Christian Cooper, called 911 on him in Central Park’s Ramble in May after the two got into a disagreement because he asked her to put her dog back on its leash, a now-viral video shows.
“I’m going to tell them there’s an African-American man threatening my life,” Amy Cooper can be heard saying in the video.
Amy Cooper apologized after the incident, saying she was “well aware of the pain that misassumptions and insensitive statements about race cause and would never have imagined that I would be involved in the type of incident that occurred with (Christian Cooper).”
The Manhattan District Attorney’s office has charged her with falsely reporting an incident, but Christian Cooper previously refused to cooperate with prosecutors, saying Amy Cooper had “already paid a steep price,” as she lost her job after the incident and became the face of a national news story.
“Bringing her more misery just seems like piling on,” he said of the criminal charge.