Most people woudn't be able to take $500 and build an organization from the ground up. Tony Weaver Jr. isn't like most people. From $500 he won by taking home first prize in a pitching contest in college, Tony was able to found Weird Enough Productions, a social impact organization that seeks to empower young people through the power of stories. Tony is also the creator of The Uncommons, a superhero series (read it on WebToon here) featuring a cast of diverse young heroes.
We had the pleasure of sitting down with tony on a Zoom call to talk about his organization, The Uncommons, and that feeling you get when the shonen OP hits.
This interview is a companion piece to our Black History Month series of articles celebrating and uplifting Black voices in the anime community. You can find links to the rest of the articles below
The cover for Volume 1 of The Uncommons
Could you please introduce yourself?
Tony Weaver: My name is Tony Weaver Jr.., and I am the creator of The Uncommons.
Awesome. So I want you to go back in your mind and tell us — how did you first get into anime and manga?
Weaver: I think that I got into anime and manga not knowing that that's what I was getting into. I remember being very fond of after school Toonami blocks, really rushing home to see things like ... My dad would give me a specific time when I needed to start my homework. He said you need to start doing your homework about 4:30. But what he didn't understand was that Yu-Gi-Oh! GX came on at 4:30, and there was no way you could miss that! They didn't do reruns, there was no way for me to go rewatch it. So I'm like, “I get it. I know you want me to do my homework, but … I need to see what's going on with the Elemental Heroes right now and you’re kind of getting in the way here. Is there any way that you can be flexible with me?” And I just thought, "oh, those are the shows that I gravitate towards, those are the things that I enjoy."
It wasn't until years later that I realized, "oh. Wow. You've been watching anime this entire time." I remember my parents and I would go to the mall and I would disappear and they would know that they could find me in the manga section at Borders, one of those kids just sprawled out on the floor in the middle of the cube of books like, “ah! This is great, this is wonderful!” And the employees walking by every five minutes, thinking, “those kids never buy anything. They've been here for hours!” That sort of thing. Manga is really special I think in part because the illustration, but also just the quality of the story and the unique themes that mangaka are allowed to explore. I didn't see that a lot in Western media when I was growing up. And I think that's what made me a fan of it really early on.
Totally. And I think it's really interesting that you bring up the fact that you didn't know that it was anime to begin with, because I feel like our generation specifically ... anime was like this very fundamental building block of our media literacy. But we didn't know it until like maybe, you know, when Adult Swim happened, and you're like, "oh wait, what? There's something going on here. This is not like other American cartoons." But yeah, also very much the same with the book stores … Borders should have charged us rent because we spent so much time on their floors.
Weaver: Yeah! They really should have.
So I wanted to know before you get into the foundation more, what's the story behind the name “Weird Enough?”
Weaver: Ah, so my organization, Weird Enough Productions, what we're really focused on is telling stories that make you feel the same way you feel when you hear a shonen anime theme song. Like when JUJUTSU KAISEN comes on and that opening guitar riff for "Kaikai Kitan" kicks in and the first verse starts and that bass drum is pounding, like it DOES something to you, right? You're just sitting here, you're watching TV, everything's fine. But then that "Haruka Kanata bassline comes in [mimics bass line] and you're like, “ah! I’m here! It's amazing! Wait, what? What am I doing?” We want to create stories that make people feel like that every time they watch it, every time they read it, page after page.
The way that we go about doing that is helping people embrace who they are. I think we're all weird. All of us are weird in some way or capacity, and for the kids who grew up watching anime, we got othered pretty fast. It didn't take us long to figure it out, right? But I think that everybody has something about them that's weird and unorthodox, and I think that society kind of conditions us to run away from that thing. But that thing that makes us different is what allows us to impact the world in a way that only we can. So, the reason we picked the name “Weird Enough” is because my belief is that as long as you pursue your personal truth, you're never too weird. You're just weird enough. As long as you’re operating as who you are in a way that's totally genuine. That's never too weird, you should never let anybody make you feel that way.
I love that. I feel like shonen anime is such a good choice to compare that with, because I think — with shonen anime specifically — they're usually all about bringing together a cast of characters who in some way or another have different traumas or are marginalized by society in a certain way. And it's because of that pain that they're able to develop special skills that let them like save the world.
Weaver: It’s really easy to fall in love with shonen because ... some people call it the concept of being an underdog, but I call it "being unequipped." Sometimes, it's not that you're an underdog, sometimes it’s just that you're unequipped. I want to be Hokage, but I can't control my chakra. I want to be the Wizard King, but I don't have any magical energy. I want to be the world's number one hero, but I don't have a Quirk. There's this constant juxtaposition of, “I want to… but I don't have…” And to see these characters move throughout these narratives, everybody can find a point in their life where they say, “I wanted to do this, but I didn't have [blank], and I felt like I needed to have that in order to do it.” So these characters overcoming becomes kind of like a rallying cry for people. That's what it's been for me.
Well said. How did you get Weird Enough started in the first place?
Weaver: I started Weird Enough Productions with $500 and a vision. Those two things.
I was in college at Elon University, I was double majoring in Acting and Strategic Communications, and I was a junior, so the real world was knocking on my door. It was in the first semester of my junior year, I was about to go move to Japan to take classes as part of my degree, and I found myself suddenly getting very scared. I felt this fear that… "if you don't do something right now, you're not going to be able to tell the stories that you want to tell." I looked at classes, like mentors of mine that graduated before me to step out into the world with this eternal optimism, this wellspring of, “I can go, I can do it!” And then you catch up with them a year later, or two years later and the world’s beat them down. And that made me very afraid. I was like, "if you don't ... if you don't do something right now, if you don't create an infrastructure for yourself right now, you're gonna struggle, and how good are the stories that you come up with going to be if you're in a constant state of struggle while you're making them?"
It's significantly more likely that you put this stuff aside, you take your toys and put them back into the toy box, then you go be an adult. And I REALLY didn't want to do that. So I found out that my school had a pitch competition and the first prize got $500, and my thought was, “500 dollars? That's like, a lot of money. I can totally start a whole company and change the world with $500. Are you joking?! $500?! Maaaaan. Perfect, that's perfect." So I put the pitch together, and it was in the School of Business, so I had to dress up. I showed up to the pitch basically as a formal Frankenstein. Because I didn't have any formal clothes, I had to borrow one friend's pants, and I had to borrow one friend's belt, and I had to borrow one friend's shirt, and it was too big for me so I had to like tuck it in in the back, and I had a pair of sneakers because I was like, “I'm not wearing dress shoes,” and my other friend let me borrow his blazer. So I show up literally in the garb of all of my friends, like all my buddies were supporting me. They were like, "you can do this, take this, take this, take this," and I pop up like, “Hi, my name is Tony Weaver Jr.” And… we got first place. We got first place in that pitch competition and even though that $500 did not take me anywhere as far as I thought it was gonna take me, now, millions of dollars later, it's really created a pathway for us.
Totally.
Weaver: I think that for us, a part of the urgency was built in the fact that I knew I didn't have that right. Like, my parents created an amazing foundation for me. I didn't have to take out student loans to go to school. My mom said, "that's my gift to you, that's my investment in you. I believe in what you can go do, I am giving you four years to figure it out and then you gotta launch, homie. You gotta get it done." So going with an attitude like that. It's like "okay, I gotta go find where it is." You got a $500 pitch competition over here, $1200 over here. By the time I graduated we raised over $100,000 just from me going and pitching, me getting the slide together, walking into the room, going,“hi, my name is Tony Weaver Jr., and I have this thing that I think is going to change the world and this is what it is, here's why you should care about it.” And that was kind of the foundation for us. Having the clarity of that vision and what the organization could be, what our stories could be, even when we didn't have the resources to make them yet.
Sometimes, it's not that you're an underdog, sometimes it’s just that you're unequipped.
Well, speaking of the stories, could you give us a little bit of a rundown of The Uncommons?
Weaver: When I talk about The Uncommons, what I say is that it is the story of a group of five unlikely outsiders. They have to save each other to save the world. So The Uncommons kicks off when our main character Iris, this West African teen, has a vision where she predicts the end of the world. She has no idea what it is, she has no idea where it's coming from, but when her parents tell her that her visions are child's play, when they write off her premonitions and tell her that she doesn't know what she's talking about, she runs away from home to the place from her vision, this futuristic metropolis called Delta City. As Iris arrives in Delta City, she thinks that she is going after her vision, but what she doesn't know is that she is walking in the footsteps of a prophecy that has been in play centuries before she ever showed up.
It has a lot of those shonen themes. People get mad when I call it a manga, because it's in color, right? People get really mad when I call it a manga sometimes, but I 100% consider it a manga because it's shonen! You've got a main character with glowy, special eyes, you've got an underdog story there, you have a very engaging ensemble cast that all have their own traumas that they're resolving, and you have these themes of friendship, these themes of self belief and really amazingly choreographed action sequences. It's totally shonen!
Well, shonen isn't just a set of visual aesthetics, it's a set of like of narrative … what's the word, narrative styles? Motifs? And it sounds like The Uncommons goes by that.
Weaver: My favorite thing when talking about manga is that I always encourage people, I always ask people and say to them, "well, what do you think manga is? What do you think it is? What do you think counts as manga?" And they’ll normally go, “oh well it's made by people in Japan,” and I go, “okay, well Boichi, the mangaka for Dr. Stone, he's from Korea and he’s published in Shonen Jump.” So is that not a manga?” And they go, “well, it's published by someone from an asian country.” Cool. So Svetlana Chmakova, who is Russian, has a manga that’s published by Tokyo Pop. There's a mangaka that I really enjoy who is a non-binary, half German, half Ghanaian creator and their series is published in Tokyo Pop. Is that not a manga? And they go, “well, it's not black and white!” And I go, "cool. Well Miyazaki himself created a manga that was 100% watercolor where the entire thing was in color. So are you gonna tell Hayao Miyazaki that he isn't a mangaka because it's in color?" The more that you interrogate the constraints that people try to put on the genre and that they try to put on who's allowed to make this stuff and who's allowed to tell these stories, the more you can go, “no, it's not that.” Ultimately what it boils down to is that it's a feeling, it's a set of narrative themes that creates the distinction of this genre. And I think we totally fall into that.
Totally. Man, that's awesome. I always love talking about where the line lies between anime and cartoons or manga and comics. It really is like impossible to quantify. You just feel it.
Weaver: Yeah. I think what happens sometimes is that there are a lot of anime fans who have been othered so much that they begin to identify with that otherness. So, mentally, the only way that they know themselves and that they understand themselves is through the feeling, “I like this thing that's different from everything else. You watch cartoons, I watch anime! I'm different.” Because they have been othered so much — there's so much pain associated with that — rather than finding areas of common ground to relate to people, they're like, “no, I'm different! I watch stuff with refined storylines.” And when you go up to them and say things like, “oh well why isn't Avatar: The Last Airbender an anime?” And they’re like, “it’s not an anime because it wasn't animated in Japan, it was animated by a Korean animation studio.” Okay. Studio Wit sub-contracts their animation to animators in Korea. Are the first three seasons of Attack on Titan not an anime since it was animated by people who live in Korea? I don't know, you tell me. What do you do?
With the stories I tell, the people that I talk to, the communities that I get the privilege to be a part of, what I try to do is talk about how the magical thing about anime is not how it separates us from the general public. The magical thing about it is not like displaying your refined taste because you understand all the Biblical allusions in Neon Genesis Evangelion. That's not what it is. The magical thing about being an anime fan is that you can turn to a random person and go, "hey, this is Shinji, and he's about to get in the robot," and instead of looking at you like you're crazy, that person says, "oh? What happens next? What kind of robot is it? What's he fighting? Why does he need the robot in order to fight it?" I think that level of possibility and that broad wealth of storytelling ... that's what makes it special. Tha's what makes it a community I want to be a part of.
I couldn't have said it better. That's ... yeah. That's exactly it.
So my next question is, well, plenty of people agree that it's important for media to show lots of different kinds of people, but I think a lot of people have difficulty articulating why it's beneficial. So, to you, what about representation is so powerful?
Weaver: I think representation is powerful because it puts you in another person's shoes. It makes you relate to a person because you have a better understanding of their circumstances. So for example, Steven Universe, right? I wouldn't say that I consider Steven Universe an anime, but if Rebecca Sugar was like, “it's an anime,” I'd be like, “okay, I believe you. Whatever you say.” But when you look at the character Garnet from Steven Universe, — spoiler alert for people who haven't seen Steven Universe — when we find out that Garnet is two space lesbians in a trench coat, there were some people who we're like, “I love black characters,” but had in no way shape or form done any thinking about the lack of representation of LGBTQ characters and any biases that those people held ... Well, if you love Garnet and you still like Garnet, guess what? You have to confront that now. You gotta look yourself in the mirror and be like, “this is a character that I liked but ever since I found out that she was part of the LGBTQ community, I feel some way about it. I feel iffy about it now.” And now you gotta interrogate that. You got to sit with that and you got to say, “I didn't even know that this bias was here.”
I think that what makes representation good as a tool on both sides is, if you are a person that is marginalized, getting to see yourself is very important. I can't stress enough what an impact something like that is able to have. But on the other side, if you're not a marginalized person, you're not a part of that lived experience, and you haven't thought about what these people have to experience at all, ever? Now you gotta think about it. Now you have to think about it, and I think it creates behavior change in a way, because you know what you don't know now. You have a better understanding of the world around you now.
Absolutely. I probably woudln't have realized I wanted to be a girl without seeing characters in anime who blurred the lines in terms of gender presentation or gender identity. That was like super formative and super helpful for me.
Weaver: There are so many people I know that talked about Ranma ½ as an awakening for them in the sense that they didn't know that it was possible for them to not have to be one or the other. They didn't know that it was possible for like those boundaries and for that binary to not be there, that it was possible for a person to live their life that way. Those sorts of things are so important. Representation, is really, really important.
Okay, so I have a very intense question next which is… top three anime. Go.
Weaver: Top three?
Top three.
Weaver: Eureka Seven, by Studio Bones. Dr. Stone because it's amazing and everybody should watch it. And, out of respect, One Piece.
Good answers. Solid answers. Okay, next question is — do you have any advice for young blerds who want to start making their own stories come to life?
Weaver: I have a lot of it, tell me when to be quiet. If you have a story that you want to tell, you have a thing that you want to make, what's important is that you think about your story, but you also think about the business context that that story is being created in. I know so many people that are like, “I want to make my own manga so it can get turned to an anime.” Okay, well number one, are you going to do that work? Because My Hero Academia didn't get picked up as an anime until maybe it's fourth arc. The stuff that happened in the anime last season had already been printed when the anime got announced. So cool, you want your manga to get turned into an anime. Are you going to draw 100 chapters of it first? So many people have like two issues of a story out, or three chapters of the story out and they're like, “yeah, we're talking to studios trying to get it adapted and a da-da-da-da.” Okay. If you're trying to do it the way that mangaka do it, that's not exactly how it works. But there are so many comparisons too, having people say like, “I want to be like Oda, I want to make the next One Piece.” Cool. Oda draws One Piece. Oda has a significant amount of say and sway in casting and all creative decisions that happened in the One Piece anime, but Oda’s not directing every episode. He's not in the booth every day with the voice actors being like, “no, I like this take, no I like this take.” He's not in the studio with the animators saying, "hey, shift this,” or, “move this." And there are so many people that are like, “I want to be Oda, but I want to draw all of it.
I want to direct the anime, I want to work directly with the voice actors, I want to have a role in casting,” and I'm like, “That doesn't happen.”
That's not to crush anybody's dreams, that's just not the process. We're working on The Uncommons animated series right now, and I'm not even the showrunner for it. And I made it! Right? Like there's … you got to think about the market that you're in and how to find success in that, because there are some people that will say, “oh man, I don't think I can draw 100 chapters of a manga, waiting for it to get adapted.” 100 60-page chapters? Yeah, that's hard. I don't think I can do that. However, you look at somebody like Jerry Craft who's a Black graphic novelist, won so many awards for his graphic novel New Kid. New Kid's like 250 pages, Jerry got a really nice advance for it, and now Lebron James is producing the show off of 250 pages. But so many people are like, “I want to be a mangaka, I want to be like Oda, I want to be like Oda!” Well, you live in the United States. In the United States, you can get paid more for less pages and get yourself in production faster if you just go work with a traditional publisher on a graphic novel. But you got to have context of the business that you're working in instead of just saying, “oh I want to be like Oda, I want to be like Oda.” You got to have a business acumen that's just as strong as your pen if you want to find a way without destroying yourself
Man. Great advice, wow. I think a lot of people underestimate how much you need to research the industry that you want to go into. And it's it's unfortunate that you can't just get by on artistic merit alone, but you really need to learn how to work with the system. Because that's the system that’s in place right now!
Weaver: There there are so many people that are like, “oh I'll just make it myself!” and I go, “Are you? You're gonna make it yourself? The budget for Demon Slayer's last movie was $15.8 million. You're gonna do that by yourself? For real? You're gonna do that by yourself? Maybe. It'll take you 15 years to do it, but more power to you." So many people are focused on creative control. They want all the creative control, they want super high quality and they want it to happen immediately and I'm like ... [near audible look of skepticism]. Those things don't mix. That is not how this works. The biggest advice that I give creators is: you think about your story, you invest in your story, by all means. Do your deal with your story. But if you want to find success, you gotta handle the business part. Think of your least favorite anime in the world right now. Think of the anime that you watched and you were like, “man, this anime was terrible.” But guess what? It got made. It got made, it made it through the finish line. You might not like the story, but it got made, people got paid for it. The creator can be like, “my work got adapted into an anime.” You got to understand what happens in that process and what allows you to get there.
I think that's great advice and I hope our readers take that to heart, all of the aspiring creatives out there. Well, we've made it to the end. Do you have any parting words for people reading this article or fans of The Uncommons?
Weaver: All fans of The Uncommons, I really appreciate you. I really, really, really do. It feels weird to think about the fact that something that popped up in my head that I scribbled on like notebook paper is something that over 2.5 million people have read, something that allows me to support myself and sustain my team as we work around the world to tell these stories and that means the world to me. I really appreciate people that read The Uncommons. For the people that have not heard of The Uncommons at all, go check it out. I hear the guy that writes it's pretty cool and you should go check it out.
But in general, like, if you're a nerd, if you're an anime fan, focus on what brings people together. Focus on the thing in these stories that feels universally relatable, that can help you relate to another person in a better way. When you see people of marginalized backgrounds, especially Black people, trying to make waves in this industry, understand that — especially for Black creators — sometimes we’ve got to work twice as hard to get half as far. So, that comment, that like, that share, that thing that feels very basic to you can really go a long way and helping prove that there's an appetite for these stories.
Source: Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!
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