Angelique Roche on First Freedom - The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth

Friend, put your phone down. Quit doomscrolling. You owe it to yourself and everyone else who came before you. It’s time to get in the fight, and First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth by Angélique Roché, Alvin Epps, Millicent Monroe, and Bex Glendining is a comic designed to inject some serious motivation into your social media-addled, catatonic body.

The fight may be new to you, but it's been raging for centuries. That’s not a despairing thought; it’s an activating one, and once you stand on the shoulders of the heroes that came before, you’ll find the perspective required to block the hateful from gaining any more ground than they already have. As a comic book reader, you already have all the tools and knowledge to resist fascism.

On this week’s podcast, we chat with journalist, comic creator, and podcaster Angélique Roché. Once approached to write First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth, she threw herself into an intense research phase. We discuss the stress and excitement of the process, and the motivation she secured in telling Dr. Opal Lee’s life story.

Juneteenth was only recognized as a national holiday in 2021. It’s the first new federal holiday since Martin Luther King Day was signed into law in 1983. It never would have happened without Dr. Opal Lee and the lessons she learned from other warriors over her extraordinary lifetime.

First Freedom: The Story of Opal Lee and Juneteenth arrives in comic book shops and bookstores, thanks to Oni Press, on February 10th. Make sure you follow Angélique Roché via her website, Bluesky, and Instagram.

This Week's Sponsors

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Other Relevant Links to This Week's Episode:

• Subscribe to The Stacks, Comic Creators Name Their Favorite Comics

• The Comic Book Couples Counseling TeePublic Merch Page.

• Stand with Minnesota

• Buy Books from Greg Ketter and DreamHaven Books

• Daniel Warren Johnson on Absolute Batman Annual

• Comic Book Club: Black Arms to Hold You Up at Meanwhile...Coffee in Herndon, Virginia, on 2/1 at 3:30 PM

• Comic Book Film Club: Blade at the Alamo Drafthouse Winchester on 2/15

Final Round of Plugs (PHEW):

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