Story by Paris Geolas
Illustration by Ellen Cochran
In a Morrisville coffee shop on a rainy Friday morning, Frederick L. Jones introduces himself with a handshake and a graphic novel. Meet the man, and meet Cast, the 12-year-old heroine of a manga called “Clock Striker” that Jones’ company, Saturday AM, has just published.
Cast is a Black girl who embarks on an epic journey to become an engineer. Jones wrote the graphic novel and illustrator Issaka Galadima brought her to life with dynamic visuals on par with popular Japanese manga. Cast is not merely a character in a story. She’s like an avatar of Jones’ work.
Both are on a quest: Cast, a one-handed teenager who wants to be a member of an elite group of superhero engineers who fight evil with science; and Jones, a middle-aged African American man who left a successful career as a gaming executive to bring diversity to his childhood passion of Japanese manga.
They have dreams not just to reach these goals, but to open them to their communities.
An Artist, An Entrepreneur
Jones was 10, a curious kid who loved drawing and reading comic books, when a librarian handed him a copy of “Weekly Shonen Jump.” Having watched “Dragon Ball Z” and “Pokémon,” he recognized the Japanese style immediately. But it was the first time he’d ever held a manga in his hands.
“It was different,” Jones said. “There was something about the stories that felt a little bit more epic. There was something about the characterizations that felt a little more natural, it felt more like real people. And after that I just became really dedicated to it.”
Soon after, Jones would start his first entrepreneurial effort.
“My mom had a word processing business, and we were one of the first families in the neighborhood to have a computer, printers and copy machines,” he said. “I would play with her copy machine all the time, and I would create comic books and then photocopy them and sell them in the neighborhood and school.”
Shortly after, Jones would recruit other kids in the neighborhood to create their own comics stories in manga-like anthology with himself as the lead editor and publisher.
Jones graduated from UNC-Chapel Hill in 1996 with a communications degree intending to work in comic books, but found himself falling into the video game industry. While manga and anime were still growing slowly, Japanese video games and consoles were exploding in popularity.
He followed the future. Jones worked his way up, starting in marketing eventually becoming a content buyer at Blockbuster. During this time, he would be one of the major players to help popularize ‘YU GI OH’ in the U.S. market. The popular Japanese manga series and trading card game would go on to become one of the most successful media franchises with Blockbuster stores serving as one of the top outlets to procure the cards. After Blockbuster, he became the VP of New Business at Gamer Graffix Worldwide.
But his yearning came back.
“It’s a natural urge,” he said. “Something was telling me it was time for me to stop making money for other people and to start doing it for myself.”
After over a decade in the video game world, Jones founded MyFutprint Entertainment, LLC, a publishing platform that could combine his love for manga as an art form with the representation he knew it lacked.
Passion meets Profit
Jones had always found ways to integrate passion into his career. Now, he was taking it to a new level by launching an original product that combined social activism, manga and business.
But he didn’t just want to bring in Black audiences by creating Black characters like Cast, he wanted to bring in artists from all over the world to create diverse stories and characters. He wanted to expand the genre.
It was a big dream and a bigger ask. Manga is historically a Japanese art, and pitching a business diversifying an art form that’s still not fully embraced by mainstream America, Black or white, would be a massive undertaking.
But Jones knew the media industry, and he was pretty sure he knew what was coming. The world of Saturday morning cartoons was disappearing, and in its place streaming services arose. Streaming services become competitive based off of the exclusive intellectual property (IP) they can either own or license. Jones knew that they would all be racing to license big series like Marvel and Spider-Man, but not everyone could win, so then what?
“If we can just create enough noise for a foreseeable future to be a brand with trusted IP that was lucrative, then we can go the distance, because they’re (i.e. streaming services) going to need us in another eight to 10 years,” he said. “And sure enough, that happened.”
Jones founded MyFutprint (with a logo in honor of his own Tar Heel pride) Entertainment LLC in 2013 and published the first ever diverse action-style digital manga magazine, called Saturday AM.
Nearly 10 years later, the brand has grown. There are two sister magazines (i.e. Saturday PM and Saturday Brunch) catering to unique demos such as older readers and female/LGBTQ, and a book distribution deal with UK publisher Quarto Group. The books are sold in over 31 countries and available in libraries, comic book stores,and major retailers like Walmart, Amazon, Waterstones and Barnes and Noble.
Saturday AM will release 13 more books in 2023 from artists all around the world, including Odunze Oguguo, known as Whyt Manga, a famous Nigerian YouTuber with over 550K subscribers and creator of Saturday AM’s flagship series, Apple Black. As the brand has become more popular, not only does Saturday AM make an effort to discover up and coming artists, established creators have often reached out to the magazine to publish their creator-owned stories.
Of Love and Leadership
Everything about him is carefully considered. Jones exudes business executive. He often loses track of what he was talking about, but it’s almost impossible to tell because his words seem so assured and hand-picked. It’s storming outside the coffee shop, but Jones walked in perfectly dry, not a single drop of rain on his clothes or behind the lens of his glasses.
He has weathered storms, professionally and personally, even though it doesn’t look like that.
Raising venture capital as a Black entrepreneur is challenging.
“I don’t care if you have the best Silicon Valley idea in the world,” Jones said. “Statistically our group (i.e. the Black community) does not get funding at the same level as other people. I had to really bootstrap it, which is not anything new, everyone does it. But I had to do it at a much more aggressive level.”
It can also be lonely. Jones is single, “relationships, relationships,” he says.
“I think the dedication and the focus that needed to go into every decision that we made the first couple of years, if I had to mitigate that with other things, I don’t know if we would be where we are today,” he said. “I’m in a position now where I’m starting to date some more, but if you talked to any executive that has a serious company growing, I’m pretty sure they’ll tell you the same thing. It’s a very difficult proposition to both successfully.
Saturday AM’s most famous series is Jones’ own, “Clock Striker,” the manga he introduced himself with. However, this was not his intention.
“I work as a creator out of necessity,” he said. “‘Clock Striker’ came about because as a Black man and a proud African American, and as the head of a Black company, I was disappointed. We had a number of creators who were people of color. None of the main characters were Black, and none of them were Black women even. And I thought, I can’t accept this as a principle. So I created ‘Clock Striker’ specifically to address that.”
Many of Saturday AM’s creators are young, and Jones says that working in manga, authenticity is something that they’re still having to learn.
“They would create manga and it looked like Japanese manga, which is great,” he said. “But it didn’t feature any diversity. I’m saying, ‘You can create beautiful art. Why aren’t you creating people who look like you?’”
Last year, Saturday AM published “How to Draw Diverse Manga,” a step-by-step guide showing how to draw authentic manga characters of all races.
The artist of “Clock Striker,” Issaka Galadima, has been an artist for 5 years and connected to Jones through Whyt Manga. He said that working with Jones is a constant learning experience.
“As a leader who has a clear vision of where he wants to go, his team follows him in full trust and confidence,” Galadima said. “He cares deeply about delivering results that make a difference.”
Jones is about to take his first vacation in a decade, since the start of Saturday AM. To what comes next, he says, “There’s this concept of if you get your foot in the door, keep it open long enough to let some other people in behind you, before it closes.”
