Positive Growth and Positive Mental Health: TikTok Star Tony Weaver Jr. Discusses His Latest Comic for Kids, Weirdo

Seems to me that if you have 794.3K followers on TikTok, that’s a lot of followers. Right? Sounds like a lot to me. And if your name is Tony Weaver Jr., there’s probably a reason for that massive amount.

So I didn’t know much about any of that. I didn’t know that Tony was a TikTok Star and the CEO of Weird Enough Productions and had his own social impact organization. I didn’t know that when he sold his middle grade graphic memoir Weirdo it got a write-up in (checks notes) Forbes. I just knew that I liked the book. I saw Tony at a Macmillan party on a boat at ALA and since I like comics I figured I’d read his. This whole influencer thing he’s got going on is great, but an influencer does not necessarily a great book make. And this book is fun.

For those of you curious about said book, here’s a bit of a recap, via the aforementioned publisher:

Eleven-year-old Tony Weaver, Jr. loves comic books, anime, and video games, and idolizes the heroic, larger-than-life characters he finds there. But his new classmates all think he’s a weirdo. Bullied by his peers, Tony struggles with the hurt of not being accepted and tries to conform to other people’s expectations. After a traumatic event shakes him to his core, he embarks on a journey of self love that will require him to become the hero of his own story.

Weirdo is a triumphant, witty, and comedic story for any kid who’s ever felt awkward, left out, or like they don’t belong. An adolescence survival guide that will give every reader the confidence to make it to the other side.

I enjoyed the heck out of the book and figured kids would as well. And now I get to ask him questions about it. Behold his answers!

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Betsy Bird: Tony! Such a delight to speak with you again. I had a chance to briefly meet you on a boat at ALA in San Diego this year. And congratulations on the release of WEIRDO! Can you tell us a little bit about the origin story of this book? Where did you get the idea to turn your own story into a book of this sort?

Tony Weaver Jr.: I wish every person who interviewed me started with “I briefly met you on a boat.” It makes me sound like a One Piece character! I think we should keep it ambiguous, we shouldn’t add any more details so that any reader truly believes that I was on the Going Merry when you ran into me for the first time.

To answer your question, I am the author of a middle-grade graphic novel called Weirdo, which I call the nerdy kid’s instruction manual for self-love and self-confidence, and I believe the things that inspired Weirdo, are the weird, nerdy thoughts like the ones that I started this answer with. As a young person, I was always enamored with stories, comic books, manga, graphic novels, and video games. Even listening to specific types of music, I would imagine these vivid images, stories, and narratives playing out in my head. When I picked up the pen to write something that would support kids in the middle of the youth mental health crisis, that would help young people who were dealing with cyberbullying and struggling to love who they are, it was immediately clear to me that it needed to be a graphic novel.

BB: Don’t worry. I’ll always introduce you as the guy who meets people on boats from here on in. Now did you always envision your story as a comic, or were there other iterations that you
considered along the way?

Tony: When I thought about the messages of positive self-love I wanted to communicate in Weirdo, it was really important to me from the beginning that it was a comic book because I think there’s something very powerful about images of a young black boy navigating his mental health struggles and coming out victorious on the other side. I think there’s something very visceral about seeing a child sitting in a therapist’s office and witnessing their breakthrough in real-time, and the comic book format kind of allows us to do that. I think that for a lot of kids who need a book like Weirdo, it’s difficult for them to conceptualize what positive growth and positive mental health look like. In a comic book, we can provide that imagery, and kind of show by example, and give kids something to aspire to.

Everybody says that representation is important, but I don’t think it can be said enough, because it truly is. And for a graphic novel where we’re talking about mental health, specifically from the perspective of a young black boy, we get to do this cool thing where black readers get the opportunity to see a character that looks like them and kids who might not go to school around black kids, or have a lot of black kids in their community, develop the muscle to empathize with a black character and identify the similarities because this kid is dealing with the same struggles that they’re dealing with.

BB: As in any fictionalized memoir, you have to make strategic choices about what to include and what to change. I mean, it’s your life. You probably knew which key moments to include, but how did you figure out what to change and what to tweak?

Tony: I think one of the things I’m most proud of when it comes to weirdo is that 99.9% of the events in the book are completely true. One of the only things that shifted were the ages that I was when certain events happened so that it made sense in the structure of the book. It’d be kind of weird if I was in sixth grade in one chapter, and then I was in ninth grade in the next chapter, and then we jumped backward and I was in seventh grade again. There was even a point in time where to make some of the timeline make sense, we had to jump from the fall semester into the spring semester. We kind of use winter break as a time skip where all the characters level up, like the transition between Naruto and Naruto Shippuden. So who knows, maybe there’s a Weirdo Christmas special story out there somewhere that’ll happen at some point that’ll be a prequel or something.

Other than making sure that things were age-appropriate for middle grades, not a lot of the events had to be changed. I think that more than a series of events, the book is also a series of lessons, and as I reflect on my life, there are a lot of lessons that I was able to grab from experiences that weren’t very positive on the surface. I think that’s part of what makes a story so compelling. It is legitimately true.

BB: For the record, I am all for a Weirdo Christmas Special. So was there any change or anything you had to leave out of the book that you wished you could have included but that simply didn’t fit in the final product?

Tony: That’s a hard one because we do truly cover a lot of ground in this book. In some of the early reviews that I received, one person said they were surprised by the broad subject matter of the book. That made me really happy. When you have clarity on your story, it’s possible to be compact, but also explore a lot of things in a meaningful way. I made it a priority to fit as much into the book as I could. However, one thing that I didn’t get to include in the book is that while I was in middle and high school, I was a part of a nationally recognized musical theater troupe that was comprised exclusively of kids in Atlanta. This troupe that I was a part of, we would travel around the city and country, and there was even one point in time when some of the kids (not me, because I did not make the cut) got to go to China and perform. I also spent about six years at the Tupac Shakur Center for the Arts in Atlanta. The arts inspired me a lot, and I spent a lot of time on stage finding my voice. Unfortunately, I did not get the chance to explore that in Weirdo as much as I would have wanted to, but, you know, maybe a different book!

BB: I didn’t realize it at first but the art in this book is by Jes & Cin Wibowo who are also both responsible for this year’s fellow comic Lunar Boy. Did you envision at all what the art in this book might look like? How do you feel about the final product?

Tony: I would say, from the beginning, I had a clear vision of the way that I wanted the book to look aesthetically, in terms of style, but I think Jes & Cin brought a massive level of draftsmanship to the way that the story was communicated through the sequential art. I’m really precious about the words and what’s supposed to fit on each page, but Jes & Cin were able to craft compositions where the emotions on the page are clearly communicated even if there were no words. I’m very happy with how the final product turned out. I think they have a very keen eye for detail, and for anyone who reads Weirdo, I think they’ll notice that attention to detail on every page.

BB: Finally, what’s next for you? What else are you working on?

Tony: The running gag at First Second is that I’m writing too many things all the time. I’m certain my editor feels that way, and I’m also certain my agents feel that way. At the time of this interview, I’m writing five different projects in some capacity, across books and also film and TV. So as a writer, I’m always busy and thinking and creating. But ultimately, with Weirdo being my debut, I think my career starts here. It’s crazy to think about the fact that Weirdo was acquired in 2019. Now five years later, everyone is going to be walking into a bookstore and catching up to the writer that I was five years ago. I’ve spent five years waiting for my work to be seen, and for people to see what I’m made of. I can’t wait for those flowers to bloom, and for this story to get into the hands of kids that need it.

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Beautifully put. Weirdo is on shelves everywhere as of yesterday. Big time thanks to Tony for taking all that time to answer my questions. Thanks too to Samantha Sacks and the team at Macmillan for helping to put all of this together.

Filed under: Interviews