The magic of creativity begins with inspiration but it can only be sustained by unwavering dedication and tireless grinding. Project founder, Jimmy Briseno, has since recruited others to grind with him on the Made Collaborative journey (and we’re so glad he did!) but the journey began with him, all by himself, in front of a room full of kids all waiting for what he was going to say next.

It took a little coaxing, at first, to get things started, but once the kids caught the storytelling bug they were off and running. It only made sense to bring a small team of artists into the collaborative process to add greater depth and legitimacy to all that Jimmy had documented from his afterschool creative sessions with the youth.

Together—Jimmy, the artists and the youth—had refined and expanded upon a number of narrative threads. All of them fresh, original ideas from the kids, based on their lives and heightened by their favorite pop culture. Jimmy and his collaborators had compiled a “series bible,” of sorts, with model sheets, storyboards, descriptions of plot and characters. There were even some preliminary scripts that Jimmy had worked out with the youth.

It all amounted to the ingredients of a great comic book story. It had elements of romance, adventure and that all-too-elusive authenticity that came straight from the kids.But it wasn’t a comic book yet. Only the ingredients of one.

We originally created the following little comic feature on the “real” Back of the Yards shortly after selecting Back of the Yards as the fictional setting for our comic series, the first of what we hope to be many more with your collaborations.  

And with that, we plan to do many more short comic features based on the neighborhoods of other participating youth as part of this ongoing Neighborhoods & Their Residents collaborative Studio Card series.  In our minds, you can’t really tell any comic story that set in an urban community without capturing some of the underlying elements and history of its neighborhood setting.  In many ways, the neighborhood is as important as any comic character.

So it was in that context we decided to put together a quick comic feature.  The writer for this comic feature is Len Kody, and the illustrator is Dan Dougherty.  Both very talented artists who have been early participants for this collaborative project.  

So, without further ado, just click to read the feature!

With this Source Card collaboration, we will be covering various topics related to law enforcement & community relations, together with your input. We’ll start this ongoing collaboration with a peek at the origins of our modern police forces, eventually transitioning to some of the many challenges our police forces face today, and then focus on the impact of those challenges within our black and brown communities in particular.    

And as we cover these various topics, we will invite you to the same, either on your own or collaboratively with others.  And we hope to not only collaborate with urban youth and their academic administrators, but also other subject matters experts along the way, and perhaps no more important in that regard than those on the very front lines we speak of, our police officers.

That’s the hope anyway.  But we’ll see exactly where this collaboration goes together.  For now, we’ll simply kick things off with a peak into the origins of the modern day police force.  

And as turns out, that tale starts with some guy named Robert Peel.  Who, you ask?  Well just turn the pages below we’ll dive right into it.