Annika Grier
illustrator & comic artist
Recent Projects:
WAIT! Isn’t cartooning supposed to be fun?!’: Little Barbara Brandon’s earliest lessons.
Come take a look at my first comic project!
This one-shot comic dives into the childhood of Barbara Brandon-Croft, the trailblazing creator of Where I’m Coming From and the first nationally syndicated Black woman cartoonist. Created with Professor Darnel Degand at UC Davis, it celebrates the spark of artistic inspiration through nostalgia and storytelling.
In this one-shot, we glimpse the moment Barbara first picked up a pencil. When her dad, Brumsic Brandon Jr., handed her and her siblings drawing tools to quiet their chaos. She didn’t understand why drawing needed silence… until she tried it. That moment marked the beginning of her journey as an artist, guided by her father’s creative legacy.
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Click here to read!
Upcoming Projects:
Girls just wanna have fun!
Come take a look at my second comic project! This one-shot comic dives into another part of Barbara Brandon-Croft's childhood, created with Professor Darnel Degand from UC Davis. Little Barbara always thought boys and girls could just play together. That’s how it was at home, with her brother and sister. But one day, when Barbara and her friend Leslie tried to join a group of boys to play, they got shut out! That was the first time she started to notice… something wasn’t quite equal.
This one-shot comic explores that shift when innocence meets the reality of gender roles and how those tiny moments shape the way we see the world.