When 48-year-old Darrin Bell—a Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist maybe best known for his syndicated work that unapologetically explores various social and political issues—was a boy, he desperately wanted a water gun. His mother bought him one, but something was off: The toy was green. It looked utterly fake.

When Bell protested—“Why doesn’t it look like a real gun?”—his mother, who’s white, said that her decision just might save her Black son’s life. “The world is…different for you and your brother,” she explained. “White people won’t see you or treat you the way they do little white boys.” They won’t see “pure innocence,” Bell recalled, paraphrasing his mother, but rather “a threat to be dealt with.”

Bell’s captivating new graphic memoir, The Talk (Henry Holt, June 6), is filled with these kinds of stories—stories from his childhood and adulthood that informed his understanding of the often brutal realities of race and racism in the U.S.

In a starred review, Kirkus called The Talk “a beautifully drawn book, rich with insight, humor, and hard-won knowledge.” Bell and I exchanged emails about his latest work. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Why did you decide to create The Talk at this point in your life?

This wasn’t the book I’d set out to create. I wrote a story about three generations of Black men in my family, and that’s the one I’d sold to the publisher as part of a two-book deal (the topic of a second book was TBD). I wanted to write that story for my children. But when the police murdered George Floyd and the summer of protest began, I felt that this story needed to be told first. I thought that my children needed this story more, while they’re still young. I wanted it to be something we could read together while having the talk and something they could someday read to their own future children, when the time comes.

You explore a variety of racist incidents, from your encounter with the cop who freaked out over the green water gun to the college classmates who insisted that, actually, “colonialism was GOOD for Africa.” What is it about a cartoon that makes it a uniquely powerful vehicle to interrogate these kinds of experiences?

A picture tells a thousand words. We think in both words and images, so we’re hard-wired to respond to cartoons and to sequential art. When a cartoon or graphic novel has both words and images, it resonates in both sides of our brains. It creates a message that’s bigger than the sum of its parts.

Was there a story in The Talk that was particularly challenging to revisit?

The chapter “Scenes” was the most challenging, because I had to grapple with a profound sense of guilt over how little I appreciated what my mom did for us when my brother and I were kids. She was protecting me, but all she got from me in return was me being embarrassed and ungrateful. As I created that chapter, I had to relive those feelings in order to convey them. But as an adult with the benefit of hindsight, it was hard to relive those childhood feelings without being ashamed of them. When I finished the chapter, I called my mom and thanked her and told her that I think that a lot of readers may come away from The Talk seeing her as the hero of my story—because she is.

Many of the panels in this book have a blue, brooding wash. This made me wonder: Do you locate your style or approach within a particular artistic tradition or aesthetic tendency?

I guess you could say that it’s in the tradition of storyboard art. Aside from my comic strip “Candorville” and my editorial cartoons, I also freelanced as a storyboard artist for a while. Storyboards generally dispense with unnecessary color and opt for tones and washes, only using other colors when necessary. In The Talk, I used full color for the TV screens in the department store, for police lights, and for a few other things to signify what I was focused intently on at the time.

Could you tell us a bit about the process of making The Talk?

My editor [Retha Powers] and I talked through the story in a single phone call, and then I sat down and outlined it, breaking it into chapters—about 40 of them. Then I wrote and sketched one chapter at a time, in order. I sent Retha each chapter when it was done and waited for her notes before moving on to the next one. The first draft of the book was over 640 pages.

Once I turned that in and Retha sat with it for a while, she told me which storylines she thought were unnecessary. This seemed to be almost as painful for her as it was for me, because those cut storylines added a whole other dimension to the book. But ultimately I agreed that that’s why they needed to go. Without them, the story is more focused and effective. Besides, Retha made the point that those cut chapters would work better in the next book, and I think that she was right. After I came to terms with the cuts, I drew the final pages.

When I read this book, I was struck by how much space you give for the entire scope of Black humanity. This reminded me of how, far too often, Black people aren’t given much dimensionality in popular culture. What are your thoughts on this?

This is true, unless people know where to look. I’m old enough to remember a media landscape where Black people were almost exclusively used as two-dimensional window dressing on most TV shows and most films. We still are. The vast majority of executives and creatives in Hollywood are white, so they’re writing what they see, not what they experience. But there’s been progress. HBO’s Girls was raked over the coals for its depiction of an almost entirely white Manhattan (I guess that it was the same NYC seen in Sex and the City), but HBO also streamed Issa Rae’s Insecure, which was several seasons of in-depth character studies. It was funny, poignant, heartbreaking at times, and nuanced. There are many others.

I feel that it’s part of a trend that began in the late 1980s, with Bill Cosby’s A Different World. It was a subversive sitcom, in that it had characters who seemed to embody familiar—even clownish, at times—stereotypes (probably to appeal to white audiences who were comfortable with them), but over time, they snuck in a lot of nuance and fully fleshed out the characters. I believe that about three years later it inspired The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, in which some of the most prominent characters (Will and Uncle Phil) made that transition into nuanced, multidimensional characters in the final seconds of the very first episode. Then there was a show called Roc and another called Soul Food (based on the movie). A generation of writers and producers who were raised on those shows created recent shows, such as Queen Sugar, The Chi, Atlanta, Black-ish, Being Mary Jane, Pose, Empire, and more.

Too often, Black people are done a disservice in pop culture. That’s why shows, films, books, and graphic novels that present the full range of humanity shine like diamonds in a sandbox.

Brandon Tensley is the national politics reporter at Capital B.