In the predawn hours on May 13, 1862, Robert Smalls commandeered the Confederate steamer Planter from the Charleston docks and escaped slavery alongside a small crew of freedom seekers. Through the maelstrom of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Smalls went on to prominence, becoming a member of Congress and much more. Rob Edwards’s Defiant: The Story of Robert Smalls, a new graphic novel published as the first volume of a collaborative, crowdsourced series by Legion M and Stranger Comics, tells this extraordinary yet little-known story. Edwards, also a celebrated television and film storyteller, spoke with PW about Smalls, the creative process, history, and heroism.
When did you first learn about Robert Smalls? Was it before or after you were brought into the Defiant project?
A classmate of mine from Cranbrook, David Baxter, who works with Legion M, got in touch with me after a Robert Smalls meme went viral in their community. David basically said, “Hey, somebody sent a meme into Legion M and another member wrote a screenplay based on the story, could you look at it? Because it may be impolitic for a white writer to write this story.”
So I looked at it and what was cool to me was, I had never heard of this guy, and I thought I was read up on everything and so it was amazing that this had never showed up on my radar screen. In fact, I worked on a movie called Emperor that was about an escaped slave, and during it the researchers were telling us that no one had ever escaped slavery, or no one escaped without consequence, or they talked about the Haitian Rebellion and other things. Well, there were Black Seminoles, there were all kinds of people who had escaped and had gone and were fine.
So, I was on the lookout for a story like this, and then when I heard about this one and not only the escape but what happened after the escape and just how amazing his story was, I thought, this is the one I want to tell. This is the one that I think will affect the most people. So, I told him I wasn’t going to just consult on it, I wasn’t going to just take a rewrite pass on it, I was going to completely start from scratch. The initial writer had heard that there was a heist in the middle of the night, that they stole this boat, and that’s what he wrote. When I asked him for his syllabus, he said, “Well, there isn’t one.” So, that was my journey as a “historian”: to try to investigate this guy’s life and tell his story.
Can you walk through the creative process a little? What sort of sources did you consult while researching Smalls’s story?
Fortunately, I had done my time at Disney Pixar, and those guys are research junkies. So, no matter what the film is, they bring book after book after book, and recordings and interviews and all kinds of stuff, and eventually you just become an expert. On Treasure Planet, it was maritime law and the history of piracy and then also Robert Louis Stevenson, technology, Boston dynamics, what was possible and all kinds of stuff. You just try to get as close to a reality as you can. I always say, I knew more about green tree frogs than most people should, because of The Princess and the Frog.
So, when this thing happened, the first step usually is, you figure out basically the line of the story, what you want to say with it, and then you start doing research; you just say, “I need to know everything.” My first question was, what kind of person would do this? What was it about his childhood that got him to this place? What I wound up with was basically, he was a guy who had grown up and never really took on the mantle of “slave.” Smalls was raised by Henry McKee. The first thing I found that was really interesting to me was that Robert Smalls and Henry McKee’s daughter were born within three months of each other. Robert Smalls was a very well-dressed man; that can only come from having been dressed in the hand-me-down clothes of the McKee family. His mother, Lydia Polite, had raised at least two generations of McKees already, so she was as much a part of the family as you could [be], and they lived of course separately; they lived in the backyard, and all the other slaves lived on the plantation. So, I figured that he grew up as a rich white boy and then never shed that, so as society tried to redefine him, he would not allow himself to be redefined. That was his defiance: I will not mold to your conventions.
One of the themes in Defiant and one goal for me was that I didn’t want to do the thing that everybody else does with slave narratives, which is: all the white people are bad, and they are just these sadists and that’s where it begins and ends. I wanted to ask, what happens to nice, generally kind, people when they’re in an unkind system? McKee asserts his authority as a slaveowner when he runs out of means as a father. The police assert their authority as slavecatchers because here’s this unruly kid who refuses to go inside at night. I think that that’s the way it works. Sometimes people assert whatever authority they can when they have that opportunity, and that’s why the institution of slavery is the bad guy, not necessarily the slaveowners and foremen, and so on. That’s where I started: this improbable guy, who does this amazing thing. Why does he do it? Then, take him through the journey.
In the foreword to Defiant, Smalls’s great-great grandson, Michael Boulware Moore, describes the graphic novel as a “bridge across time.” What does that mean to you?
The way I look at it is, first, everything old is new again. Here we are in 2025, we’re still debating the Fourteenth Amendment. This year, for Juneteenth—the book came out on Juneteenth—the President of the United States says you cannot celebrate this federal holiday on federal grounds, and a lot of people backed down from that and events were canceled all over the country. So, you had this whole thing of, well, there’s oppression, and the automatic reaction was well, we won’t celebrate these things. What I think the “bridge of time” is, is What would Robert Smalls do? Robert Smalls would have just thrown the thing [Juneteenth] and said, “Come get me.” We need to see more of that now. I had this fascinating conversation with a 70-year-old white British man who had just read the book, and he said, “I don’t think you were meant to inspire me, but you did. I’m inspired because I look at what he did and I think, we should all be doing stuff like that.”
You helped bring the first Black Disney Princess to audiences in The Princess and the Frog, and more recently, working on the screenplay and story for Captain America: Brave New World, you brought another Black hero—or superhero—to the big screen. How did those experiences shape your storytelling for Defiant?
I think they got me ready for it. Frankly, if you had asked me in 2000 to write Defiant, I would have said no. That was before Treasure Planet, which gave me a feel for epic storytelling, and then The Princess and the Frog was like the day in high school where they give you an egg and you had to show up the next day with the egg uncracked. It felt like that. My four years on that was, “Don’t blow it.” I told them that you’re not going to find anybody who is going to take this more seriously than me, and so off we go. The same was true of Captain America, where everything he says is going to be put under a microscope. People are going to come after all those stories, and they did. But you want to at the end of the day have something that you can be proud of, that other people can be proud of, and I’m really gratified that people will run up to me and say, “Hey! Did you write that thing? Oh my God!” and give me a hug of nowhere, “Thank you!”
So, with this, I thought, there’s nobody else who has the CV to write something this big and important, to take it seriously, and to not step on a rake. I am pulling out all the stops, but I want to connect people to him as a man, as a father, as a human being, and take everyone through this epic story, and then [in subsequent volumes] expand it to the family, into modern day, and out and out. Recently, we moved out of comic bookstores and into Barnes & Noble and Amazon—I think we debuted at #1—so it’s catching on. I think that it’s the kind of book that you can leave on your kid’s bed and know that they’ll know a lot more about our history by the end of it, which would be virtually impossible to do with most other forms.
Can you speak to your experience of this collaborative process in creating such a uniquely hybrid graphic novel project? Was it similar or different from other things you’ve worked on?
Writers’ rooms are entirely collaboration. I love collaboration and the idea of, “Look, I’ve taken it to the one-yard line—I need a fullback.” At Disney Pixar, there’s this concept of ‘plussing.’ Everything gets “plussed,” which means that I turn in my pages to a story artist and the story artist starts drawing, and a lot of times that would get locked in: they’d take it to the director. So, I would go in very early and I would see what they were going to do with my scene, and I would say, “Great, I love what you’re doing, I’m going to help that out; I’ll be right back.” I would go rewrite my pages to what they were doing and then we would take that into the director. That was a process—I was at Disney for more than 10 years—that just became a really great way to communicate with artists.
Stranger Comics has a very similar system. Darrell May is the layout guy, so I talked directly to him. Darrell was like, “What kind of gun does he have?” He would go down to the details; there’s not a detail that was missed in this. In fact, we had huge arguments over what flags are flown at different times for different regiments, and things like that. Some things wind up as historian versus artist. So, Darrell would take a pass at it, and then after he had laid it out, we would look at it and give him notes and he would redraw, basically, where everything belongs and what everybody looks like.
Then it would go to Sean Damien Hill, who would do the final pencil and ink work with Alex Paterson and the other artists and editors. Some work was based in Italy, so art would get shipped over and the “modern” stuff, the 1914 stuff, would be done over there. We wanted that to look different as you were going between past and present; slightly different styles the artists had. There were several colorists as well. We were meeting every week at every stage, I was giving my input, kind of directing it as you would a movie. Fortunately, those guys were super patient and wanted to get it right as much as I did. The way we progressed was entirely collaborative. I take my part of it as a storyteller but the artistry; those guys went above and beyond the call and did some great stuff.
What are the main takeaways you hope readers of Defiant have?
If this kid can go from the lowest of the low to highest of the high, where he starts off born in a one-room backyard shack on a day when there’s a lynching right down the street; if he can go from that to Congress, the railroad, the printing press, giving speeches—not without conflict, often from the same, constant antagonists who will be seen in forthcoming volumes. What I want people to take from it, like what my 70-year-old white British friend took: it’s inspirational. No matter where you are today, you are not as bad as where Robert Smalls started. If he can ascend to where he ascended, there’s hope for everybody. That, I think, is universal. It’s less at that point a slave narrative and more Horatio Alger story; an inspirational tale for everybody to read, hopefully multiple times. I do have my days where I go, “What would Robert Smalls do?” WWRSD, you know? And you say, “OK, ground yourself.” Play the chess game like Robert Smalls. You can get on a boat at 3 a.m. and at 6 a.m. your whole life is changed.
Wyatt Erchak is a historian of the Civil War era interested in visual storytelling, whose work explores Black pioneers and their allies fighting against slavery.
This article has been updated with further information and for clarity.
