Frederick Noland is an Oakland-based artist with a focus on visual storytelling. He’s the creator of acclaimed graphic novels and comics such as Steady Rollin’, Our Little Wild Time, and Black Sheep, as well as a regular comics contributor to The New Yorker, Popula, and the East Bay Express. Noland has also worked as an illustrator and animator and teaches comics and illustration at CCA.

Noland’s newest graphic novel, Major Taylor: World’s Fastest Man, is about the first Black champion cyclist and a trailblazing international sports superstar. Taylor was born in 1878 in Indianapolis and came of age during the Jim Crow era, facing racism at every turn. Yet he still became one of the greatest American athletes of the 20th century, winning his first world championship by the age of twenty. The book will be out from Drawn & Quarterly this August.

Join Noland and CCA Comics professor Justin Hall as they discuss Noland’s long career, how his background as a preacher’s kid, Black punk, and pedaling papa have influenced his work, what it was like drawing 400 pages of a single book, and just how he achieves those luscious ink lines.

Artwork above is by Frederick Noland.