Seitu Hayden, The Wrist – The People Issue 2024

Seitu Hayden, artist and illustrator (including graphic biographies of Malcolm X and Barack Obama), has had a career that straddled publishing and advertising. He was a college student when he created Waliku, a Black life comic strip that ran in the Chicago Defender in the 1970s but looks contemporary today. Waliku was part of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2021 “Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” exhibit.    

My intent, coming out of high school, was not to come to Chicago. I’m 71 years old and I’ve been here since 1971, but I’m from Fort Wayne, Indiana. My intention was to go to New York, to the School of Visual Arts, camp out on the front door of Marvel Comics, and get hired.

My mom had introduced me to Richard Green, who was known as Grass Green. He was a Black cartoonist, working for Charlton Comics. He was also doing a strip for a local Black newspaper. He was the first person I could talk comics to in Fort Wayne, and he hired me to ink his work and inspired me. I wanted to become a comic book artist.

I got into the New York School, but they didn’t have a dormitory. So Chicago became the second choice, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts. I read somewhere that Walt Disney went there and they had a major in cartooning. And I thought, “If Disney went there, that’s good enough for me. I found out later he only stayed for a semester.    

The Chicago Academy gave me a scholarship for the first year, but what sealed the deal was that they had a connection to what was then a very new Herman Crown Center at Roosevelt University. So I had a place to live. And it was full of young people—international students and students from all the art schools in the city. For somebody who never knew much about Chicago to be living downtown at that time, in that place, it was heaven.

The very first person I met when I moved into the dorm was Marvin Jones, a photography student at Columbia. He helped me get a comic strip in the Daily Defender. It was called the James Gang, but I changed the name to Waliku as I got more into Black Body, a national student group I joined. They came up with a ceremony where myself and some other people were granted African names, and my mom picked out Seitu. It means artist, and from then on I used it instead of my birth name, William Eric. I transferred to Columbia College the next year and did four years there.

We had a lot of the printing industry here, but for publishing it was Britannica and places like Reuben H. Donnelley, which is where I got my first job coming out of school, working on ads for the yellow pages. At one point I met a man named John Ortman, an art director at Foote, Cone & Belding. He could draw his ass off. He was a holdover from the time in advertising when art directors could actually draw. But at some point they said, “No, you’re the idea guy, you ain’t got time to draw. Get somebody else to do that, get a wrist to do it.” That was the term in the industry for somebody like me, who would draw up the ideas of the copywriters and art directors. Ortman was my introduction to the commercial illustration world. I became his assistant, the nighttime guy. The money was in doing storyboards. And, as much as I wanted to do comics, I was at the point in my life where money was way more important.

Most of my career success I attribute to the Black press and Black-owned businesses. I did a comic strip, Shop Life, for a magazine called Shoptalk, put out by SoftSheen. And my first ad agency job was for Vince Cullers. He opened up the first Black advertising agency I think in the country.  At the point I joined Vince, they had Kellogg’s, Illinois Bell—the Black accounts, of course. I always talk about Blackvertising—you’ve got smaller budgets, lower expectations, but you always overperform.

A copywriter there said to me, “You want to be a wrist all your life?” I said, “Man, from what I’ve been able to see, creators have a hidden expiration tag on ’em and only management can see it. And at some point they’re going to think you’re too old to come up with ideas for the consumer we’re trying to reach now, and then you’re going to be out on your ass.”

I love cartoons. That’s what got me into art in the first place.

I got to work for Foote, Cone & Belding, J. Walter Thompson, Ogilvy & Mather, and then Leo Burnett. I’ve worked in-house, be it as a freelancer or on staff, at the four biggest agencies in this town. But I was coming in on the tail end of an era. What I’ve witnessed is the changing face of illustration because of what’s gone down with technology.

By the time I got to Foote Cone, I had given up on my comic book dream, but I met a guy there who wanted me to draw an independently produced comic called Tales From the Heart, about a young woman’s time in the Peace Corps. We did five issues before somebody at Marvel got wind of it and offered us a deal, a chance to do a graphic novel for an imprint of Marvel called Epic Comics that was a creator-owned label. So they put out two graphic novels, The Temporary Natives and Bloodlines. At that point I thought, maybe I’m going to make it in the comic world after all. Maybe my dream is going to come true. But it never connected. This is all happening while I’m still doing commercial art and storyboards, in the early 90s.  

My own personal joke is I’m a art ho. If you’re paying, I’m drawing.

At Burnett, they put all us artists underneath the Capps Studio banner. I ended up staying there till they cut me off at the knees when I was 59, which is when that hidden expiration tag popped out on me.  

Now I’m a little bit all over the place. I did a Spider-Man sticker book—got to draw my favorite Marvel characters. What I’ve been doing this year is storyboards for an educational YouTube show, Hip Hop Boobly. Now that she’s two and a half, my granddaughter has brought me back into the world of children’s programming. Because I love cartoons. That’s what got me into art in the first place.

And I’ve got Saytoons stores on CafePress, Zazzle, and Amazon Merch. I think about the stuff that I’ve sold all over the world—that in Switzerland or Australia somebody’s got a T-shirt designed by me, and they didn’t care if I was Black, white, or whatever, they just liked what they saw, thought enough of it to buy it.  

So where I am now? I’m still a art ho. I keep telling myself I need to do my own thing, like some kind of autobiographical comic about the foibles of my crazy life in an art career in Chicago. I keep going back to that dormitory. It was a magical place, a magical time.

This was originally published in the 2024 edition of our People Issue, the Reader’s annual special of first-person stories, as told by your neighbors, classmates, and the weirdo at the end of the bar.