new animé-style series ‘primus 7’ by blerd-owned media company

By Jacqueline-Elizabeth*, AFROPUNK contributor

This past weekend, our Black-owned indie media company, Noir Caesar Entertainment (NSZR), founded and owned by NBA Player, Johnny O’Bryant III of the Charlotte Hornets, made history at this year’s Crunchyroll Expo 2017 (CRX), in Santa Clara, California.

NSZR Entertainment shook Crunchyroll Expo to their core with the release of the highly-anticipated, full-length trailer for our company’s very first animated series, Primus 7: The Movie, along with the subsequently successful launch of our Kickstarter to fund the project, now available for viewing on our website and Facebook.

We have teamed up with  JM Animation—the very same company responsible for other wildly successful animated series such as, Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Boondocks, and Fairy Tail, and have gone on to receive backing and support not only from our fanbase, but great Black actors and comedians, such as Orlando Jones, amongst others.

Despite being founded only five, short months ago, NSZR Entertainment has seen immeasurable success in the markets of it’s entirely original content, including comics, manga, and anime, by our diverse crew of talented writers, artists, and creators dedicated to our mission to push for more diversity and representation in the world of anime, manga, comics, video games and beyond.

We recently broke 30k followers on Facebook (accumulating ten-thousand plus followers in the last five days alone), and matched the success of the company’s instagram for Primus 7, which is also at 30k-plus followers and growing even faster after this weekend. We have had the opportunity to meet with several major media publication companies such as ViZ Media, Tokyopop, Crunchyroll, among others, all of whom were highly impressed with what Noir Caesar has set out to accomplish. Many enthusiastically sought us out to discuss taking the company global—and we couldn’t be more grateful for the opportunity to show the world and everyone in it that diversity and representation truly does matter. 

Some of the talented staff and creators of Noir Caesar Entertainment in attendance this weekend included our founder and owner Johnny O’Bryant III, apparel designer and co-creator of Primus 7, Vaughn Alexander, famed illustrator, Mikhail Sebastian (Mythallica Lux Nova, The Latchkeys), Marcus-Kwabena Johnson and John Lawrence, the minds behind one of NSZR’s original (and most popular) manga, Arms Of The Dragon, Corey Mikell, creator of the Spacepop series, and TeamBackPack’s legendary musical producers, Will Ill Brown and his brother, Cosmos Black, as we greeted, met, and kicked it with fans of our company’s works featured in NSZR’s unique line of Hype! Manga, and sat down to discuss the future of NSZR with various producers and other creators who never wasted a moment to share their support and wisdom with us.

The NSZR booth was swarmed daily with people attracted by the dope beats of Primus 7’s theme song, “Liberation”, as it resonated through the halls of the convention center, and had people and cosplayers full on turning up and dancing along to the trailer of Primus 7.

Above all, the most satisfying accomplishment achieved at Crunchyroll Expo this weekend (aside from our team meeting with the legendary Final Fantasy artist and creator, Yoshitaka Amano), was the emotional responses from those who didn’t hesitate to tell us that it truly meant everything to them to finally see themselves representated in the world of mainstream anime and manga—particularly those of whom are parents and were excited over their children and younger generations having far more heroes of color to look up to than they had.

We were also fortunate to host a panel, and be invited to join a second one centered around diversity and representation. Both were highly successful, with dozens of people meeting with us both after the panels (and at our booth) to ask questions and expounding over how many of them had never seen that many Black creators on a single stage at one time. It was by far one of the most humbling experiences, leaving us at NSZR all the more determined to continue in our drive to push for and create content that can not only be shared worldwide, but continuing on to inspiring future creators who have been told “No, you can’t” simply because of the color of their skin, or—in many cases of Black nerds—that our love of anime, manga, video games, and the like somehow make us “not Black”.

As Noir Caesar Entertainment moves forward towards a future brighter than any of us could have ever hoped to dream of, we will continue to produce the highest-quality of content and make the dream of diversity and representation in the world of anime, manga, comics and beyond to be create a reality to be shared by all.

To learn more about how we’re making that happen, check out Noir Caesar’s website, Facebook, support our Kickstarter, and prepare yourselves for nerd history in the making!

#GetHype

*Jacqueline-Elizabeth Cottrell represents the Black-owned, creative entertainment company, Noir Caesar, as their Entertainment Representative and Spokesmodel. She hosts bi-weekly vlogs that discuss Black nerd culture, and keep fans informed on what’s happening within the company. She is presently writing a script for a brand new comic-book title to be featured in an future edition of the company’s monthly, serialized publication, ‘Hype Monthly Magazine’, similar to Shounen Jump and Shoujo Beat.