Posro Media LLC

As we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day and the inauguration of the first black president, three new books focus on the African-American experience.

In just a couple weeks, Jason Levy, 13, and his friend Donovan Richards, 13, will leave their homes in Trenton to begin studying science at Brown University in Providence, R.I.

Fourteen years ago, Roland Laird set out to change the world as he knew it - the comic book world, that is.

Brown University grads Ayana Evans, Felicia Lyde and Roland Laird founded the Ethel Tremaine Robinson Foundation to encourage Black philanthropy among fellow alumni of their alma mater.

For many alumni, it is a struggle to give back to their school, even though that institution has given them so much. Yet, a group of African-American graduates from Brown University has started a foundation that not only gives back to the university, but to the community as well.

Once disregarded as bastardized literature with little to no educational content, nowadays the graphic novel is finally being taken seriously. Enter Roland Owen Laird, an African-American comic book author. Best known for his successful Afrocentric weekly strip The Griots, Laird yearned to tell a bigger story. Together with his wife Taneshia Nash Laird and artist Elihu "Adofo" Bey he created Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African-Americans, an account of the rough, continuing transition of Africans into African Americans.

Over the past quarter century or so, there has been a slow but steady increase of African-American comics creators, doing work that transcends race and genre, and getting recognized for it. New Jersey’s Posro Komics has played a key part of this revitalization, not only contributing entertaining and enlightening material, but heightening the awareness of black creators in the media spotlight.

The Governor's Early Literacy Initiative brought authors Roland Laird and Taneshia Nash Laird to the Trenton Public Library yesterday to promote family reading.

Four years ago, Roland Laird hit bottom. He and his wife of four months, Taneshia, had just lost their home to a gas-line explosion.

From the arrival of the first slaves in colonial Virginia to the Million Man March on Washington, Still I Rise is an amazing condensed cartoon chronicle of African Americans that's aimed primarily at adults and prefaced with an introductory history of black cartoonists. [Grade] A-

Prize-winning novelist Charles Johnson aptly describes Still I Rise: A Cartoon History of African Americans as "popular entertainment that enlightens."

I ask Posro Komic's head writer and artist (Roland Laird and Elihu Bey II) what their book would be if it were a record. It's the only thing you can ask, really. Posro's book, MC Squared (MC2), isn't a superhero comic, it's a hip-hop comic, the story of Earl Terrel, a regular-joe Harlem barber with a phat jeep and dreams of programming black-themed computer games.

Staring out a smudged window in his cramped home office, Roland Laird cannot see past the squat, sprawling apartment complex across the street. But with a pen in hand and the thumping pulse of hip-hop music in the air, Mr. Laird closes his eyes and sees the crowded streets of Harlem, losing himself in the rhythms and riddles of the inner city.

Marcus and Monique Griot are publishers of an African-American weekly newspaper called The Griot. (A griot is an African keeper of oral history.) Founded in 1865 by Marcus' great-great grandfather and freed slave Cinque Griot, the paper has been successfully handed down from generation to generation, and the Griots hope to turn it over to their own children one day.

When Roland Laird, creator of MC squared, named his Edison, N.J. company Posro Comics. "I took the word Negro and got rid of its prefix. That prefix means 'dead.' So instead of calling ourselves Negro, I prefer the term Posro. It puts a positive spin on the term."

"We want to do the comic book equivalent of 'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison, something that strong," says Roland Laird of Piscataway, N.J., creator of "MC Squared," which debuted in July. Laird, 30, and his business partner launched the book with several thousand dollars saved up from their silk-screen T-shirt business.