On a warm April afternoon, I met cartoonist and avid cyclist Fred Noland in front of his studio in a converted factory wedged between forlorn train tracks and I-880 in East Oakland. A solidly built man of 50 with warm brown eyes and a wide smile punctuated with deep-dish dimples, Noland led me into a cavernous white-walled space that he shares with other artists and handed me a cartoon of his from 2013. In it, he’s kitted out in cycling gear, just riding his bike when someone shouts, “Hey, Lance Armstrong.” In the cartoon, Noland cringes and holds up three fingers as he schools the flustered bystander: “I DON’T do DRUGS. I am NOT a SOCIOPATH. I am NOT WHITE.” A decade later, he still dislikes any comparison with Armstrong: “It’s because he’s the American face of cycling,” Noland says.
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Noland, whose work appears regularly in underground comix, the New Yorker, and LA Weekly and on murals on San Francisco’s Market Street, prefers to be compared with his cycling hero, Marshall Walter “Major” Taylor (1878–1932), who became the first Black world champion road cyclist 30 years after the abolition of slavery. “I would have no problem with somebody being like, ‘Hey, Major Taylor,’ or a Justin Williams—they’re just not as well-known,” he says with a shrug.
That may change with Noland’s forthcoming, 250-page biographical comic, Major Taylor.
Noland first heard of Taylor around 2010 while riding his bike around Oakland’s Lake Merritt. He’d noticed cyclists sporting Major Motion T-shirts and discovered they were part of a Los Angeles–based cycling club. Digging into Taylor’s life story, he learned about the Jim Crow–era sports star. “It kind of brought up other things that I didn’t think about, didn’t engage in. Like the times when I was treated in a certain way because of the color that I am,” he says, noting, “Clearly, he had to deal with more in 1878.”
Noland’s graphic memoir, Steady Rollin’: Preacher’s Kid, Black Punk and Pedaling Papa, came out in April. It’s the story of his early life as the self-described misfit son of a Church of Christ minister in the East Texas Bible Belt and his twenties as a “SoCal Black punk” in suburban Ventura. Eventually, Steady Rollin’ time-lapses into his life in downtown Oakland as a graphic novelist, parent, and cyclist. Noland says he took up biking in 2002, prompted by a dream that promised freedom and relaxation on two wheels.
The book also serves as an anthology of Noland’s work, ranging across styles from cartoons to drawings pulled from sketchbooks that sit stacked in piles around his office and kitchen. Assembling the book chronologically helped Noland find order that had previously eluded him. “My life has felt chaotic for me before, and [now] it definitely does have an actual, like, I don’t know, less by-the-seat-of-my-pants feel to it,” he says.
In the not-so-recent past, Noland took on a mix of corporate and nonprofit graphic design jobs to support himself and his eight-year-old son, who lives with him part-time in a studio apartment near Lake Merritt, but he no longer needs the corporate gigs. “This is my living now,” he says with a touch of surprise.
Noland’s been so busy, in fact, that his podcast about artists and their day jobs, Serious Moonlighting, has been dormant for a while. “I haven’t done a new episode in about three years because I’m not moonlighting anymore,” he says. “I need to change the name to Seriously Doing It.”•
Molly Colin has reported from the U.S., Canada, Lebanon and Russia for the New York Times, Newsweek, American Lawyer, the Christian Science Monitor and other publications.
