The Multimillion Dollar Business Of Black Nerd Culture

In 2024, a little girl dressed as Chopper from the anime series One Piece walks a cosplay runway. While she walks, someone announces that it’s her birthday and 34,000 strangers begin singing “Happy Birthday” in unison. Offstage the girl’s mother is moved to tears by the scene unfolding in front of her.

This is not an accidental moment. It is what a multimillion-dollar business looks like when it’s built by the people for whom it’s made—DreamCon, a convention founded by RDCWorld to create a space for underrepresented voices in fandom culture.

After 20 years in audience development and market research for media companies, I’ve encountered a persistent industry assumption: Black fans of anime, gaming and comics (known as “blerds”) are not commercially viable at scale. Projects like Lovecraft Country occasionally pursue blerd audiences, but as novelties rather than genuine market recognition.

The Market

Black American spending is estimated to reach $2.1 trillion in 2026, but brands and platforms have historically underserved this audience. Publicly available data shows that Black media consumers spend more than 81 hours per week consuming media, 31.8% more than the general population.

Additionally, Black Americans make up 17% of U.S. anime fans (notably more than their approximately 13% of the general population). The phenomenon is even more pronounced when focusing on Gen Z anime fans, where Black Americans are 23% of the viewership versus being only 14% of the Gen Z population.

The Media Industry’s History With Blerds

Black audiences are disproportionately engaged consumers of the categories that define “nerd” content. Repeatedly, Black audiences have been the media industry’s saviors in moments of financial distress before being forgotten once the crisis subsides. After the crisis, investments follow the recently returned audience instead of the one that has been engaged and present the entire time.

For blerds, the pattern is evident in case studies such as Blade (1998), a superhero movie with a Black lead and Black director that rescued Marvel Studios from bankruptcy—surprising Hollywood when it proved that superhero movies could be commercially successful. Almost 30 years later, we see the same dynamic with both Black Panther movies and Sinners (2025). These projects are just a few examples of Black-led genre storytelling outperforming industry expectations, yet the industry seems to be surprised every time. However, the gap between Black consumer purchasing power and the industry’s investment in serving them is a business gap that is now being filled from the inside.

The DreamCon convention grew from 800 attendees to over 32,000 in just seven years. Drew Jackson, a nerdcore artist who spent 10 years building a musical catalog, went viral overnight. Curtis Baxter, a Marvel comic writer, is creating new IP that will power the blerd content engine. These three aren’t waiting for the next industry crisis to make blerd culture visible again. They’re building the infrastructure themselves.

DreamCon: The Cultural Foundation And Kendale King

RDCWorld, the YouTube collective led by Mark Phillips and Affiong Harris with 7.3 million YouTube subscribers, experienced the same institutional dismissal firsthand — not from studios, but from the conventions built around their audience’s culture. Their response was the same one that has defined Black entrepreneurship broadly: if the existing infrastructure won’t make room, build your own. So, in 2018 they built their own convention.

On the convention website, the RDCWorld founders said “Originally, we were planning on visiting anime/comic conventions as guests to meet and interact with our fans in a fun setting. However, many of these conventions (except for a small few) were either ignoring us or turning us away and saying we wouldn’t ‘fit in.’ So we decided from there that instead of making excuses or complaints, we would create our own bigger/better convention.”

The first DreamCon convention was held in the Waco Convention Center and attended by an estimated 800 people. The only revenue source for that first DreamCon was ticket sales; not a single sponsorship. However, that changed in 2021 with an unexpected partnership that merged the vision of RDCWorld with the financial rigor of Kendale King.

Kendale King didn’t set out to become CFO of one of the fastest-growing conventions in the country. He just wanted VIP tickets.

King, a CPA and Morehouse graduate, first attended DreamCon as a fan with VIP tickets. When VIP tickets sold out the following year before he could buy them, King did what any resourceful fan would do: he found another way in, applying to be a staff volunteer—despite the fact that they didn’t seem to be looking for an accountant.

“I think I’m going in there just to work on a budget, doing some bookkeeping here and there,” King recalls. What he found instead was a thriving creative community without financial infrastructure to support it. What started as bookkeeping in exchange for VIP tickets became a CFO role. Kendale King is now CFO and head of partnerships at DreamCon, responsible for all of the money moving in and out of the convention. Since joining the DreamCon team, King has helped the convention to grow from low six figures in revenue with 2,000 to 3,000 attendees and zero sponsorships to a multimillion-dollar operation drawing more than 32,000 attendees at Houston’s George R. Brown Convention Center in 2025. DreamCon’s 2025 positive economic impact on Houston is quantifiable at an estimated $19.2 million.

King acknowledges that the success of DreamCon is a team effort, but also understands the role he plays on the team:

“Obviously, I didn’t do any [of the] marketing; they did that. I’m alright figuring out the price and figuring out how much we should charge for sponsorships, actually negotiating those agreements. Even to this day it’s still a big part of what I do.”—Kendale King, DreamCon CFO and head of partnerships

The Momentum Signal: Drew Jackson And Nerdcore Music

In 2015 nerdcore rapper Drew Jackson started making music that reflected his life experiences as a young Black man in the United States. He gave himself 10 years to build a rap career, slowly amassing a catalog of songs. In 2022 Jackson wrote his first nerdcore single, a song about the popular DC character Static Shock. By 2024, he pivoted completely into the nerdcore rap scene and recorded his first EP called Nostalgia—embracing his lifelong love for cartoons, anime, comics and video games.

On December 12, 2025, near the end of his 10-year deadline, things for Jackson changed dramatically. It was the night before he dropped his new single “Jabber,” and his primary TikTok account was hacked. Gone were the 200,000 followers he spent years accruing. Drew Jackson had a choice to make: give up on his career or push forward and release the new single to a smaller audience. Jackson chose to release the new single on his backup TikTok account of only 9,000 followers before going to bed.

Jackson recalls, “I woke up and I was like, what the heck is happening to my phone? Where did all these notifications come from? What is happening? Who is this guy? Where can I find this song? I was like, oh, oh, oh, shoot. I didn’t — yo, what? What? My mind was blown.”

The song, a first-person character study of an unhinged villain named Jabber from the anime Gachiakuta, had gone viral overnight. Spotify numbers were climbing in real time and comments were flooding in from fans who’d never heard of him before. What followed was the undeniable result of Jackson’s decade of quiet work: new fans arrived and found a catalog waiting for them. His viral moment wasn’t a dead end. Instead it was a door to a collection of nerdcore music waiting to be discovered.

Despite his breakout, Jackson has not been able to secure performance slots at anime conventions. He’s applied and reached out, but hasn’t been accepted. Audience demand is documented; the institutional recognition has yet to follow.

“I’m hoping the fans rally around me. Keep blowing the song up. Let these conventions know — like, I think maybe we should bring that guy in.”—Drew Jackson

This scenario is not unique to Jackson and is similar to the reception described by RDCWorld and DreamCon founders Mark Phillips and Affiong Harris. However, the tide seems to be changing as more artists are taking their careers into their own hands. For example, in November 2025, established nerdcore artist Mega Ran was nominated for a Grammy Award, an achievement that the nerdcore community sees as an inflection point.

“That is wild,” Jackson says. “A nerdcore artist got nominated for a Grammy. That is crazy.”

The broader culture is catching up to what blerd audiences have known for years. The marketplace exists. DreamCon proves that. The audience exists. “Jabber” proves that. What remains is the upstream creative source that feeds both: the stories, characters and worlds that give conventions their programming, give nerdcore its source material and give blerd culture its reason for gathering in the first place. That infrastructure is being built, one comic at a time, by artists like Curtis Baxter.

The IP Pipeline: Curtis Baxter And Eyes Are The Window

Curtis Baxter is a blerd writer and industry insider—having written for several major industry titans from Ben 10 on Cartoon Network and Marvel’s Black Panther for Electronic Arts to Storm #1 and Predator: Black, White & Blood #2 for Marvel Entertainment. He knows the content pipeline. He knows what it takes to take a story from pitch to pages to publication. He also knows what and who gets left out.

In Fall 2026, Curtis Baxter will be releasing Eyes Are the Window (EATW), his creator-owned indie comic. EATW follows Ola, a Nigerian woman who undergoes a procedure called “Null-Mote,” a neurotechnology that suppresses emotional expression. The story is a psychological horror with deliberate cultural references.

“Get Out is a reference point for us because of the heavy racial undertones that persist and grow over Ola’s story—from micro-aggressions at work, to cultural appropriation and cultural exploitation. Black Mirror is another because a key element of ‘EATW’ is how new technologies often disproportionately harm the Black community.”—Curtis Baxter

The origin of Eyes Are the Window is personal and the framework makes the subtext explicit. Baxter was inspired by his younger sister, who has been labeled as “angry” for not smiling constantly—an experience shared by many women, but is especially common among Black women. In the comic, the Null-Mote procedure includes a feature called “Switching”: on-demand emotional modulation. That experience, the disconnection between internal reality and external perception, became the comic’s core emotional engine.

“In corporate settings, Black employees often have to ‘code-switch,’ meaning they have to change the way they speak, behave, and most importantly, appear to avoid stereotypes and fit in with the dominant culture. It’s mentally and physically exhausting. In the context of EATW, ‘switching’ serves as a metaphor for code-switching,” Baxter explains.

Although the inspiration is personal, Baxter is not approaching EATW as a passion project. His approach is IP development—an adaptation strategy, direct-to-consumer distribution, legal representation, a literary manager and key creative attachments all in place before a single issue ships.

“Having great reps is worth their weight in gold. The time for waiting to be chosen is dead.”—Curtis Baxter

When Baxter finally brings EATW to studios, he will have data on his side, including EATW sales data and the precedents set by Get Out (made for $4.5 million and grossing $256 million worldwide) and Sinners (2025) as proof that cultural specificity is a differentiator, not a liability.

“Cultural specificity is quickly becoming an element that allows commercial success. Look no further than Sinners and K-Pop: Demon Hunters. I believe if you’re making something for everybody, you’re making it for nobody. Audiences enjoy it when they feel like voyeurs into a sub-group or community that they’re not part of.”—Curtis Baxter

The Financial Reality

Deloitte research found that Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ audiences together drive more than a third of the U.S. media and entertainment market — and 71% of their entertainment spend is driven by feelings of inclusivity. The business case for serving this audience is not a social argument. It is a financial one.

The multimillion-dollar business of blerd culture isn’t a trend. It’s a market that existed before anyone was paying attention. The only change is that now it’s getting too big to overlook and the people who embody it are the ones building businesses around it—on their own terms.