How many people can say that they love their job? Yorli Huff is among the few people that did.
“I very rarely hear anyone say that ‘I love my job’, but I loved my job absolutely,” says Huff. At the time she was a special drug agent for the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department. Huff was one of the few African-American undercover agents in the task force.
While at the department she excelled at her job and her success was met with racism and discrimination. “ No matter how I out performed, no matter the accomplishments that I did during that time, the great cases that I did, the arrest that I made, the seizures that I made I still was not good enough,” says Huff. “And it was hard factual evidence that one could lay out and say that this is a super performer, because of the color of my skin and someone’s ignorance it really made me mad as hell that they thought, that they had the audacity to take something from me.”
Huff took a stand against the injustice and filed a lawsuit against the Cook County Sheriff’s Police Department. The lawsuit took her 11 years to win, but ultimately she was victorious.
A valuable lesson that Huff learned from the lawsuit was thinking strategically. And she realized the game that she was playing could no longer be fought with misplaced emotions. “I moved from playing checkers, which was very emotional, the anger and the frustration,” says Huff. “. I moved from playing checkers to begin to play chess and to become very strategic, very focused, and very determined in learning my opponent, because we were about to play a game and my life depended on it. And once I learned the rules to this particular chess game, then I mastered the rules.”
After her victory she decided to share her story with others by writing her autobiography titled The Veil of Victory: A Memoir of Tragedy & Triumph. Huff received “divine inspiration” to turn her character from Veil of Victory into a comic book and cartoon.
Huff is the founder and CEO of Engendering Strength Inc. which is devoted to inspiring and empowering women, and was created based on the experiences that Huff overcame in life and her relationship with God. According to the website the company was also created to show people how have a “mindset to excel against all things, dream the impossible and dare to be different amongst all odds.”
Derrell Spicy, is the illustrator of Superhero Huff comic book series and creator of the well-known comic strip WHATZ UP MAN,which tells the story of “everyday life” in Chicago’s West Side black community. He recalled how he and Huff meet. “She saw that I worked on children’s books and said that she was currently looking for a comic book artist,” says Spicy. After Huff told him her story, he decided to take a chance and they started putting “the pieces together from just talking.”
Since her comic book’s release the series has gained acceptance by various comic book readers, although the core audience is teenage girls. “It capture a lot of people especially a lot of young women. Because—[the] comic book characters are women,” says Spicy. “And they can relate to it… So it can be a very good teaching tool and it can be a very good sci-fi tool. They tell different sci-fi stories with a little bit of an element of the neighborhood. A little bit of an element of the military. And [womanhood].”
He said that the comic book also has a lot of spirituality in it. Spicy says that the series brings awareness to issues such as self love, skin tone, and self pride. While a lot of well known fictional heroes’ origin stories may come from a place of personal tragedy or from some alien planet, Huff decided to take a different approach with her character.
Most of the characters in the Superhero Huff series powers come from acts of selflessness. “Help makes her stronger,” says Spicy. “The more she surrenders herself to helping others. The more powerful she becomes.”
Spicy explained how the comic heroine is relatable to women. “A lot of women like it because the way she looks. The retro look, but more up-to-date with the technology around her,” says Spicy. “And her team that she has with her. She’s a young woman. But older people can relate to her, because the way she [looks]. She don’t look like your average girl on the street,” he added.
Huff described the protagonist of the series Phadrea as a “strong black woman, who represents power, and represents intellect and able to handle her own.”
She hopes the comic heroine will become an inspiration to today’s generation and help them gain back something that is lacking. She recalled how her generation had hero’s such as Christie Love. “She is going to become what Christie Love was to us, who [remembered] her, back in the day,” says Huff. “So, hopefully she will-she is going to serve as that motivator that inspiration to say, that “you can do it.”
Courtesy of Yorli Huff
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