The classic superhero origin story goes like this: An outsider child feels like an alien — or perhaps is one — and yearns for transcendence. Nicolas Cage’s origin story is no exception.

By his own account, Nicolas Coppola, as he was then known, was “a skinny, kind of weak kid who had a dream of being the Incredible Hulk.” The youngest son of an academic father and a mother who spent much of his childhood institutionalized for mental illness, he often felt like a freak. The actor once told Movieline that, as a kid, he was surprised when he went to the doctor and they “didn’t find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green.”

In the mid-’90s, Sebastian A. Jones was a young, Black record producer in Los Angeles dreaming of something bigger. After spending the last decade mapping out the fantasy world of Asunda, a realm that filters the lore of a J. R. R. Tolkien novel through the prism of the African diaspora, he was ready to pitch his vision to Hollywood. Unfortunately, this was the ‘90s, and Hollywood wasn’t interested.

“A couple of [studios] were like, ‘Oh, this is primarily Black,’” Jones tells Inverse. “Because it focused on a Black female lead, they didn’t want to fuck with it. Some were like, ‘If you change the girl to a white boy, I’ll make it.’ Others were like, ‘This would look good during a Black History Month announcement.’”

Jones says he actually considered a few offers, but ultimately couldn’t stand to see a character he spent decades creating placed in the wrong hands. “I realized that in order to protect the integrity and the vulnerability of Niobe, I’d have to start another company.”