About

Join three giants in the world of Afrofuturist comics in this compelling conversation between two Mississippi natives, Tim Fielder and John Jennings, along with University Press of MIssissippi contributing writer, Donna-lyn Washington.Tim Fielder is an Illustrator, concept designer, cartoonist, and animator born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and raised in Clarksdale, Mississippi. He has a lifelong love of Visual Afrofutuism, Pulp entertainment, and action films. He holds other Afrofuturists such as Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Pedro Bell and Overton Lloyd as major influences. He has worked over the years in the storyboarding, film visual development, gaming, comics, and animation industries for clients as varied as Marvel Comics, The Village Voice, Tri-Star Pictures, to Ubisoft Entertainment. He also works as an educator for institutions such as the New York FilmAcademy and Howard University. Tim hopes to push forward with his art in the emerging digital content delivery systems of the day. His project, Matty’s Rocket, is a product from his company Dieselfunk Studios. Tim also is the author and illustrator of the upcoming graphic novel, ‘INFINITUM: An Afrofuturist Tale’, published by HarperCollins Amistad in January 2021. Tim makes an empty nest with his wife in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Harlem.JOHN JENNINGS is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings’ current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York Times best-selling graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic dark fantasy novel Kindred. Duffy and Jennings recently released their graphic novelization of Octavia Bulter’s prescient dystopian novel Parable of the Sower (Abrams ComicArts). Jennings is also founder and curator of the ABRAMS Megascope line of graphic novels.Donna-lyn Washington edited John Jennings: Conversations, part of the University Press of Mississippi's Conversations with Comic Artists Series. She is adjunct lecturer of English at Kingsborough Community College, and she is also senior editor and senior writer at ReviewFix. She has contributed to Rediscovering Frank Yerby: Critical Essays, published by University Press of Mississippi, as well as entries to the Encyclopedia of Black Comics. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.