Q+A with Tim Fielder, Afrofuturist Graphic Novelist

"It should have been the most productive years of my life creatively, suddenly that doesn’t mean anything in a commercial construct. That trained me not to be sentimental."

Cultural critic Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism in the early 1990s to describe a discipline that imagines Black people in the future and in speculative science-fiction. Scholars like Kodwo Eshun and Alondra Nelson have expanded the term to more generally mean using Black and Pan-African artistic, spiritual, and technological thinking to understand the past, present, and future. 

2018’s Black Panther film release heralded Afrofuturism’s entry into the mainstream. In February 2021, the New York Times highlighted Harlem-based graphic novelist Tim Fielder as one of the artists behind the present Afrofuturist boom. But Fielder has been drawing Black people in sci-fi scenarios before the term Afrofuturism even came about.

Known in the comics community as an OG Afrofuturist, Fielder has spent over three decades working and illustrating for clients like Marvel Comics, The Village Voice, Tri-Star Pictures, and Ubisoft Entertainment. Despite being a futurist, Fielder’s narratives also often include a heavy focus on the past. As a storyteller, Fielder grapples with the fact that Black work has been historically ignored, discarded, and destroyed.

Fielder came up in the era where ideas lived and died by an editor’s whims. For Fielder, this often meant he faced an uphill battle for including Black characters in his stories with any sort of agency. 

Fielder worked in the comics industry throughout the 90s, the decade where Marvel declared bankruptcy and the comic speculator boom burst. But Fielder kept illustrating. Spending years as a character and concept designer in other industries, Fielder returned to comics in 2014.

Earlier this year, Fielder released his graphic novel Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale  (HarperCollins 2021) which tells the story of an African Warlord named Aja Ọba who is cursed with the inability to die. Infinitum’s greatest strength is its ability to invoke existential dread and wonder. Fielder’s artistry is on full display on each page and every brushstroke is able to convey an impressive amount of emotion. There is less attention given to dialogue than you’ll find in some other graphic novels, and most relationships you see in the work are presented in broad strokes. But Infinitum’s concepts and imagery are more than captivating enough to leave you contemplating its themes for days to come. The work fits nicely as a culmination of Fielder’s decades-long career of championing multidimensional Black characters in fantastical worlds. 

Along with the reissue of his previous graphic novel Matty’s Rocket, starting February 1st, a catalog of Fielder’s published and unpublished work will display at Carnegie Hall’s New York City-wide Afrofuturist festival under the title “Black Metropolis: 30 Years of Afrofuturism, Comics, Music, Animation, Decapitated Chickens, Heroes, Villains, and Negroes.”

Ultimately, Fielder’s MO as a creative is well summed up by the foreword of Infinitum that reads, “I draw Negroes in Spaceships.”

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

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You’ve spoken about your experiences in previous interviews. Is there a particular moment from your time in the comic industry where you remember feeling frustrated?

Oooh, which one should I pick? [laughs]

Speaking solely for myself, I found comics had been commercially on the low-end because of my chosen genre. Now, we call it Afrofuturism. Then, we called it putting Black characters in speculative scenarios. You’re trying to do something that the world isn’t ready for. You had Black cartoons, but only a handful of them had any real power. In my day, if a Black character had any kind of agency, he had to die. What we could do is kill that character and then allow the white character to be heroic. Here, I was trying to not do that.

Until I met the Sims brothers who did Brotherman, I did not realize that you could do it yourself at such a young age. But I was caught in this thing, working for Marvel comics doing fully painted comics for Marvel Music. Then the industry crashed in the late 90s, and everyone got washed out, and some changed careers. For me, I went to animation, video game design, and teaching.

You’ve had a big rush of attention with the release of Infinitum, has there been an individual reaction to the book that stands out in your mind?

The jury is still out on what Infinitum will be commercially. But critically? Oh my god. One amazing review after another. I’ve been very, very, very fortunate. The two that were not as positive — I mean, no one wants a bad review — but you appreciate the pushback because it keeps you on your toes. It makes you better as an artist when you pay attention. 

The single greatest response was my youngest son. He’s a sci-fi head and a screenwriter. He said, ‘Hey, I’m going to tell you something. Your book is really good.’ 

And I said, ‘Oh, thank you man.’ You know he’s my kid, of course, he’s gonna tell me that.

 But he said, ‘No, I’m not just telling you this because you’re my dad. I’m telling you your book is really good.’ 

It caught me off-guard. Arguably one of the most critical people in my life, for him to say that? [laughs] That meant a lot.

The other was from a review from The Comics Journal. I’ll never forget it. I was downstairs in New York, sitting in the car reading this review, and I am in tears. You know, as an author, you try to put in easter eggs. One of the old head reviewers there did a deep dive and was illuminating things that I didn’t even see. That really hit me.

I’m not gonna sit here and pretend I don’t want validation and acceptance from my chosen field and industry. Of course, I want that. To have received that on both a personal level and from the industry — that meant a lot.

Without giving too much away, that last panel of Infinitum conveys a true sense of horror. Did you always plan to end on that sort of note? Or was that something that developed over time? 

I came up with the basis of a story about a Black man who couldn’t die in the early 2000s because I was tired of Black folks dying in fictional storytelling. Now things have changed somewhat recently, thank god. And I hope my books have added to that discussion that we can have agency and not die in fictional stories.

Beyond that, this iteration of Infinitum started as a part of a New York Times story on Afrofuturism. They eventually passed on it. But the last sequence of Infinitum is virtually unchanged from the black and white sketches I did then.

So I painted the end of the book first.  But I had to go back and tighten things up because one of the problems when you paint, is that you get better as you do it. So the entire process was iterative. 

There was a point I considered removing that end sequence. But that would have been a cop-out, so it was totally unchanged. 

Are there any visual or storytelling techniques you’ve learned in the past few months that you would want to go back and apply to the book now?

There’s nothing I would want to apply to any past works. Those projects are done, and I’d never want to suffer through the hell I went through making them. So let’s get that clear. [laughs]

But if I do a new book — I’ve been doing 3D modeling and animation for almost 25 years, and that has had a tremendous effect on how I work and illustrate. It allows me to concept and build environments and props. But in the last two months, it has gotten more extreme in the 3D department. I feel I have personally gone through a nexus event in how I approach my work, where it has transformed everything. 

Was there anything that surprised you about working with one of the big five publishing houses?

If you are an author fortunate enough to get a book deal with a big five, understand that you must be an active participant in the marketing, publicity, and selling of your book. The rare author like Stephen King or J.K. Rowling — sure, they can sit back, and the books sell themselves. But that’s only five or ten authors in the entire industry. You must be prepared to hit the road and to interface with both management and audiences. Teaching for years taught me how to interface with the public. But you must not shy away from that.

If you are one of those lucky few authors and your book comes out and just hits? That’s fine. But for the rest of us, we got to work. It’s a job. 

A large publisher will do what they can, but they have fifty-gazillion other books they are publishing. Your job is to work with the publisher. To be fearless, active, attentive, and involved.

So let’s say there is a young creative trying to get into creating comics professionally. Where do they start? 

Do you want the bright and cheerful or the real and dirty variant?

Let’s go real and dirty.

So I trained as a young man to be a comic book artist. But as I said, by the time I hit 30, the industry died. Marvel declared bankruptcy, and people were wondering if the American comic industry would even exist after 2000 or so. It should have been the most productive years of my life creatively, suddenly that doesn’t mean anything in a commercial construct. That trained me not to be sentimental.

If a technique can get me to where I want to be faster and more efficiently without any drop in quality? I’ll embrace it. I would encourage young people to embrace the process and understand that it’s just as important as the end goal. I know it’s cliche. But it’s true.

Now, the way people consume content is different, and it’s never going back to the way it was. The standard for what is appropriate quality? None of it matters anymore from a commercial point of view. You can have any art style. It is only important you have a story, you’ve finished that story, and you deliver it to market. 

It’s got nothing to do with fair. It’s physics. A person my age in the old world construct would be done. But because the way we consume content has changed, the one thing I have over young creatives is experience. Now for the first time, you all in your mid-twenties are competing with people who would have retired as creatives.

I tell any young artist you better get with it, because I’m coming for your lunch money.

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