Culver Center of the Arts Mini Comic Fest is back! This event brings together artists, writers, creators, and scholars to discuss comics, culture, and industry. The event will feature panel discussions and the Black Kirby exhibition Whatever Happened to Dyno-Woman: The Alternative History of an Afrofuturist Icon on view now at the Culver Center of the Arts.

Exhibitor tables open. Meet the artists in the Whatever Happened to Dyno-Woman? exhibition with John Jennings.
12:00-1:00pm

Afrofuturism in Art
1:00-2:00pm
John Jennings, Stacey Robinson, and Ytasha Womack. Moderated by Jalondra Davis.

Representation Matters: Centering BIPOC Women, LGBTQ+, and Disabled Voices in Comics
2:30-3:30pm
Mariah-Rose Marie, Jasmine Walls, and James F. Wright. Moderated by Loren Barbour.  

Behind-the-Scenes: Voices from the Margins in Comic Creation
4:00-5:00pm
Alexandria Batchelor, Sebraé Harris, and TJ Sterling. Moderated by John Jennings.

UCR ARTS
3834 Main Street
Riverside, CA 92501

Bios:

Loren Barbour (she/they) is a graduate student in the English department at the University of California, Riverside. They’ve previously taught a class on Queer Comics, focusing on how comics can be used to reflect and interrogate social categories like race, gender, sexuality, and (dis)ability. She’s especially interested in the ways comics readers play with meaning, both in their reading practices and in collaboration with other fans. 

Alexandria Batchelor, AKA Foxee Design, is a professional comic colorist with over 11 years of experience in the industry, including work for publishers such as Penguin Random House, Dark Horse Comics, and Abrams Books. Recent projects include Whoopi Goldberg’s superhero graphic novel The Change and Tananarive Due and Steven Barne’s horror graphic novel The Keeper. Alexandria has also worked on the award-winning graphic novel adaptations of Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Parable of the Sower. She is currently working as a color editor on Parable of the Talents, the sequel to Sower.

Dr. Jalondra A. Davis is a Black feminist artist/intellectual working at the intersections of Black Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and contemporary genre fictions and popular culture. She has work on Black speculative fiction and culture published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Shima Journal, the Museum of Science Fiction Journal of Science Fiction, and forthcoming in the Routledge Anthology of Co-Futurisms. Her monograph in progress, Merfolk and Black Being in Water is about Black mermaids. The project analyzes the many appearances of mermaids, water spirits, and other aquatic beings in African diasporic literature, art, and popular culture, with a focus on narratives that engage and interrogate the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlife, Western modernity, and the Anthropocene. She is the author of a novel entitled Butterfly Jar and talks mermaids, fantasy, and Black aquatic life on the Merwomanist Podcast.

Sebraé Harris aka “StarLite Crystal” is an African American Artist Entrepreneur in the field of Animaton & Manga (Animator & Mangaka). He started drawing at the age of 4 and started taking art seriously at the age of 8. He also created Speed-Boy “The Vermillion Speedateer”, Wiz Harrison, and his original Animation & Art Studio in 2008. Mentored by Disney, Dreamworks, and WB Animators and Artists , He’s a college graduate of Riverside City College Class of 2020, 21, and 22 terms with Degrees in Fine & Applied Arts, Animation, Business & Entrepreneurship.  Sebraé currently runs his own Animation & Art business, StarLite Crystal Animation & Art Studio creating art for clients local & across the United States of America. “The Vermillion Speedateer” is Sebraé’s first manga/comic series 15/16 years in the making!

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 Nasier Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings’ 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. Jennings is also founder and curator of the ABRAMS Megascope line of graphic novels.

Mariah-Rose Marie is a graphic novelist, story artist, educator, and writer based in Tovaangar, aka Los Ángeles. Their comic, illustration and storyboard work can be seen anywhere from Netflix and HBO Max to The New Yorker, Science for the People Magazine, and Ignatz award-winning work with The Nib. Always with empathy (and often with humor) Mariah-Rose interweaves the individual and the global through stories that reach across political borders and personal identity. 

Mariah-Rose is the maker of COOK LIKE YOUR ANCESTORS (Silver Sprocket, 2023) the international recipe collection and guide to intuitive cooking. Their debut fiction graphic novel GO BACK & GET IT (Random House Children’s / Make Me A World) is coming in 2027.

Stacey Robinson is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was a 2019-2020 Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research who completed his Master of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo in 2015. For the last several years he has traveled internationally discussing the complexities decolonized future spaces. As one half of the collaborative team “Black Kirby” with artist John Jennings, Stacey creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, lectures, and workshops that use world-building strategies to imagine new worlds inspired by Design, Hip-Hop, the Arts and Sciences, and diasporic African belief systems. Latest Exhibited works include ‘The Black Angel of History’, at Carnegie Hall, and ‘Futures’ at the Arts + Industries Building at the Smithsonian. His latest graphic novels are, ‘I Am Alfonso Jones’ written by Tony Medina in 2017 is available from Lee & Low Books, and ‘Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and the Tulsa Race Massacre’, written Alverne Ball in 2021 is available from Abrams Books.

TJ Sterling is an artist and writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Growing up he frequented local comic shops where he began to collect his first comics which would eventually inspire his signature 90’s comic style. TJ continued to hone his artistic ability and in 2001 he moved from Michigan to New York to attend art college. During college he worked for the infamous Bullpen at Marvel Entertainment. After graduating college, working at Marvel, Dark Horse and Aspen Comics, TJ started his own comic book company; RAE Comics. The first comic book produced by TJ and his team was “Okemus”. TJ debuted Okemus at San Diego Comic Con 2015 and sold out his first print run of 400 copies. Since then, TJ has garnered an amazing fanbase across the globe which he passionately serves. To date TJ has raised over $70K via Kickstarter for various titles from RAE Comics. During his off time he has freelanced for various clients such as Universal Music and DC Comics on Batman Giant #5. TJ is also a teacher at the Joe Kubert School of Comic and Cartoon art.

Jasmine Walls is a California-based writer, artist, editor, and hot chocolate enthusiast with a passion for stories that are fun, engaging, and critical, set in worlds a little off center to our own. Some of her most recent books include BROOMS, co-created with artist Teo DuVall, and Vixen: NYC in collaboration with DC Comics and Webtoon.

Ytasha L. Womack is an author, filmmaker, dance therapist, and champion of humanity. Ytasha is a leading expert in Afrofuturism and the imagination. Her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi & Fantasy Culture is taught in universities around the world. She co-curated Carnegie Hall’s Afrofuturism Festival and is featured in the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s Afrofuturism exhibit. She created immersive experiences based on her novel Rayla 2212 for the Adler Planetarium. She was a resident with Black Rock Senegal and a writer in resident with the WOW Festival in Liverpool. Her films include Couples Night and the dance film A Love Letter to the Ancestors From Chicago. A Chicago native, her latest book Black Panther: A Cultural Phenomenon debuted in Oct. 2023  www.ytashawomack.com

James F. Wright is a Los Angeles-based writer, reader, and ramen eater who’s been penning comics, off and on, for over a decade. Among these are the culinary coming-of-age crime saga, Nutmeg, the Eisner Award-nominated queer sci-fi romance, Contact High, and the kaiju space battle one-shot, Godzilla Rivals: Rodan vs Ebirah. He has also contributed to the Eisner Award-winning anthologies, Elements: Fire and You Died: An Anthology of the Afterlife. When not writing he enjoys knitting and going to the movies.