The Afterverse
- Alex Smith
- The Rotunda
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2020 Black Artists Support Grant
Responsive Opportunity Grant
Collage by Alex Smith.
Writer Alex Smith’s newest endeavor, The AfterVerse, is an exploration of the techno-fantastic, a multiverse where unicorns exist alongside advancements in bio-technology, where bio-appropriate nano-tech innovations are run on magical systems, all through a queer, African diaspora lens, centering Black people not just as survivors of possible dystopia, but as continued innovators in an ever changing world. Smith’s writing is influenced by sci-fi writers like Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany, comics writers and pioneers Grant Morrison, Moebius and Dwayne McDuffie, as well as the lure of 80’s cinema, animation and toylines that spoke of a myriad wild, dangerous and possible futures; the art will be reflective of this, inspired by early designs for films like Alien and Dune as well as Black and African diaspora mythology. Consisting of three 22 page comic stories that will serve as first issues, yet published in one anthology volume, with the intention of kicking off a shared universe where these seemingly disparate tales take place. The stories in AfterVerse will be all ages yet high on stakes, for everyone but centering queer Black people as lead characters.