“The Storyworlds of Tim Fielder”
On October 15th, 2020, the Graphic Possibilities Research Workshop welcomed Tim Fielder for a virtual conversation with Professor Kinitra Brooks. We spoke with Tim about his upcoming book, Infinitum (out January 19, 2021), which is an Afrofuturist tale epic in scope and steeped in Afrodiasporic experience that embraces the potentialities of the comic page. Tim talked to us about the influences of Buck Rogers & heavy metal; the critical importance of teaching and working with students; visualizing the Black experience through Afrofuturistic illustration; and, of course, comics. Check it out below, and you can find more of Tim’s work on his website.
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 R Delany, Octavia Butler, Pedro Bell, and Overton Lloyd as major influences. Fielder is renowned for Matty’s Rocket (2015) and his new graphic novel, Infinitum will be released in January 2021. 
Image 1: Tim Fielder
Dr. Kinitra Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She currently has two books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by black women. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman in popular culture. Dr. Brooks will serve as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University for the 2018-2019 academic year.
Image 2: Kinitra Brooks