For many Africans, comics were an excellent entertainment of our childhoods, but we still had to face that most comics creators pretended that we didn’t exist at all. The comics universes were places we could dream of visiting, but the on-page demographics made it clear we couldn’t become citizens.

Yet over time, North American culture has increasingly embraced being universal, so that Marvel and DC have added or enhanced numerous African characters, as well as Indigenous, Latin American, and Asian characters. But even though the Big Two have featured more African characters and hired more African creators, there still aren’t many of us on the inside and we don’t answer to African editors or publishers, so we still don’t control the fates of characters who look like us.

But thanks to creators and indie publishers such as Kelvin Nyeusi Mawazo, that’s changing. Mawazo is the creator of Black Sun, a science fiction-adventure series set in the futuristic world of Alkebulan, about an heroic group of people struggling to liberate their world from a devastating invading armada. The comics are amazing, and fans are loving them.

One production aspect of the comic that seems almost science fictional itself is that Mawazo doesn’t use pencils, pens, ink, or even paper to create the comic. Instead, he uses 3D digital models to create the art entirely inside his computer, and finishes the work in Photoshop. Since I’m producing a graphic novel myself using a similar approach, I was eager to find out how he does what he does. And fortunately, he’s posted video tutorials right on his website BlackSunComics.com.

I spoke with Kelvin Mawazo by web video on December 30, 2018. We discussed:

• Which software he’s chosen to create and modify his characters and worlds with, and why
• The multiple artistic and production-flexibility reasons he’s chosen to use 3D modelling
• How his experience as a photographer helped him race up the learning curve
• What he’s learned from early publishing mistakes to become profitable, and
• The promotional work that has been indispensable for growing his audience

Along the way, Mawazo refers to PSDs, or Photoshop files, and I refer to rendering, which is the digital process of turn posed, virtual 3D objects into completed 2D images—kind of like taking and developing an old-fashioned photograph.

Black Sun Comics.com

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