In this episode I talk with Dr. Qiana Whitted. Qiana Whitted is professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. A graduate of Hampton University with a PhD from Yale University, her research and teaching focus on Black literary and cultural studies, and American comics and graphic novels. She is the author of the 2020 Eisner Award-winning book, EC Comics: Race, Shock, and Social Protest, the 2009 book, “A God of Justice?”: The Problem of Evil in Twentieth-Century Black Literature, and co-editor of the 2012 essay collection on Comics and the U.S. South. Rutgers University Press will publish her newest collection, Desegregating Comics: Debating Blackness in the Golden Age of American Comics, on May 12, 2023. Dr. Whitted is also the editor of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society. 

In this conversation, we talk about her views on Afrofuturism in comics, especially in light of her research on EC Comics and how speculative stories involving the black experience shape our collective understanding of this notable comic publisher.