Southern Connecticut State University | Arts, Culture & Community | Comics | Kulturally Lit | Graphic Design
Maya Lwazi Rose dressed as the Mystery Machine. Photos Kapp Singer.
Maya Lwazi Rose strutted onto the stage. She stopped in the center to face the audience, twirled her arms, and struck a pose. Her blue shirt and skirt, with orange fabric draped from the arms, was meant to invoke the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo. Cheers and whoops erupted from the crowd.
Several other costumed participants tried to upstage Lwazi Rose. There was the Joker, Harley Quinn, Brother Blood, and Nubia—all DC Comics characters— and Jinx from the League of Legends video game. But, in the end, the Mystery Machine garnered the loudest applause. Lwazi Rose took home the win.
The cosplay contest, hosted by Josh "AnUrbanNerd" Brown.
So went the cosplay contest at Kulturally Lit’s third annual DiasporaCon, a one-day convention focused on graphic novels made by creators of the African diaspora.
“I just loved the energy of the Scooby-Doo gang,” said Lwazi Rose. “They’re big old nerds and they love spooky things. With the power of friendship and a love for mystery solving, they’re able to make the world a better place—but really it was just fun,” she added with a laugh.
The contest capped off a busy Saturday at Southern Connecticut State University’s Adanti Center ballroom, where around 25 vendors and over 110 participants from across the state came to buy and sell comics and other wares from Black creators, learn about illustration and animation in a series of workshops, play video games, and show off their costumes.
This year’s event had a significantly larger attendance—about triple the number of attendees and double the amount of vendors—compared to last year’s convention, which was hosted at Quinnipiac University’s North Haven Campus.
“The other DiasporaCons were good, and I believe having it here in a place that’s more accessible, in partnership with Southern, has just made it so much better,” said IfeMichelle Gardin, founder of Kulturally Lit. “It’s a wonderful vibe. I love everybody’s energy. It’s just happy.”
“The space was amazing and really allowed for a great flow of people,” said Juanita Austin, the organizer of DiasporaCon, who came dressed as Garnet from Steven Universe. “It was really great to see how engaged people were with the topics.”
For Tyrone “ZeroSnake” Motley, a comic book author from Hartford, DiasporaCon was a chance to show off his new comic, UNRIVALED, which he has been working on for over five years. Motley explained that the manga, set in West Africa, features a number of intense battle scenes where “even the heroes die.”
“If you like Game of Thrones, this is for you,” Motley said.
Motley shows off UNRIVALED.
The event also featured a keynote address by Sheena Howard, a professor of communication at Rider University in Lawrence Township, New Jersey, who writes on Black representation in American comics. Howard’s talk was structured around what she calls her “five truths of self-empowerment”: “break the barriers of labels,” “self-belief,” “integrity,” “being resourceful,” and “accountability.”
She discussed the hurdles she faced in her own life, beginning with a story about leaving an abusive partner. For Howard, this moment and its aftermath forced her to look inwards and see the value of her skills as a writer. Realizing her potential, she said, was not only self-fulfilling, but also allowed her to make money to cover years of expensive legal fees from her divorce proceedings.
The anecdote set the stage for the rest of the talk, where Howard told the room full of creators—writers, illustrators, animators, and more—about strategies for believing in themselves and marketing their work. She gave general self-help guidance (“be who you say you are behind closed doors”) alongside a number of specific strategies, like how to write a purpose statement and how to send a convincing pitch email.
Sheena Howard.
Howard also discussed her own work and emphasized the value of public scholarship. In graduate school at Howard University, she said, many of her colleagues sneered at her dissertation project about Black characters in the comic strip The Boondocks, which she eventually turned into the anthology (with co-editor Ronald L. Jackson) Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation. Since then, she has written and edited a number of other books, including Why Wakanda Matters, Encyclopedia of Black Comics, and Black Queer Identity Matrix.
“I refuse to just have my work be for other academics,” Howard said. “I want my work to impact everyday people—people who are not other PhDs.”
On Saturday, one of those people was Lindsay Philippe, a screenwriter and art curator.
“[The talk] really gave me inspiration,” Philippe said. It helped me feel like I have a roadmap to jumpstart some of my projects. I felt like ‘wow,’ this is exactly what I came here for.”