My Saturday evening was spent at the Watershed’s Afrofuturism season. The event in question was a screening of Will Smith’s movie version of I Am Legend, followed by a discussion of black superheroes.

The film was rather better than I expected. Will Smith is so much better on his own than when being the comedy black guy in someone else’s movie.

I wasn’t really there for the film, however. I was there to hear Edson Burton, Adam Murray and Jon Daniel talk about black superheroes. I mean, Black Panther, Storm — what’s not to like?

Adam is one of my colleagues from Ujima, and he knows a lot about the relationship between superhero comics and hip-hop. That’s certainly an area I can be educated in.

Jon is a fabulous graphic designer and, amongst other things, was responsible for the Afro Supa Hero exhibition at the Museum of Childhood in London last year. I was delighted to get to meet him.

Just in case anyone has missed me enthusing about this before, I am firmly of the opinion that Minister Faust’s From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain is the best superhero novel ever written. I am also a big fan of Samit Basu’s Turbulence. Both books use the superhero genre for hilarious and accurate satire of the author’s societies — black North American and Indian respectively.

I also note that Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising and Hurricane Fever feature a Bond-like character, and Bond is most definitely a superhero.

One thing I learned at the talk is that John Jennings, who created the fabulous cover for the Mothership anthology, is also one of the two people responsible for the Black Kirby exhibition. That gives me an excuse to post this: