Rough Drafts and Technomagic Musings

An End of the Semester Illustration & Two Comic Covers I'm Obsessed With

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I almost didn’t post this.

I made it a week ago and sat on it. It was a rough draft that I was pleased with and also wanted much more from.

Making visual art to share is much more challenging for me than writing to share and I’m not sure why. It might be that I’m self conscious about how much of my art is self-taught. Though I don’t have an MFA or any real training in creative writing, I do have a Ph.D. and thus have a lot of practice writing. While I don’t necessarily believe that my Ph.D. training made me a strong writer—at least not in the way I wanted to be—I do believe it gave me skills to be a sharp and critical reader. The ability to reverse engineer a book and see how it’s made helps me be a thoughtful writer in my own work.

I haven’t developed that practice with my art just yet.

I’m trying to develop that practice. So in honor of that, I’m going to to share two comic covers I’m obsessed with and tell you a little bit about what I find so special about them.

Context: I have been obsessed with the 1:25 variant cover for Action Comics 1054 by Yasmin Flores Montañez since I saw it drop a little while back on Twitter. It features Natasha Irons partially covered by her suit. I knew it was going to be hard to find in stores and I was silly and didn’t preorder, so I have spent the last two days searching local comic shops for it. No luck. I eventually found a copy on eBay and hopefully it’s on its way to me soon.

Let’s see this glorious cover.

I love Nat’s hair, it spirals out in tendrils like tornados. I love that she’s in the middle of donning her suit; I love all of the small metallic pieces attaching themselves to cover her, protect her. I love seeing a Black girl donning the symbol of the House of El. I love the electricity radiating off of her; she is made of energy, just waiting to be pointed in the right direction. I love the contrast of the hot pink background with tech/schematics outlined softly in it with the blue. It reminds me of the pink of Bitch Planet tech…technology doesn’t have to be blue.

Natalie straddles the blue and the pink, and her brown skin doesn’t have a place in either. It reminds me of Anna Everett’s theorizing of Black technophilia and the work so many others—like Andre Brock, Jr., Catherine Knight Steele, and Moya Bailey—have done to remind us that Black women loved to create in technology for a long time, that we were often the first computers (think of Hidden Figures). It reminds me that her magic is both distinct and made more resonant when located in a longer history of Black digital practice.

And I think it’s in direct conversation with one of my favorite Riri Williams: Ironheart covers by Luciano Vecchio:

Where as Natalie’s armor appears to be attaching itself to her, Riri’s looks like it’s falling apart—away and off of her. Can she fly without it? And still, even in her free fall, her gaze is skyward. There is hope that she will still some how manage to fly.

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One day, I’m going to commit to writing something longer than a Substack post about technomagic girlhood. One day, I’m going to get comfortable with my rough drafts.

Until then, please enjoy the loose connections my mind makes when I see a Black girl who can engineer herself the ability to fly.