His comics move Black characters through flight, immortality and changing visual styles without surrendering their lives to an old genre's limits.
Tim Fielder describes Matty’s Rocket as a story told across three moments of Matty Watty’s life, from a Mississippi childhood to an older woman’s recollection. His official project page presents an alternate history of spaceflight shaped by Jim Crow, while his 2018 interview places Matty in France as an adult. The period settings have a design purpose beyond providing costumes for pulp adventure. Fielder says the visual language shifts with its decades. A remembered 1920s scene can look and read differently from the 1968 conversation in which the older Matty tells her story. The future arrives through rockets, but Fielder’s stated aim is also to give a Black woman command of a page and a genre that seldom pictured her as its pilot.
Fielder calls the method retro-Afrofuturism. In a first-person interview about the graphic novel, he described wanting the work to feel as though it might have been made in its fictional period. Silent-film dialogue cards and a later comics vocabulary coexist. The change is more than pastiche. Matty's voice travels between them, giving her control over a narrative that reaches back to a time when Black women rarely occupied the center of science-fiction adventure art.
Fielder's other major graphic novel, Infinitum: An Afrofuturist Tale, asks a different formal question. Its King Aja Oba is cursed with immortality and moves across centuries, watching political worlds rise and fall. The immense span could reduce a character to a symbol of history. Fielder’s official synopsis grounds that immense span in the king’s loss and the decision that provoked his curse, giving the epic an emotional and moral point of origin. The artist's own book site says he wanted Black life to occupy the scale of the epic. The drawing, pacing and point of view must make that claim believable.
A life told twice
Matty's Rocket takes place in an altered twentieth century. Matty begins in Mississippi, moves into aviation and eventually becomes a space pilot. Fielder has said his mother and grandmother informed his desire to make the work. The connection matters because Matty is not a generic astronaut painted a different color. She carries the experiences of a Black woman who has moved through eras that restricted where and how she could travel. The rocket extends a history of movement; it does not erase that history.
The book's 1968 framing device lets an older Matty speak to a reporter about her younger life. In the Smash Pages interview, Fielder explained that he uses conventional word balloons for that later exchange, while remembered earlier events use diary-like narration and silent-film title cards. Readers are thus given more than one time at once. They see the adventurer inside an earlier period and hear a survivor who has already lived beyond it. Matty is neither trapped in the innocence of the past nor reduced to a retrospective explanation of herself.
Fielder’s account of the page design suggests several reading speeds. A word balloon belongs to a speaking character in a depicted moment. A title card interrupts the image and asks the reader to take language as an event in its own right. Diary narration can carry feeling across several pictures without pretending every thought was spoken aloud. The effect he seeks is a change of distance: a remembered moment can evoke a film Matty once inhabited, while the interview frame returns to the older person choosing how to tell it.
Fielder's movement through animation and comics informs those choices. He first developed Matty's story through comic work, then pursued an animated form before returning to the book. The 2018 conversation describes his decision to keep visual devices from silent film rather than rebuild the project as a conventional comic after a publisher's request. That persistence was not a refusal to edit. It was a judgment about what the story needed: an image language that made Matty's era visible in the act of reading.
The book draws on early adventure cinema and science-fiction illustration while altering their assumptions. Fielder mentions Frank Hampson's Dan Dare and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux as touchstones. The pairing is telling. One offers a model of lavish futurist adventure; the other marks a Black filmmaking history often left out of the canonical story of screen spectacle. Matty's Rocket lets those traditions converse. The pulp thrill remains, but its pilot and its implied audience have changed.
A Black character who remains alive
Infinitum begins with a harsher gift. King Aja Oba loses those he loves and cannot die. According to the official book account, Obinrin curses him after he takes the child born to her, and the king's subsequent journey crosses the rise and loss of kingdoms, global technology and space travel. Immortality makes an epic timescale possible, but it also makes the central character answer for his early exercise of power. The story's longevity is bound to a conflict within a family rather than a magical exemption granted without cost.
Fielder has said that he conceived the story partly because he wanted a Black protagonist whose life would not be cut short as a routine narrative effect. In a first-person interview with Smash Pages, he put the desire plainly: an epic in which a Black character gets to remain present across history. That decision is political, but it is also a demand on storytelling. If the protagonist cannot be removed by a quick death, the author must find other sources of tension. Survival becomes complicated by memory, guilt, adaptation and the consequences of decisions that last longer than any ordinary lifetime.
The project’s stated reach is deliberately vast. Fielder describes 280 full-color images carrying Aja from ancient African kingdoms through later technological transformations and outward into space. He does not present the past as a brief prologue before the “real” science fiction begins. The ancient and the intergalactic belong to the same life. A scene of war, a moment of private loss and an image of a spacecraft must all have a place in the same visual argument. The character's body supplies continuity while the world changes around it.
That continuity can become a burden. Aja cannot treat an earlier act as safely finished when he remains alive to witness its effects. Fielder's immortal hero is therefore unlike a conqueror whose story ends at victory. His survival makes historical consequence personal. The official site describes him as a warrior, lover and pioneer, but these identities do not arrive as separate episodes on a checklist. Each is changed by what happened before. A man who travels among stars still carries the decision that made him immortal.
The graphic novel's form is crucial to this scale. In the 2021 interview, Fielder explains that he kept a one-image-per-page structure from an earlier conception of the project. The choice creates a different pace from a grid of small panels. Each image must hold a story beat, while the reader's act of turning a page becomes a step across time. The broad stroke needs a human detail strong enough to carry it. A gesture or expression can stop the epic from becoming an illustrated chronology.
Fielder also added first-person narration during editing. He recalled that some passages had striking pictures but too little access to Aja's feeling. The added voice did not replace the images; it gave the reader another route through them. An immortal figure risks becoming distant because the span of his experience seems impossible. The narration can restore uncertainty, desire and regret to each moment. The editorial choice shows how Fielder treats a comic as a balance of image and interiority, not simply as an art portfolio bound into a book.
Drawing a world with a computer
In the FAQs on the Infinitum site, Fielder answers a question about how he made the book: “I create the graphics completely with the computer.” That fact by itself says little about the artwork. What matters is how he uses digital rendering to create a fully painted sequence whose visual scale can move from a royal court to a battle formation to intergalactic travel. He names Aaron Douglas and other Black visual artists among his inspirations, alongside science-fiction illustrators and filmmakers. The combination is not an attempt to make one tradition absorb the other. It provides different solutions to the problem of making a future image that remembers Black histories of art.
His account of the project includes the wish to draw armored African warriors in large formations. That is a specific graphic ambition: an image many readers have been trained to expect in European or East Asian historical epics placed within an African historical imagination. Fielder's work can be exuberant about spectacle while asking why some peoples have long been denied the visual scale of epic cinema and comics. His stated ambition asks for not only a hero but crowds, landscapes and technologies worthy of sustained attention.
Fielder's method also comes from decades of design work. His interview about Matty's Rocket discusses storyboarding, animation and the need to choose the visual device that serves a given scene. The concept of a “design solution” is plain but useful. A flashback in silent-film cards, an interview in balloons and a centuries-long life in full-page images solve different narrative problems. Fielder's Afrofuturism resides partly in this craft: he changes the inherited grammar of comics to make different protagonists and times feel native to it.
The two books take opposite approaches to duration. Matty has a bounded human life remembered by an older self. Aja has a life that refuses to end. Both structures permit a Black protagonist to remain central across more than one historical moment. Matty's recollection gives her authority over how the story of her younger self is told. Aja's immortality forces him to remain answerable to acts he might wish were forgotten. The forms are different, but neither character is a disposable figure in someone else's adventure.
From page to moving image
Fielder has continued to develop Matty's Rocket in animation. In a 2026 first-person interview, he described using illustrations from the book as the basis of animated sequences and explained that the medium now lets him realize effects he could not complete earlier. The shift does not make the graphic novel a mere storyboard for a superior screen version. Each format changes the audience's control of time. A comic reader can pause on a page and choose when to turn it; an animated episode gives motion and duration a stronger authorial command.
The same interview reports that he is working on an animated Infinitum. Its status is a work in progress, not a completed counterpart to the book. The distinction matters because Fielder's production history has been long and nonlinear. A project can pass through pitches, preproduction images, books and moving pictures without each planned form arriving at the same time. The published graphic novels are distinct from these works in progress; later versions may ask different questions of the same characters.
The animated Matty gives him an opportunity to test a paradox built into the printed pages. A silent-film card in a comic asks the reader to supply the pace at which the words appear and disappear. On screen, Fielder must set that pace himself. The book's allusion to early cinema can become a moving sequence, but the screen also takes away the reader's freedom to linger over a single painted frame. Translation between media therefore changes Matty's remembered time. It can reveal how an illustrated gesture unfolds while making the pauses chosen by the artist more explicit. Fielder's account of reusing the book's illustrations suggests continuity of design without making the two experiences identical.
Fielder built an independent route for sharing his moving work through Afrofuturism.org. This is a distribution decision as well as a creative one. The stories have survived industry changes, publisher decisions and years of labor. A creator who controls a place to show his animation can shape how viewers encounter a series that began outside the mainstream categories of science fiction illustration. The infrastructure behind a future image can affect whether that image remains available.
Krull's interview with Julie Dash on speculative fiction offers a useful neighboring view of storytelling across time and medium. Dash speaks through film and ancestral history; Fielder works through comics and animation. Both attend to the formal question of how an image can hold people whom an inherited visual language has neglected. Fielder's answer appears in a pilot's remembered dialogue card and an immortal king's full-page pause.
The figures in his books are large enough for rockets and centuries, but their stature is earned through small acts of design. In the visual system Fielder describes, a word balloon gives way to a card, a page turn can carry a reader into another era, and first-person narration supplies a fear or regret the painting alone might leave hidden. These decisions let Matty and Aja occupy epic space without losing particular voices. In Fielder's hands, the future is not only where the characters travel. It is also the shape of the page that lets them stay.