Dorany Pineda, Los Angeles Times
Manuel and Geiszel Godoy are military veterans, and they believe deeply in social justice. But above all, they are entrepreneurs who saw an underdeveloped sector in their industry and dove in. We have to show that we can pull a Tyler Perry as a community, Manuel Godoy, president of Black Sands Entertainment, says in a recent video interview. The idea is that the bigger the company gets, the better the IP does, the more everybody wins, and we can fund our projects ourselves because we have the experience, the expertise to do it.
The Godoys niche is a growing one: indie comics by Black artists, written for Black families about Black people, with a focus on tales of Africa before slavery. Among their projects are an upcoming animated series and the Black Sands Publishing app.
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“If we get this done,” Godoy says, “we’ve proven that you no longer have to walk through the gate they built in order to get to the main stage.”
Black Sands isn’t the first through the gate. It joins a growing hive of Black creators who’ve carved space in a format that for decades was
steeped in racism and exclusion.
“Black Sands: The Seven Kingdoms” is the flagship comic series of Black Sands Entertainment.
(Black Sands Entertainment)
Booming genres like Afrofuturism (which meshes African culture with science fiction) reflect worlds envisioned by Black activists: Worlds in which existing power structures are dismantled and Black people thrive.
In
The Souls of Black Folk, written in 1903 by W.E.B. DuBois, the author describes the African American experience as a Double Consciousness, a psychological condition brought on from living in a world as a Black person through the eyes of racist white people. Comic historian Ken Quattro was profoundly affected by DuBois work while he conducted research for IDW s
Invisible Men: The Trailblazing Black Artists of Comic Books, his new book chronicling the lives and work of 18 Black men the comic book industry not only forgot but barely acknowledged existed.
Men like Matt Baker, Elmer C. Stoner, Orrin C. Evans, and E. Sims Campbell may not be household names, but they are part of the group introduced in