Several recent projects show African and Afro-diasporic worlds moving between forms. Tim Fielder’s Matty’s Rocket is approaching film adaptation. Zairoo Entertainment has presented a Pan-African steampunk tabletop game as the foundation for a larger entertainment property. Advocate of the Gods brings African deities into a contemporary courtroom. Writer Traci N. Todd and author-illustrator Vashti Harrison discuss how books for young readers connect Black history with imagined futures.
These projects differ in audience, scale, and purpose, yet each requires creators to decide which parts of a world can change and which parts give that world its identity. A comic adapted for film gains movement, sound, performance, and a large production team. A tabletop setting allows players to create stories inside a designed world. A legal drama places inherited sacred figures inside a modern institution. An illustrated book asks writers and artists to convey history through words and images together.
Such changes can give readers new ways to encounter unfamiliar work. Writers and artists must also address questions of craft and responsibility. When creators adapt a story, they can alter its form while remaining answerable to the histories, relationships, and cosmologies from which they draw.
Tim Fielder discusses adapting Matty’s Rocket for film
In The Beat’s interview, Tim Fielder discusses the development of Matty’s Rocket as he approaches the passage from comics to film.
In comics, an artist closely controls composition and pace. The size of a panel, the arrangement of a page, and the space between images all affect the reader’s experience of time. A reader can linger over a face, return to an earlier image, or take in a full page before following its sequence. Filmmakers set the duration of each moment through editing, sound, and performance. Actors interpret characters physically, while designers, cinematographers, composers, editors, and other collaborators contribute to the resulting world.
A film adaptation could introduce Matty’s Rocket to people who do not encounter it through comics or graphic novels. Reaching a larger audience, however, does not settle the central artistic question. The filmmakers still have to identify the visual and narrative choices that make Fielder’s work recognizable as his.
The adaptation therefore involves more than transferring events from panels into scenes. Fielder’s visual grammar carries part of the story’s meaning. Character design, spatial arrangement, rhythm, and the treatment of Black life within speculative imagery all contribute to the work’s identity. Filmmakers will have to translate those qualities into cinematic decisions without treating the comic as a preliminary storyboard.
For writers and artists considering adaptation, Matty’s Rocket raises a useful craft question: which effects belong to the original medium, and which deeper commitments produced those effects? A film cannot preserve the physical act of turning a page. It can preserve relationships, historical orientation, emotional emphasis, and the rules by which an imagined world makes sense. Filmmakers can then use sound, motion, and performance to develop those commitments through cinematic techniques.
Readers may also want to return to the comic after seeing an adaptation. Comparing the versions can show how much of the storytelling depends on form. A pause drawn across several panels affects a reader differently from a pause held by an actor. Readers can value both experiences and notice different features of the story in each.
Zairoo Entertainment presents a Pan-African steampunk tabletop world
Zairoo Entertainment has presented its Pan-African steampunk fantasy tabletop role-playing game as the foundation for a larger entertainment property. That description comes from the company, so claims about scale and future expansion should be read as ambitions until releases, partnerships, or audience response provide firmer evidence.
Beginning with a tabletop role-playing game has creative consequences. Game designers establish histories, locations, technologies, conflicts, and limits. Players then make choices within that structure, producing events the designers cannot fully predict. To support many sessions, the designers must provide enough depth for different groups to follow different routes without losing the world’s internal logic.
The use of “Pan-African” creates a particular challenge. People use the term to describe solidarity, exchange, and shared political imagination across borders and diasporas. Creators can also use it as a broad visual label that conceals differences. A convincing setting would need to show how particular societies, histories, materials, languages, and systems of knowledge inform its inventions. Distinct traditions cannot be reduced to interchangeable sources of costume, machinery, or supernatural power.
The designers face a related problem with steampunk. Many steampunk writers and artists derive their machinery, clothing, cities, and political tensions from nineteenth-century Britain and Europe. Even works critical of empire can remain visually dependent on imperial centers. Designers working from African histories could reconsider which technologies developed, who controlled them, what needs they served, and how communities understood their use.
The project will require specificity to develop a coherent world. The designers could identify the political arrangements behind a city, the trade relations that make a machine possible, the people who maintain it, and the social consequences of its use. They could also distinguish inventions grounded in documented history from those created for the game. By making these decisions, the designers would give players causes, obligations, and disagreements that can sustain play as well as scenery.
Players make the designers’ answerability especially visible when they test a tabletop setting through action. They ask who holds authority, where resources come from, what forms of kinship carry obligations, and which choices the rules reward. If the designers borrow from living traditions, players may quickly encounter gaps that a fixed narrative could pass over. Careful research and consultation would help them build a world whose cultural references remain specific under repeated use.
The company’s plans for expansion into other media introduce another challenge. A tabletop setting can contain many possible protagonists and outcomes, while a film or television adaptation usually selects a narrower sequence. Any future adaptation would have to choose which parts of the shared setting become central and whose perspective organizes the story. Those selections would define the property more sharply than promotional language can.
Advocate of the Gods places African deities in a contemporary courtroom
Nollywood Reporter describes Advocate of the Gods as an exploration of African mythology through a contemporary courtroom. The creators place sacred figures within an institution structured by testimony, evidence, procedure, and argument.
A courtroom requires participants to state claims before competing authorities. Lawyers shape accounts into admissible forms. Witnesses speak under rules that determine which kinds of knowledge judges and juries will recognize. Judges interpret law, and the state gives their decisions practical force. By placing deities in this setting, the writers must decide how divine obligation, inherited custom, human judgment, and legal procedure relate to one another.
The writers’ decisions can affect every level of the drama. They might use a deity’s identity to determine what counts as testimony, which promises bind a speaker, or whether a human court has jurisdiction over the dispute. Lawyers or judges might misunderstand the conflict because their legal categories cannot accommodate the relationships involved. Characters may disagree about the authority of inherited practice within contemporary life. These questions can determine what people do and what consequences follow.
By using a contemporary setting, the creators avoid confining African sacred traditions to a sealed historical past. Communities have carried gods and spirits through devotion, performance, retelling, migration, scholarship, suppression, and dispute. The writers can place that continuing history of interpretation in a modern courtroom by showing people debate what an inherited figure requires under present conditions.
Viewers should scrutinize how the production treats particular traditions. “African mythology” covers many distinct cosmologies, communities, languages, and histories. Deities cannot be combined solely because they come from the continent, and sacred figures with living communities around them require more care than fictional characters assembled from a general mythological catalogue. Readers and viewers should look for specificity about where the figures come from, how the story interprets them, and whose knowledge informs that interpretation.
Writers adapting sacred material face a related craft problem. Exposition can easily overwhelm a legal drama if characters repeatedly explain beliefs they already share. Advocates and witnesses have natural reasons to explain relevant facts to judges, juries, and spectators. Even there, information should arise from disagreement, strategy, or consequence. A character’s account of a deity should reveal the character’s position as well as provide background.
The writers can also use the legal setting to present conflicting interpretations within a tradition. Members of a culture may disagree, and people continue to argue over inherited stories as they carry them into the present. By giving characters different relationships to the sacred figures, the writers can avoid presenting tradition as a fixed collection of facts. They can show interpretation as part of contemporary social life.
Traci N. Todd and Vashti Harrison discuss history and possibility in children’s books
Publishers Weekly brought writer Traci N. Todd and author-illustrator Vashti Harrison together for a conversation titled “Past, Present, Future”. By speaking together, they consider how writing and illustration represent Black historical memory and imagined possibility.
Books for young readers often provide an early encounter with histories beyond a child’s family knowledge. They can also expand the range of futures that a child associates with Black life. Authors and illustrators construct those encounters through concrete choices: which person stands at the center, what information the text supplies, what the image reveals, and how much difficulty a young reader is asked to hold.
An illustrator builds a historical argument through visual choices. The artist decides which faces occupy the page, how people inhabit a room or landscape, and which details make an earlier period legible. Scale, color, expression, and composition affect how a child understands power and intimacy. An artist may make a public event accessible through one person’s posture or make a broad historical claim specific through clothing, architecture, or the arrangement of a family.
Writers and illustrators can divide the work of explanation between words and images. The text may provide dates or context while the illustration shows an emotional relationship that the words leave unstated. An image can complicate a sentence by directing attention to someone outside its immediate focus. Through this collaboration, creators can connect public history with individual experience.
Todd and Harrison’s discussion has much in common with the week’s adaptation stories because creators of books for young readers also reshape inherited material. They select what to carry forward, decide what needs explanation, and present the material to readers encountering it under different conditions. They remain responsible for the histories they represent and for the possibilities their work places before children.
Adult readers can also approach children’s publishing as a field of serious visual and narrative craft. Writing and illustrating clearly for a young audience requires careful selection and precision. Writers cannot assume extensive background knowledge, and illustrators cannot rely on decoration to carry a historical scene. Both must build context without allowing explanation to displace character and feeling.
Creators must balance orientation with discovery. A child needs enough information to understand the stakes, along with enough imaginative room to form questions and make connections. Readers may remember history more durably when they can see people acting within it. They may also find imagined futures more persuasive when those futures retain a relationship to the lives and struggles that preceded them.
Requirements of changing form
Across these stories, creators gain new possibilities and accept new obligations when they move work between media. Fielder and his collaborators must determine how to preserve the visual identity of Matty’s Rocket in a cinematic production. Zairoo Entertainment’s designers must give players a Pan-African setting grounded in cultural and historical specificity. The creators of Advocate of the Gods must decide how sacred figures alter the substance of a legal drama. Todd and Harrison consider how words and pictures carry Black memory toward younger readers.
Creators working with mythic inheritance make choices about continuity whenever they change a form. They decide which relationships remain central, which histories need context, and which formal devices can be replaced without weakening the work. They also decide who can speak, who receives explanation, and whose knowledge defines the world.
Readers and viewers can assess these works through similar questions. Which specific traditions and histories inform the setting? How does the chosen medium affect the experience? Do cultural references determine character, conflict, and consequence, or do they remain on the surface? What can creators accomplish in the new medium that they could not accomplish in the earlier one?
Successful adapters preserve more than recognizable names and images. They carry forward the underlying relationships, obligations, and ways of understanding that made the world coherent in the first place. They can then extend that world through the techniques available in the new medium.