“Fat, Black people deserve to be main characters capable of anything.” As a young child growing up in Greenville, North Carolina, artist Alex Smith spent a lot of his time engrossed in the world of cartoons and comics, devouring works like Battle of the Planets, X-Men, and Doom Patrol. In college, Smith first encountered science fiction novels by Octavia E. Butler and Samuel R. Delany, both of whom he admired because “they were Black and absolutely, phenomenally awesome.” “They both showed me that sci-fi could have literary quality, could be progressive and liberatory,” Smith added. “Just their ideas, world-building, and...