Laguardia #1 Review: A Sci-Fi Comic Full of Beautiful Black People

Writer: Nnedi Okorafor / Artists: Tana Ford & James Devlin / Dark Horse Comics We know Nnedi Okorafor can write anything she puts her mind to. She’s a multi-threat creative, with Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards for her fiction, an HBO deal in the works to adapt her stellar novel Who Fears Death into prestige television, and a growing stack of Black Panther/Shuri comics to her name. Oh, and she’s a professor and lecturer. Okorafor clearly stays busy. With Laguardia #1, Nnedi Okorafor continues her work of bringing a unique, insightful Black African science fiction aesthetic to audiences. The setting is fantastic: Aliens have landed on earth, first through the port of Lagos, Nigeria (the setting for Okorafor’s Lagoon) and now spreading as immigrants throughout the world. This is not an easy, seamless immigration, neither in Nigeria or America. The story centers on Future Nwafor Chukwuebuka, a Nigeria-American doctor who’s returning to New York pregnant from Lagos, leaving behind a concerned boyfriend/baby daddy, Citizen Raphael Nwabara. Travelling with Future is an alien sentient plant, which names itself Letme Live. Just from the names, you can see the direction this story is going. Future. Citizen. Letme Live. The stories of Future and Citizen move on parallel tracks as anti-immigrant sentiment grows on both sides of the Atlantic. Common to both is a strong, confident character style. Okorafor creates these characters so well, so quickly, their attitudes are so gen…