Have you ever wanted a Black comic or animated series that speaks to African cultural concepts? Or a Black anime that has a cast of characters without stereotypical fatal flaws? How bout a protagonist with power ups that want to make you study up on the real world history involved with its conception?
Well lucky for you, Black Sands is here and it’s taken the weeb world by storm.
Black Sands is a action-adventure comic and animated series created by Manuel Godoy, and illustrated by French concept artist David Lenormand.
The original concept for Black Sands was thought up by Godoy who infused Egyptian esoteric concepts with a modern day take on the hero’s journey to give us the story of Ausar, who fights for the throne of the ancient Kingdom of Kemet. We get tons of different characters throughout the light novel, most of them either are foes for Ausar and his companions to overcome and allies, some who have hidden motives, to show Ausar the way forward.
In terms of animation, Godoy gets a 10/10. The animation was produced by Godoy’s Black Sands Studios, which is apart of Black Sands Entertainment Inc, and visualization was headed by Teunis de Raat (yes that de Raat who led the visual effects team on Chronicles of Riddick) and industry animators like Tarik Holmes formerly of BlackBox comics.
The series of shorts primarily used 2d animation although teasers for the official animated series show 3d animation.
The Black Sands animated shorts were received with stuns and awes on social media, with episode 1 netting over a 100,000 views on YouTube alone.
Black Sands is the most popular black indie comic series in the nation, selling over 25,000 copies in the last two years, but Godoy wants to make a full fledged animated series and hopes to build even more in the coming years after landing a 500k deal with ‘Shark Tank’ in January of this year.
If you wanna see a sneak peak of the animated series click here. Check out Black Sands novels and comics here.
–Kel McKnight, B1Daily
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