Comics Guest Edited by Qiana Whitted

Bot-Anical Garden

A young girl with long brown hair stretches and happily greets the day with “Good morning, world!” She opens a door and steps out into the sunlight. Her garden is revealed: wilted plants and blackened produce lie in the soil. In the next panel, the girl is holding a wooden basket with limp vegetables and says, “at this rate we’ll barely make it through winter.” She clutches her forehead and sighs, “I guess I should get some help.” The scene switches to a laptop being opened and the screen turning on. The title appears to the right: Bot-anical Garden by Naima Whitted.

A finger taps on a keyboard. Close-up of the girl’s wide eyes glowing with lines of binary code, her face excited. She exclaims, “Almost done…” In the final panel, she smiles mischievously and shouts, “Let's test you out!” while sitting on the floor in a dark room, with her legs crossed, facing the glow of a device she's built.

The top panels show the girl building a robot. She screws parts on, attataches the robot’s hand, and fixes it into place. Excitedly, she throws her arms up and exclaims, “Nice!” The robot looks at her, confused, as she tells it, “Time to get to work!” The next panel shows a close-up of a claw-like gardening tool scraping soil. The robot, now holding the tool, begins tending the garden. The final panel shows the girl happily skipping along a dirt path while tossing seeds, singing under the sun, while the robot hurries behind her with a bag slung over its shoulder.

The girl pulls a sprouting carrot from the row of plants and says, “Looking good so far” after examining it and making sure it looks healthy. The next panel shows her and her robot companion examining the rows of sprouting vegetables. Suddenly, she notices something odd poking out of the dirt. Two black and silver pointed shapes stand out against the rest of the sprouting vegetables. She says, “Wait, what’s this?” and digs it out, revealing a metallic-like carrot root. The girl asks, “Why does it look like that?” and bites it with a crunch. The next panels show the bizarre root on the ground, with the girl yelling “BLAH!” In the final frame, the root lies on its side and echoes, “Good morning, world!” with the same cheerfulness the girl had earlier.

Naima Whitted is a fine arts major at Howard University with a concentration in animation from the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts. Her work has been exhibited at Bison at Basel (Art Basel Miami Beach), Moja Arts Festival (Charleston), ArtFields Jr. (Lake City, SC), and more. She has also illustrated the children’s picture book, A Blessing for the Word, by Rian Jenkins. Visit her on Instagram @nai_dr4ws.

FROM Volume 74, Numbers 1 & 2