Jersey City Black Comic Con: Lifting new voices and highlighting diversity in pop culture [Video]

In-between running a Jersey City community center and working on art projects such as the Harriet Tubman statue for the city of Philadelphia, Alvin Pettit is a self-proclaimed comic geek, a fan of iconic superheroes such as Batman and the X-Men.

The Jersey City artist has admired famous comic artists such as Neil Adams and Frank Miller; during his childhood in Baltimore, he ran down every week to a drugstore or magazine store to grab new issues and went to small conventions to compete in art contests, drawing his favorite superheroes.

But while growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, Pettit noticed that there wasn’t much representation for Black and minority groups in the realms of pop culture — not just in comic books, but also sci-fi and horror.

“(Back then), we had two Black people in space with Lando Calrissian in ‘Star Wars’ and Lieutenant Uhura in ‘Star Trek,’ …