Using Diversity To Reinvigorate Basic Plots

I’m really liking The Adventures of Athena Wheatley, Or, Warp & Weft, a new graphic novel that’s publishing an installment every Wednesday. The story isn’t very far along yet, but I just appreciate the basic premise: a black woman, who from the autonomy she seems to have I assume is free, in Baltimore in 1841 becomes a time traveler. It’s a lot of fun to see that extremely familiar premise (time-travel) from a new perspective, whether Athena’s wondering in her journal if she’s becoming a prophetess because of her strange dreams, or skipping a rock through a force field to see if it’s safe to escape through, only to see it transformed to something else entirely. One of the easiest ways to refresh an old concept or scenario is to show how someone with a different set of background assumptions and experiences would react to it rather than trying to convince an audience that a tweak to the scenario itself is radically new and inventive.