Basi Affia, founder of the Des Moines-based comic book production company Sensi’il Studios, took second place in the 2025 Athene Black & Brown Business Summit Pitch Competition, held in West Des Moines April 16-17.
“It’s an honor to be on stage with so many high-caliber business owners and people who are doing so many cool things,” he said. “So it was really just an honor to be up there and be counted among that echelon of professionals.”
Affia, 28, said Sensi’il Studios is Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota’s first Black comic book publisher, a business he started in 2022, but “I’ve been writing since I was a kid.”
Affia said the second-place win came with $7,000. He received another $1,500 for winning the Catalyst Award, a new honor this year that was voted on by attendees of the summit. He plans to use the funding for a marketing campaign to push online sales, to book events for ComicCons, and pay artists for books the company is working on.
“[It’s] definitely a cash injection that I needed to get some stuff moving,” he said.
More than 400 small business owners worldwide applied for the pitch competition, including several from Iowa, according to a news release. Seven finalists were chosen to give a five-minute pitch in front of judges at the summit. An eighth finalist was chosen at random from attendees who had also applied.
The other top winners of the pitch competition were MinkeeBlue of Philadelphia in first place, and third-place winners Spoonful Wellness and West X East of Brooklyn, N.Y.
This year, a total of $40,000 was divided among the winners of the pitch competition and distributed based on final rankings. The Business Record sat down with Affia to learn more about his company.
The following Q&A has been lightly edited for brevity.
Tell me about your comic book production company.
We travel around the Midwest, bringing authentic representation to science fiction and fantasy with our graphic novels and comic books. We have some animated projects, and we’re trying to grow those projects that we’re working on. I also go to after-school programs and libraries and schools, speak to students as well as business conferences and other things to learn more, so that I can continue to teach more skills as well. So yeah, just representation, education and entertainment all wrapped up in there.
What kind of stories do you tell?
Primarily sci-fi, but I do like fantasy as well. I’m working on some fantasy stuff right now, but all my sci-fi stuff has a kind of a military story vibe to it as well. And it’s always been like that, just because I’ve always been kind of interested in military stuff. But then after I joined the Army now, I actually know some stuff, so that’s definitely one of the things that influences that as well. And also one of the demographics that I serve too, is veterans. So I definitely like to incorporate things in there that veterans and soldiers can relate to.
What inspired you to start this company?
Just growing up and being a nerd and not seeing or relating with the characters that I saw, not seeing characters that looked like me, acted like me or really had anything that I could identify with. Case in point, like Lord of the Rings, one of my favorite series, but the only people of color in there were the bad guys so it was kind of a confusing message.
Why is it important to have African American representation in comic books and storytelling?
Storytelling is such a big part of human history. Throughout humanity’s existence, people have come together around the fire, shared food, shared music, shared stories and that’s how cultures would unite and relate and bring peace. In today’s world, that’s still true, but on an individual level, the desire that everyone on Earth shares is to be heard, to be seen and then also to be in control of their story. So when we are consuming things and we’re only seeing ourselves represented a certain way — I mean, there’s psychological studies and stuff that have been done on this — it essentially teaches us, “Oh, this is how I’m supposed to be, because those are the stories that we believe.” Since a good majority of movies about Black people are slavery, segregation or we’re criminals or something like that, that’s what is being programmed into the community. That’s how we learn things and get taught about the world around us, and that highly influences what we believe about ourselves, which informs how we should live our life. So as far as why representation in comic books matter, it shows a different side of Blackness. We’re not criminals. There’s stigmas about the Black community, and about any of the subcultures within the Pan African spectrum, and we can all break free from those and say, “Hey, it’s OK for me to be a Black kid who was a nerd. It’s OK for me to be a Black kid who likes anime, comic books, video games.” It’s OK for the first-generation Kenyan American to break out of the box that they were raised in and experience new things. It really starts to break down the barriers of possibility so that people can achieve their best self.
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