Mark your calendars! Avery Research Center, April 18, 6:00 pm, McKinley Washington Auditorium 

“The Souls of Black Comix,” John Jennings, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York 

In the last decade, a new generation of black scholars, publishers, creators, archivists, documentarians, and curators have come forth with a re-imagined vision of what it means to depict the African American experience via the comics medium. An underground movement has been operating unseen, flowing in tandem to the mainstream but showing very different levels of the American experience. The Black Age of Comics is an attempt to shift the paradigm of how black images and stories are portrayed in the medium of comics. In this presentation, Dr. John Jennings discusses the history of Black images in the comics medium, and presents his own recent work, including his upcoming graphic novelization of Octavia Butler’s KINDRED (with collaborator Damian Duffy).