It’s our first Throwback Thursday! Remember when comic book artists John Jennings and Damian Duffy came to campus?
ALANA Center Workshop on inner monsters
In addition to the workshop, they also attended Mia Mask’s African American Cinema class in which they discussed Shaft (Gordon Parks, 1971), Blaxploitation, and the African-American superhero. They also workshopped comic content with Peter Antelyes’ Comics Course and visited Christine Malsbary’s Race and Representation course and Annie Menzel’s Black Political Thought course. Before they left, Duffy and Jennings visited the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center for a tour of the museum’s highlights. At the end of the tour, Jennings and Duffy were greeted by their own installation.
Their piece entitled Working Out Our Issues (2014) was assembled with basic instructions by museum staff, leaving much of the work open to variability and interpretation. It’s scale, as evident in the picture, lends to its immersive impact; all at once it’s a barrage of visual stimuli, that’s graphic, confrontational, and humorous all at once. Pulling from narrative, racial, and their own career histories the work is a retrospective as much as it is a leap forward.
Check out the pictures above of their work and of them working. We encourage you to look into more of their work such as The Hole, one of their most famous graphic novels. Keep an eye out for an upcoming graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred.