Black Kirby: In Search of the MotherBoxx Connection - Softcover

Jennings, John; Robinson, Stacey

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941958117 ISBN 13: 9781941958117

Publisher: Cedar Grove Publishing, 2015

Synopsis

A catalog of primarily visual artworks-on-paper, this collection is the work of a creative duo that makes up the collaborative entity, Black Kirby. Their art celebrates the groundbreaking work of legendary comic creator Jack Kirby and functions as a highly syncretic mytho-poetic framework by appropriating Kirby's bold forms and revolutionary ideas combined with themes centered on AfroFuturism, social justice, Black history, media criticism, science fiction, magical realism, and the utilization of Hip Hop culture as a methodology for creating visual expression. Their work also focuses on the digital medium: how its inherent affordances offer much more flexibility in the expression of visual communication and what that means in its production and consumption in the public sphere. In a sense, Black Kirby appropriates the gallery as a conceptual crossroads to examine identity as a socialized concept, and to show the commonalities between Black comics creators and Jewish comics creators and how both utilize the medium of comics as space of resistance. The duo attempts to re-medicate blackness and other identity contexts as sublime technologies that produce experiences that can limit human progress and possibility.

About this title

About the Author:

John Jennings is an associate professor of art and visual studies and an award winning visual artist, designer, and graphic novelist. He is the coauthor of Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture and The Hole: Consumer Culture, Volume 1. He lives in Buffalo, New York. Stacey Robinson is an assistant professor of graphic design. His work discusses ideas of “Black Utopias” as spaces of peace away from colonial factors by considering past and present Black protest movements and the art movements that documented them.  He has been a part of many exhibitions including Invisible Ink: Black Independent Comix at Univerity of Tennessee  Beyond the Frame: African American Comic Book Artists. He lives in Chicago.

Review:

Black Kirby is a political and visual revelation. John Jennings and Stacey Robinson, honor the comic genius of Jack Kirby, in spectacular signifying fashion, by reminding all of us that what remains most compelling about the graphic narrative form is its irresistible invitation into fantastic worlds of mutable subjectivity. Secret identities, super humans, aliens, gods, and mutants were always subject to Black fantastical appropriations; they have always been subjective placeholders for the identity politics with which Black comic book fans have had to do battle in their everyday lives. Black Kirby pays powerful homage to the most influential artist in the modern comics era, but its genius lies in the fact that it simultaneously honors the legions of black comics readers who saw themselves in the broad shoulders of Kirby's heroic figures; imagined their existence in Kirby's celestial landscapes and who fashioned themselves as magnificent Black heroes in worlds beyond the existential limits of our reality, but well within the boundless spaces of the Black imagination. --ames Braxton Peterson, Chair of Africana Studies at Lehigh University

John Jennings and Stacy Robinson use their art to rewrite history. But the common phrase, what if?, barely touches on the manner within which they begin to retell our stories. Together, they sift through our collective past in order to reshape and repurpose images we have come to know and in some cases love. In the process, they transform these images into liberation tools anchored toward forging a better future many of us were unaware was even possible. Get this book and bear witness to how these brothas from the South get it done! --Clint Fluker, Curator, Emory University

Black Kirby is funky brilliance, the kind that makes you scrunch up your nose, screw your face, and involuntarily mutter: Aha! --Regina Bradley, African American Literature, Armstrong State Univeristy

About this edition

• Publisher: Cedar Grove Publishing
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1941958117
• ISBN 13: 9781941958117
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 180