Wednesday night best-selling author and artist John Jennings arrived at the opening for his exhibit "Collaboration(s): A Journey with John Jennings," and entered the Comic-Con Museum for the first time.
"I am giddy," Jennings said looking around the museum space and the binational exhibit "Border Blitz" that opened alongside his. "I'm totally giddy. I wasn't expecting this. I'm very excited. I was already honored to be selected to be in the show with all these other wonderful artists, but I wasn't prepared for this."
But it is about time his work gets showcased at Comic-Con Museum. Comic-Con International has awarded him a pair of Eisner Awards for "The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art" and "Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation." He has also been on many panels at the pop culture convention, so this exhibit feels absolutely right.
Jennings credits are extensive. In addition to his Eisner Awards, he is a Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, graphic novelist, editor, professor at UC Riverside, scholar and design theorist. If you follow him on social media, you can get exhausted by how much he is doing.
The title of his exhibit reflects how he sees the world of comics.
"Comics can be really collaborative," Jennings said. "I think we're made out of stories, to a certain degree. And so we collaborate on these stories together all the time. In fact, if you're making comics, then you're almost depending upon the audience to be a collaborator as well. But due to how comics in the mainstream industry are produced, you have people who have different designations. You have a writer, you have an inker, you have a colorist, and they're easy to collaborate with. And so, it's really about the beauty of comics as a medium, but also just the joy of sharing ideas and collaborating with people that you care about."
That collaboration takes on additional dimensions when adapting a novel.
"Adapting prose into a graphic novel is a totally different collaborative process," Jennings explained. "One of the biggest things you have to realize is that when you're translating a book, you're actually changing the narrative because comics is a different medium, and the different media have different affordances. So some things you can do in prose, you can't do in comics. And that translation, you're thinking about the strength of what comics do that's different. And so, we try to build that into the narrative as much as possible."
Attendees will have a chance to collaborate in a small way at the exhibit by taking some black and white images Jennings has created and then coloring them in, writing a story for them, and leaving them up at the exhibit.
"That's pretty cool," Jennings said. "I think that's the beauty of comics. They push against the grain a lot as far as how comics go. Anybody with an idea can make a comic. You can actually take an image or a series of photographs, add some text, take it down to the local copy shop, and you become a comic book producer. You publish a comic. That's a very cool and powerful thing."
Jennings got hooked on comics through his mom, who was also a fan of horror and passed that love onto her son. My favorite part of the exhibit is a corner filled with black and white sketches all inspired by Black horror films, or iconic Black horror characters.
Jennings' visual style is influenced by woodcut artists as well as by hip-hop.
"My style is very much informed by woodcut," Jennings explained. "So that particular esthetic, but digital. What I try to do is, how do I emulate an analog printmaking esthetic, but digitally? Because I work totally digital now."
And from hip-hop he was inspired by the idea of sampling and remixing.
"That actually affected the way that I look at making images in general," Jennings added. "The principles of juxtaposition of different ideas, disruption of images, using things that are analog with the digital, and also just becoming a big sampling machine. I mean, Photoshop, for instance, it's almost like a mixing board, but visual, right? I mean, it's like the dopest collage making device that you can imagine. You take all these different things and put it together, that's exciting. So that affected my work."
That work is on display for the next four months at Comic-Con Museum and then he will bring in a new collection of collaborations.
Jennings has been a guest on Cinema Junkie many times talking about horror. So check out these podcasts.
