34 PUBLISHERS WEEKLY ■ NOVEMBER 4, 2019
Author Profile
a shared interest in hip-hop, comics, and
“using art to talk about identity in
politics.”
The pair dove into the nascent self-pub-
lishing space in the early 2000s, thrilled
about being able to make their comics
accessible to the masses—a concept that had
previously been unfathomable. “I was inter-
ested in webcomics,” Jennings says. “And
then I came across [online self-publishing
platform] Lulu, and I thought, let me get
this straight: there’s a company where you
can make content and sell it? I think I was
the first person in my whole department to
start creating pedagogical class materials
and putting them in that space.”
Duffy estimates that he and Jennings
have completed at least 10 projects
together over the years. “Around 2006, we decided we wanted
to curate a comics art show at the University of Illinois,” Duffy
says, “partly in reaction to the Masters of American Comics art
exhibition that opened in 2005 at L.A.’s Hammer Museum,
which set the canon of the greatest comics creators ever. Except
for George Herriman [creator of Krazy Kat], they were all white
men. We wanted to make the ‘anti-that’ show, which we did
with Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics”—a
2008 exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum.
Lauded as a trailblazer of the Afrofuturist aesthetic and an
expert on black speculative art, Jennings was an obvious choice
when the team at Abrams decided to adapt the edgy sci-fi works
of Octavia Butler. He didn’t hesitate to take on Kindred with
Duffy, noting that Butler’s style, storytelling, and themes line
up perfectly for a rich visual interpretation.
“Her prose is tight and lovely in its preciseness, which
lends itself to illustration very well,” Jennings says. “It’s very
descriptive, which is helpful for putting together graphic
scenarios, and it’s extremely well researched, and that helps
with the ephemera we can create. Also, she’s writing about
power dynamics primarily, which is, of course, something
that comics—and particularly American comics—are very
concerned with.”
Duffy and Jennings’s adaptation of Kindred vaulted to first
place on the New York Times bestseller list for hardcover graphic
novels and scooped up the 2018 Will Eisner Award for Best
Adaptation from Another Medium. When Abrams was consid-
ering which Butler novel to take on next, the pair suggested
Parable of the Sower—“because of our current political situation,”
Jennings says.
Parable was first published in 1993 and opens in Los Angeles
in the year 2024. The city has been ravaged by climate change
and poverty. Gun violence, homelessness, and drug abuse run
amok as a deranged president with the catchphrase “Make
America Great Again” promises to bring back jobs and cleangovernmental house. “She was actually
writing about Reagan,” Jennings says.
“But if you took Pence and Trump and
fused them into one body, you’d have the
president in Parable of the Sower.”
Parable isn’t a gentle read, and Jennings
asserts that it “outhungers Hunger Games;
that’s ‘Little Bo Peep’ compared to this.”
Though it’s not a horror novel, Parable
is indeed horrific, and it’s no surprise that
Duffy and Jennings are both hardcore
horror fans. Jennings says the first author
he remembers reading as a child is Edgar
Allan Poe. “My mother is a massive horror
fan who reads a lot of crime fiction, which
I read, too, and still love,” he says. “I grew
up surrounded by woods and noises—and
an appreciation for the unknown was
impressed on me early on, as was the idea that if you can master
the things that frighten you, your possibilities open up.”
Like the novel it’s based on, the graphic novel Parable leans
heavily on frightening imagery. Duffy and Jennings assert that this
book isn’t suitable for readers under 15—mainly because it depicts
violence against children—though Duffy is quick to note that the
violence “is not at all glorified—it’s very humanized.”
It’s there—in the finely lined territory of humanizing but not
glorifying violence—where Jennings’s craftsmanship as an illus-
trator shines most distinctly. “My background is in graphic
design, so I am always trying to capture the eyes in some way,”
Jennings says. “Color is important; it’s a storytelling asset.
Everyone has different skin tonalities, and I am always really
trying to bring that out. I tend to use darker tones on people of
color so that people understand that they are black. Teal also pops
up a lot. My family and I lived in a teal house once. Some people
down south call it ‘haint blue.’ Haint is the southern vernacular
for haunt or ghost. It’s a kind of light creamy blue color that sup-
posedly traps spirits, who mistake it for the sky. I am always
trying to capture the ghost in the machine, so to speak, and
thinking of technology traditionally, spiritually, and racially.”
Jennings is always thinking politically, too. “I love that James
Baldwin quote, ‘Artists are here to disturb the peace,’ ” he says.
“If you have a soul and you’re an artist of any kind, and you see
injustice or oppression or things of that nature, in some way your
work will speak to it—especially if you’re part of that oppressed
group. Throughout history, oppressed people always have robust,
symbolic, and powerful art. Look at works out of the Harlem
Renaissance, or the Polish posters by Jewish folk during WWII.
Have racism and oppressive spaces actually created a space where
if you are an artist of color you have to make your work about
that thing? I am of the opinion that you do.” ■Nicole Audrey Spector is freelance writer and book editor whose work has ap-
peared in the Atlantic, the New Yorker, and Vice.