John Jennings: Build Your World
Exhibition on view June 20, 2026-March 27, 2027
Preview: June 19, 2026 (6 pm-9 pm) at the City of Meridian's Juneteenth Heritage Festival Black Business Expo
John Jennings: Build Your World explores the extraordinary storytelling and world-building of John Jennings—Mississippi native, NYTimes bestselling graphic novelist, Harvard Fellow, and Hugo- and Eisner Award-winning artist.
In Build Your World, Jennings’s groundbreaking work in Afrofuturism, folklore, and comics is brought to life through multiple creative projects, including Silver Surfer: Ghost Light (Marvel), Kenny Dreadful and the Hainted Hoodie, and Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road (Rosarium Publishing).
Silver Surfer: Ghost Light
Silver Surfer: Ghost Light (Marvel), Jennings has reinvented a forgotten Black Marvel character as a cosmic guardian tied to African American memory and interstellar mystery. This section offers a comprehensive overview of the complex process of working with a behemoth like Marvel and its creative teams.
Kenny Dreadful and the Hainted Hoodie
Kenny Dreadful and the Hainted Hoodie presents a new Southern Gothic tale that blends horror, folklore, and coming-of-age themes through the lens of a magical hoodie haunted by ancestral spirits. As new work, Jennings has complete control over every aspect of Kenny Dreadful’s story. This section will include early concept art, storyboards, and environments created by Jennings, along with annotated sketches that show influences from Mississippi folklore, African spirituality, and horror traditions.
Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road
Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road (Rosarium Publishing) brings the Mississippi myth to life. Here, Frank “Half-Dead” Johnson, a fictional brother of Robert Johnson, seeks to regain his soul while helping others along the way. Visitors to The MAX will see how Jennings’s original watercolors enliven the noir.
Together, these sections reinforce the exhibition’s main theme of world building as an act of liberation. Through his work, Jennings transforms the legacy of the South into a platform for liberated futures. The South is not just a place—it’s a portal. This exhibition uses the language of comics and graphic novels to build layered worlds that challenge historical erasure, reframe trauma, and imagine radical futures.
About John Jennings
A native of Flora, MS, John Jennings is a graphic novelist, Media Studies Professor, Harvard Fellow, and New York Times bestseller who draws on Black Southern memory to create new worlds.
Perhaps best known as coauthor of the New York Times bestselling graphic novel Kindred, Jennings has also adapted Olivia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, as well as directing Abrams ComicArts’s imprint Megascope, where he publishes graphic novels on the experiences of people of color.
As creator of Marvel’s Silver Surfer: Ghost Light, Jennings has been featured on the Disney+ documentaries Marvel’s 616 and Marvel’s Behind the Mask. Jennings’s forthcoming compendium, My Super Hero is Black, illuminates some of the most important Black creators and characters through Marvel Comics history.
Jennings currently has work on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room.” A collection of interviews, John Jennings Conversations, published by University Press of Mississippi, discusses folklore, systemic racism, Mississippi—and the need for Black heroes. He is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers), and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem.
