SuperSouth:
The Visual Frequencies of John Jennings
SuperSouth: The Visual Frequencies of John Jennings brings together two landmark exhibitions originally presented at Jackson State University—Other Heroes: African American Comic Book Creators, Characters and Archetypes (2007) and Planet Deep South (2016)—to explore the evolution of John Jennings’s visionary practice across art, design, and speculative storytelling.
Other Heroes reimagined Black presence and power in the comic arts, reframing the superhero as a lens for understanding race, representation, and collective memory. This groundbreaking exhibition positioned comics and visual culture as spaces for cultural critique and creative resistance.
Nearly a decade later, Planet Deep South, an exhibit and conference organized in collaboration with Dr. Rico Chapman and featuring work by Black Kirby, Jennings’s long-running partnership with artist Stacey Robinson, expanded those ideas into the realm of Afrofuturism and digital worldbuilding. Conceived as part of a broader conference and creative research initiative, Planet Deep South explored the intersections of technology, the Black South, and speculative imagination, positioning HBCUs as vital engines of future thinking and cultural production.
SuperSouth unites the critical and creative energies of these two exhibitions, tracing how Jennings’s work transforms the gallery into a site of Black speculative thought. Through layered imagery, heroic archetypes, and remix aesthetics, Jennings and his collaborators re-envision the Deep South not as a static geography but as a living, cosmic terrain where history, technology, and imagination converge to chart new futures.
About the Artist
John Jennings is an award-winning artist, designer, curator, and scholar whose work spans comics, graphic novels, visual culture, and Afrofuturism. A Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California, Riverside, Jennings explores themes of identity, race, technology, and the Black speculative imagination.
He is the co-founder of Black Kirby, a collaborative art duo with Stacey Robinson that reinterprets the work of comics legend Jack Kirby through an Afrofuturist lens. Jennings is also a co-editor of The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art and the artist behind graphic adaptations such as Kindred by Octavia E. Butler.
Through his art, writing, and curatorial practice, Jennings reimagines visual storytelling as a site of liberation, bridging the heroic, the historical, and the speculative to illuminate new Black futures.