Season 2: Episode 9 – John Jennings

What media(s) could we use to tell better climate stories? What is the message that we should send to increase not only climate awareness but climate action? John Jennings, professor, comics artist, author, and design theorist shares with Eric a brief history of social justice in comics and why he thinks they are a valuable resource and medium to inspire climate activism for all ages.

This podcast is sponsored by Dreamhost.

Cli-Fi Comics mentioned in the episode:

• Climate Changed

• World Without Fish

• Trashman

• The Great Pacific, Vol. 1: Trashed

• The Great American Dust Bowl

• The Massive, Vol. 1: Black Pacific

• Snowpiercer

• Parable of the Sower

• The Leak

• The Rime of the Modern Mariner

• AD New Orleans After the Deluge

Teaching Comics to Designers Resources

• Comic Book Design

• Understanding Comics

• Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist

John Jennings is a professor, author, graphic novelist, curator, Harvard Fellow, New York Times Bestseller, 2018 Eisner Winner, and all-around champion of Black culture.

As a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, comics, and graphic novels. He is also the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. His research interests include the visual culture of Hip Hop, Afrofuturism and politics, Visual Literacy, Horror, and the EthnoGothic, and Speculative Design and its applications to visual rhetoric.

Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 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. He is co-founder and organizer of the MLK NorCal’s Black Comix Arts Festival in San Francisco and also SOL-CON: The Brown and Black Comix Expo at the Ohio State University.

johnjenningsstudio.com

twitter.com/JIJennings

Theme music by Casual Motive

At the end of each episode, we ask our guests what their ideal climate design project would be. They have four weeks with a class full of design students. We translated their response into a project brief that you can use for your class.

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