5.3 It’s on The Illabus: A Discussion with Jean-Christophe Cloutier and John Jennings (SW)

John Jennings—Hugo Award winner, New York Times bestselling author, curator, scholar, and Artist—is keenly aware that in adapting novels for the graphic format, his decisions turn what has only been imagined into facts drawn on the page. In this conversation with critic, translator, and teacher of a creative course on the art of making comics, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, Jennings explores how he makes those decisions that range from the design of endpapers to selecting a character’s skin tone with the ultimate aim of championing Black culture and Black comics. Given that Jennings has just entered the Marvel Universe with the debut of Silver Surfer: Ghost Light, the timing is right to reflect on the pressures and pleasures of adapting beloved stories for a contemporary audience. Jennings is both teacher and student of comics’ powerful lessons, and lucky for listeners, his course comes with an illustrated syllabus, aka illabus. In the podcast’s first ever episode about graphic novels, Jennings and Cloutier talk comic book history, the power of collaboration, and the importance of long showers.

Mentioned in this Episode:

By John Jennings:

Black Kirby: In Search of the MotherBoxx Connection, John Jennings and Stacey Robinson (2015)

The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, Edited by Frances Gateward and John Jennings (2016)

Kindred, Octavia Butler, Adapted byDamian Duffy and John Jennings (2018)

Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler, Adapted byDamian Duffy and John Jennings (2021)

After the Rain, Nnedi Okorafor, Adapted by John Jennings and David Brame (2021)

Box of Bones: Book One, Ayize Jama Everett and John Jennings (2021)

Silver Surfer: Ghost Light, John Jennings and Valentine De Landro (2023)

Also mentioned:

Megascope, Curated by John Jennings

Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Scott McCloud (1993)

Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, Roger Sabin (1996)

Outside the Box: Interviews with Contemporary Cartoonists, Hillary L. Chute (2014)

Maus, Art Spiegelman (1980-1991; complete version 1996)

Unveiling Visions: The Alchemy of the Black Imagination, The Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture (2015-2016)

Barry Lyndon, Dir. Stanley Kubrick (1975)

The Silver Surfer: And Who Shall Mourn for Him? Stan Lee, Howard Purcell, et al. (1969)

Kitty Pryde and Wolverine, Chris Claremont and Al Milgrom (1984-1985)

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay (2011)

“Red Dirt Witch,” in How Long ‘til Black Future Month? N.K. Jemisen (2018)

To learn more about the comic artists Jennings discusses, including Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Winsor McCay, Frank Miller, and Charles Schulz, see Jeremy Dauber’s American Comics: A History (2021) and Thierry Smolderen’s The Origins of Comics (2014).

Listen and Read:

Audio: It’s on the Illabus

Transcript: 5.3 It’s on the Illabus

10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT) – Novel Dialogue

How to write about place is a question that cuts across the career of the South African Ivan Vladislavić. The questions of place and space are pressing ones in the context of South Africa, where the transition to democracy in 1994 included a redrawing of the national map, and the last three decades have seen the large-scale transformation of urban centers such as Johannesburg. What defines Johannesburg a literary city? asks the critic Jeanne-Marie Jackson. From this unfurls a series of reflections about the writer’s relationship to place and the various ways in which narrative form can be bent to capture the experience of place—and in particular the experience of a place as it changes across time. The resulting work may feel fragmentary, Ivan allows, but that is a function of the nature of place rather than an imposition on the part of the writer. Finally, the conversation turns toward Ivan’s choice to study Afrikaans literature in the 1970s. As a tradition often at odds with Afrikaner politics and urgently concerned with the world Ivan himself inhabited, reading the work of Afrikaans writers such as Ingrid Winterbach, Entienne Leroux, André Brink, and Breyten Breytenbach offered a vital counterpoint to Ivan’s training in the English canon. Ivan closes by fondly remembering the teacher who introduced him to the writer’s notebook, a habit that continues to be crucial to his practice today. Mentioned in this episode: The Folly Double Negative The Near North Zoë Wicomb, You Can’t Get Lost in Cape Town Georges Pérec Gauteng John Miles, Ampie Coetzee, Ernst Lindenberg, and Taurus Publishers Marlene van Niekerk Nadine Gordimer The Goon Show Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

1. 10.4 Place Presents Itself To You in Fragments: Ivan Vladislavić and Jeanne-Marie Jackson (MAT) 42:40
2. 10.3 Just Slightly Outside the Circle: Peter Orner and Sarah Wasserman (EH) 40:40
3. 10.2 Beautiful Sentences Matter. Billy-Ray Belcourt and Matt Hooley (SW) 43:57
4. 10.1 "Extreme Circumstances, Extreme Reactions:” Aaron Gwyn and Sean McCann (JP) 46:37
5. We Better Laugh About It: A Discussion with Álvaro Enrigue and Maia Gil’Adí 47:03