In John Jennings's graphic novella Protocol and Response, a figure in a black spacesuit moves through time gathering objects for a room that has not settled in one century. Dr. Zora Nova is a traveler and a collector, but the artifacts she encounters are more than clues in a science-fiction puzzle. A comb, a vessel and a power figure carry histories that press back on the one who handles them. As her memory falters under the strain of time travel, the objects help her recover a relation to the people and places that official history has made hard to reach.
Jennings made the novella for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Before Yesterday We Could Fly publication. The exhibition imagined a home for descendants of Seneca Village, the Black New York community destroyed for the creation of Central Park. The comic gives that architectural speculation a moving character. Its room is a vessel that can land, collect and depart again. The design is fitting for an artist who has repeatedly treated comics as a technology for rearranging what a culture remembers.
In a substantial interview with the Met, Jennings explained that comics were present in Afrofuturist culture long before the recent superhero boom made the connection fashionable. He pointed to the visual worlds of Parliament-Funkadelic and to independent Black comics makers. For him, the medium's ability to place different times, images and speech on one page is particularly suited to work that reclaims a history of the future. Protocol and Response takes that argument into the museum itself. It asks what an object can do when it is drawn, narrated and returned to a sequence of human decisions.
A traveler named from other stories
Dr. Zora Nova's name is a compact history of Jennings's references. He told the Met that Zora honors Zora Neale Hurston, while Nova recalls Samuel R. Delany's novel of that title. Her role as a time-traveling gatherer of data also nods to John Akomfrah's The Last Angel of History. These connections do not turn the character into a mere collection of citations. They give her a lineage before she begins to move. Jennings makes a Black woman the agent who retrieves what the room needs to imagine its inhabitants' continuation.
Her spacesuit is black, a deliberate contrast with the white suit often treated as the default image of space travel. Jennings says he initially made its shape somewhat androgynous, then revealed the traveler as a woman early because Black women's leadership is central to the Afrofuturist work he wanted to honor. The design uses costume to control information across panels. Before a reader knows who is inside, the suit challenges a visual convention. When the face is revealed, the story can move from a generalized traveler to a person with a body, a history and a particular responsibility.
The suit has another life underneath its dark exterior. Jennings describes festive colors that recall scales and aquatic strands of Afrofuturism, including Detroit techno duo Drexciya. Red, black and green on the arm make an Afrocentric position visible. These elements are placed on one character without needing to resolve into a single origin story. A graphic image can hold references in simultaneous layers. The reader may register color, silhouette and symbol before learning each of their histories.
Jennings's method was collaborative even in the making of a single figure. For reference, he asked his friend Nicole Williams to model and Tarji Stewart to photograph poses. He then sampled those images in his digital process. Such a sequence matters because speculative drawing is sometimes imagined as a solitary act of invention. A pose has weight, balance and gesture; another person can bring those qualities into the artist's imagined future. Williams and Stewart's contributions do not disappear when the photograph becomes a panel.
The figure's movement through time is not frictionless. Jennings says the strain damages her memory and consciousness. History is not simply waiting in storage for a qualified visitor to take it home. The traveler is changed by the attempt to recover it. The novella's title, Protocol and Response, suggests a technical exchange, but the responses that matter are not only the clean replies of a machine. They are encounters with objects whose histories resist being reduced to data.
Objects that answer back
The Met's interview gives Jennings room to discuss several specific artifacts. He chose to highlight a nineteenth-century vulcanized-rubber comb because of the histories attached to Black women's hair. In a museum, the object can be catalogued by manufacturer, date and material. In the comic, its presence also asks whose grooming and self-presentation are considered worthy of historical attention. Zora's own hair is covered by the suit, making the comb's appearance a way of bringing bodily knowledge into a scene that might otherwise be dominated by futuristic equipment.
He also drew vessels for their practical and symbolic power. A vessel carries something through space; it can hold memory and hope as well as water or food. The period room itself becomes one. This repeated form links the small artifact to the larger architecture without claiming that their histories are identical. The object is useful and meaningful at once, just as a home is both a shelter and an accumulation of relations.
An nkisi power figure has a particularly important role in Zora's recovery. Jennings describes it as the object that helps her break through a condition of dislocation. He connects the figure to histories of healing and remembrance. The page can stage this encounter as an event, while the museum record supplies a different kind of information about origin, material and collection. Neither mode is complete by itself. The comic gives the figure narrative force; the catalog can preserve particulars that a panel cannot explain without stopping its movement.
Jennings told the Met that some objects were chosen because their beauty drew him in, while others carried more direct narrative functions. That admission gives the novella texture. Not every item needs to become a transparent lesson. An archive also contains things that attract attention before their full story is known. Zora's collection is a form of searching, and searching includes uncertainty. The work allows a reader to feel that an artifact can be present and still partly inaccessible.
The comic's room is itself temporary. Jennings imagines it landing at the museum, then taking off again to collect more artifacts from alternative histories. This is a pointed revision of a period room, which usually offers a stable arrangement as if a historical moment could be sealed inside its walls. His vessel remains open to additions. What it knows now does not close the question of what Black families might have made if the Seneca Village community had continued.
Drawing with sampled worlds
Jennings works digitally and speaks candidly about sampling. A former student, Rob Mach, sent him photographs of wall textures from Nigeria. Jennings incorporated those textures into his comic's representation of the room. This is a specific example of his larger method: an image can carry a trace of another place into a new composition. The process depends on attention to where the material came from, even as it changes form.
Sampling is also a useful way to understand the story's references. Zora Neale Hurston and Samuel R. Delany share a character's name; Akomfrah's film echoes in her vocation; the visual language of space travel is remade through Black clothing and aquatic color. The references are not a checklist that must be solved before the story can be felt. They show how a cultural future can be assembled from prior works without pretending that the past has only one owner or one meaning.
The Met publication reproduces the novella after essays and images about Seneca Village and the exhibition. Its position in the book changes the rhythm of the reading. After prose descriptions of historical evidence and curatorial choices, panels make the room and its objects active in a speculative sequence. The shift of form matters. An archival gap becomes a pressure on a character; a museum artifact becomes something she can seek, lose, recover or misunderstand.
Jennings has argued that comics are a medium rather than a genre. That distinction is crucial here. A comic is not automatically a superhero story, and a science-fiction comic is not obliged to prioritize spectacle over thought. Panels can control pace, hold an image while text moves around it and make two different times visible on the same page. Protocol and Response uses those capacities to place personal memory beside museum history. The speculative device is powerful because the medium can make the disjunction legible at a glance.
There is a productive tension in publishing such a work through a major museum. Jennings has described Afrofuturism as emerging from street cultures, Black nerd communities, music and independent comics, rather than from an academic institution alone. The Met gives the novella visibility and a collection of objects to engage. It also becomes part of the story's question: who can gather, display and interpret Black cultural materials? Zora's movement through the museum does not erase that institutional power. It puts a Black maker's imagination into conversation with it.
The long remix called Black Kirby
Jennings's work with Stacey Robinson as Black Kirby shows another side of his practice. The collaborative project remixes the forms and ideas associated with comic creator Jack Kirby through Black history, Afrofuturism, hip-hop and social criticism. A 2015 catalog credits both Jennings and Robinson. Its institutional abstract describes primarily visual works on paper and their interest in the flexibility of digital media. The partnership is central to the work's authorship.
The name Black Kirby is an argument built into a signature. It recognizes the formal power of mainstream American comics while asking what happens when its mythic machinery is rewritten through Black visual culture. The project does not simply place a Black face into an unchanged heroic template. It uses appropriation, remix and the gallery as places to examine how identity is constructed. In that sense, it belongs to the same family of questions as Zora Nova's journey, though the work's tone and form are different.
The University of Illinois record emphasizes hip-hop as a method, not just a subject. Sampling, layering and transformation are ways of making meaning. This helps explain how Black Kirby can use an established comic vocabulary without becoming only homage. A familiar visual gesture can be turned toward a different historical claim. The viewer's recognition of its source is part of the friction the new work creates.
Jennings has also adapted Octavia E. Butler's Kindred for comics with Damian Duffy. That project brings a novel about forced time travel and slavery into a medium where the violence of historical contact must be shown as well as narrated. The adaptation is a separate collaboration and should not be confused with Black Kirby or the Met novella. Across these projects, however, Jennings keeps testing how a drawn sequence can make the relation between past and future bodily immediate.
His range challenges a narrow account of Afrofuturism as a single set of images. One project speaks to a museum's missing period room; another remixes superhero visual language; a third adapts Butler's historical speculative fiction. What joins them is a concern with how Black memory enters media that have not always made space for it. Jennings does not need every panel to show a spaceship. His future-oriented work often begins by asking what has been excluded from the archive or from the assumed reader's field of vision.
A future that can be edited
At the close of a conventional quest, the collected objects might be safely installed and the traveler's problem solved. Jennings's idea of the room as a vessel resists that neatness. New artifacts may still be found; new histories may change the arrangement. The room's imaginative family is not a static emblem of Black life. Its possessions and practices could alter over generations that never had the chance to live there.
That openness is an ethical and formal decision. The destruction of Seneca Village was a definite historical act. The lives that might have followed cannot be recovered with the same certainty. A comic can acknowledge both facts by giving the reader a visibly imagined continuation. It does not need to pretend that a panel is an archival photograph. Its force lies in how carefully it moves among evidence, possibility and desire.
Jennings's title also works beyond its fictional technology. A protocol is a set of rules for exchange; a response shows what happens when another party receives the signal. Museums, comics and readers each have protocols for recognizing an object as meaningful. Zora's journey tests them. The comb and the nkisi are not mute data points waiting to be filed. They make demands on attention, memory and interpretation.
Krull's conversation with filmmaker Julie Dash offers a useful neighboring question. Dash describes a historical film whose characters cannot know the future they face. Jennings gives a visual form to the historical futures that were denied to a community. The works are distinct, but both let Black lives occupy a temporal field wider than the surviving record alone.
When Zora Nova enters the room, she brings more than artifacts. She brings the possibility that a collection can be rearranged by someone whose history the institution once placed at its edges. Her black suit, sampled textures and damaged memory make the work's method visible. To imagine a future is to move with what has been kept, what has been lost and what someone may yet find. Jennings draws that movement panel by panel, leaving the vessel ready to travel again.