Audio recording is automated for accessibility. Humans wrote and edited the story. Past, present, and future come together at the Mississippi Arts + Entertainment Experience (The MAX), an arts and cultural center in downtown Meridian that honors Mississippi’s creative icons, showcases working arti sts, and nurtures the next generation. A gateway to arts and culture across the state, The MAX features a museum celebrating Mississippi’s creative legacy, a two-story hall of fame showcasing the state’s groundbreaking artists, and dynamic studio and performance spaces where people of all ages explore their creative passions. Now on view at The MAX, John Jennings: Build Your World, is an immersive new experience from one of the most innovative storytellers working at the intersection of comics, speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism. Jennings fell in love with the imagined worlds in the Marvel comic books his mother gave him as a young boy in Flora, Mississippi. Filled with superheroes who helped people and fought against oppression and evil, those comics inspired Jennings to build his own worlds and “create comics that make people feel the way I felt as a kid… see[ing] what I saw when I opened a Marvel comic book.” Now a New York Times bestselling, award-winning graphic novelist and a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside, Jennings has returned home for an exhibition that explores his extraordinary visual storytelling and world-building through four creative projects. In Silver Surfer: Ghost Light (Marvel Comics), Jennings reinvents a forgotten Black character from the pages of the Marvel comic books he grew up reading, transforming Al B. Harper from a plot device to a cosmic guardian. The complex process of working with a behemoth like Marvel and its team of creatives is given a comprehensive overview, alongside art of the new Marvel hero Jennings created. Two dozen original drawings from Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation (Abrams ComicArts) show how Jennings builds on Octavia Butler’s seminal work of Black science fiction to create new worlds, using different sketch styles and color schemes to differentiate California in the 1970s from antebellum Maryland in the early 1800s. Blue Hand Mojo: Hard Times Road (Rosarium Publishing), a solo project conceived, written, drawn, and colored by Jennings, blends history with folklore and magic in a gritty graphic novel set in 1930s Chicago. Original watercolor artworks show how Jennings richly layers new worlds using Mississippi culture. Another solo project, Kenny Dreadful and the Hainted Hoodie,presents an original Southern Gothic tale that blends horror, folklore, and coming-of-age themes through the lens of a magical hoodie haunted by ancestral spirits. Jennings has complete control over every aspect of Kenny’s story, with early concept art alongside annotated sketches, showing influences from Mississippi folklore, African spirituality, and horror traditions. Imagining futures is the central theme of Build Your World. Each project highlights Jennings’s unique ability to blend speculative fiction with Southern Gothic sensibilities. Soundscapes and interactive technology paired with sketches, storyboards, and finished art, allow visitors to explore how he has built entire worlds, bringing Black characters to the fore and infusing each alternative reality with the culture that shaped him. For Jennings, “You can’t separate my work from Mississippi. It’s in every ghost and every future I imagine.” Jennings returned home last fall as part of a site visit to plan the exhibition, and again in June for the opening of Build Your World. During that initial trip, Jennings traveled to the Delta, with stops at Graball Landing near Glendora, believed to be where Emmett Till’s body was brought from the Little Tallahatchie River; Dockery Plantation, home to blues legends like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, “Pops” Staples, and David “Honeyboy” Edwards; and the famed crossroads from the Robert Johnson blues mythology in Blue Hand Mojo. These places hold particular significance for Jennings, who is working on a graphic novel about Till and considers the blues a major influence on his work—a connection he traces back to spending time at a juke joint “too young,” he once admitted. On view through March 27, 2027, Jennings has several return trips planned during the exhibition’s run, including an artist residency this fall where he will travel the state to meet with students and discuss his work, followed by a visit to the Mississippi Book Festival in Jackson. Related programming, including workshops on creating handmade zines, making your own monsters, and receiving hands-on guidance from Jackson Comics artists, will be offered at The MAX through next spring. ...read more read less