#duppy

Dango Date 🍡

Gift Art! Kezia

Milk White Steed by Michael D. Kennedy

Milk White Steed is an amazing work that we heartily recommend to one and all.

Kennedy’s strategies in representing the quality and character of Black British lives and times often employ and/or rely upon the figure of the duppy, a concept involving a spirit or ghost that originated in central Africa and later evolved to figure prominently in West Indian folklore, where it can be used to connect generations and also, in some respects, be seen as a device through which the past can be made manifest in the present. These employments can veer unexpectedly, yet nonetheless aptly, into the surreal – both visually in the artwork and also narratively, as automatic writing, free association and dream states, as well via incursions from the realms of science fiction and the supernatural into the quotidian.

Kennedy’s comics have broken new ground and his adaptation of the duppy to the world of comics is quite successful, revealing it to be ideally suited to the form.   Milk White Steed is a signal work that has the potential to open a new chapter in the history of comics.