Sometimes with startling horror, the past pounces on you. It can be a sober, often terrifying, but ultimately liberating experience of reckoning.
John Jennings is a creator whose growing contribution to comics as socially significant literary arts can hardly be measured. With Abrams ComicArts, Jennings has launched an imprint, MEGASCOPE, a line presenting speculative (sci fi, fantasy, horror, magical realist) graphic fiction created by and about people of color. (Megascope is named for a W.E.B. DuBois fictional machine that “can peer through time and space into other realities.” A perfect name.)
“After the Rain” is the first salvo of this ambitious new line, a graphic novel adaptation of the short story “On the Road” by superstar sci-fi and fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor, no stranger to comics but not as frequent a horror writer, though this is clearly a horror-infused and hard-hitting story.
Brace for impact.
Written by Nnedi Okorafor
Adapted by John Jennings
Illustrated by David Brame
Lettering by Damian DuffyDuring a furious storm a young woman’s destiny is revealed . . . and her life is changed forever
The drama takes place in a small Nigerian town during a violent and unexpected storm. A Nigerian-American woman named Chioma answers a knock at her door and is horrified to see a boy with a severe head wound standing at her doorstep. He reaches for her, and his touch burns like fire. Something is very wrong. Haunted and hunted, Chioma must embrace her heritage in order to survive. John Jennings and David Brame’s graphic novel collaboration uses bold art and colors to powerfully tell this tale of identity and destiny.
Okorafor’s short story, originally published in 2009, was later collected in 2013 in an anthology entitled Kabu Kabu. If you’re not familiar with Okorafor, she is one of the leading figures in the growing movement of speculative writers of African descent, much in the legacy of Octavia Butler and including such masters as Nalo Hopkinson and NK Jemisin.
In this graphic adaptation by Jennings and Brame, details are few but we dive into depths quick. The main character, Chioma, is a police detective from Chicago’s South Side who has returned to her familial origins in Nigeria, though those loose facts are the few we get before we are thrown headlong into encounters on a different plane entirely. On a torrentially rainy and muddy evening, Chioma answers persistent knocking on the door from a young boy, speaking Igbo, laughing, his head hacked open and his brains exposed.
Whatever is going on with this impossibly alive boy, he pokes Chioma’s hand, visually “infecting” her with something that knocks her out before he disappears back into the night. Chioma is chided by her grandmother and aunt, with whom she’s staying, for opening that door, but suddenly, with only the tiniest bits of explanation, Chioma is plunged back again and again into a growing raft of supernatural entanglements. Literally, visually, the world around her becomes a Bernie Wrightson-esque spirit-scape of senses-overwhelming colorful lizards, vicious ivy, deathly stenches, and mysterious interactions with figures half-real and half-mystical.
From there, the story is best experienced rather than described, since its force is in its lush visuals and destabilizing twists. Okorafor’s original language gets heavily employed in swathes of text boxes and Damian Duffy’s kinetic lettering. That text from Okorafor’s story conveys the fearsome uncertainty in being carried into this frightening sequence of otherworldly trials.
But it’s really the lavish and unbridled imagery by artist David Brame, along with uncredited but extraordinary coloring by Jennings, that elevates a decent Okorafor story into a transporting comic sojourn. The horror tropes and symbolic dismemberments aren’t new, but they are effective, especially contextualized by circumstances of diaspora and violence, as well as different supernatural actors and symbolisms. The action whips you off your feet, so that the starting premise that Chioma is a Nigerian-American cop who lives proximate to US urban brutality can get almost completely forgotten during these spiritual descents into darkness, until the narrative brings it all back full circle and you remember again that there is a life, in fact, before and after the storm.
Continued belowI admit that these trips of crawly creatures, ghostly encroachments, and fractured realities were confusing to me at first. And they persisted through the main body of the book with rare mentions of their meaning, true to the mixed genres of horror and fantasy that drop us into fantastical worlds with unsettling rules and logics and nary a needless exposition. It’s an immersive story, well-told but initially cryptic. I count that all as a virtue of resisting the temptation to over-explain itself, letting the force of its themes and larger significance hit you once you’ve awoken (or awoken again!) from the feverish dreams.
The book’s epigraph, also in the original “On the Road” story, comes from Nigerian Nobel-winning playwright Wole Soyinka, something of a literary forbear to Nnedi Okarafor: “A tiger does not proclaim its tigritude. It pounces.”
“After the Rain” does indeed hold little back, pouncing fast and proving its mettle without apologia. Aesthetically, it swells with thickness and threat, modulated with rhythms of cleanness and clarity that only leave a breath before submerging again into rich color and dense foliage. In the midst, it feels tangled, but in the end, lively, fleshy, like a passage through a bowels or a womb.
Narratively, the mysteries swallow you up. But in the end, gasping and dripping, I was left surprised, holding worn and precious remnants of culture, resilience, family, and faith. I couldn’t tell you what all of it was about, truth be told. But rarely have I been through a stormier story that I was more eager to step back into.
