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Baoanh Nguyen

I Am Alfonso Jones and the Power of Visual Storytelling

Updated: Feb 4


I Am Alfonso Jones masterfully weaves together visual motifs, leans into Afrofuturism, and uses a line work and series of flashbacks that convey the gritty realism of long histories of oppression of Black Americans.

Hailed as the first Blatinx Lives Matter graphic novel, Tony Medina, John Jennings, and Stacey Robinson’s I Am Alfonso Jones (2017) powerfully depicts the pervasive police brutality and violence inflicted on young Black and Brown Americans. The creative team do so by creating color conscious drawing and writing that puts front and center the stories, culture, and struggles of Black and Brown youth in the US.



Contrary to what some might argue, we are a long way from achieving a post-racial society. Indeed, the color conscious storytelling artistry of I Am Alfonso Jones with its use of braiding together of visual motifs, emotionally-charged graphic panels, and eye-catching graphiation styles powerfully reminds us of this fact.


Artists Jennings and Robinson use visual motifs throughout the course of the story to shape the complexities of the experiences of Black & Brown youth in the U.S. In Comics Studies, the concept “translinearity” is used to identify this use of the repetition of visual motifs to link, in Martha Kulman’s words, “two or more non-contiguous units.” One such motif is the visual of a bullet. This appears on the first page of the book, rapidly ricocheting in the air.



The bullet appears in the foreground as it flies through a vacuum of space to find its next innocent victim. Midway through the story, Jennings and Robinson repeat the image of the bullet. This time as an abstract, rocket-sized bullet chasing the protagonist Alfonso down. This time they draw a circle around Alfonso, an indication that the bullet has randomly found its next victim and without rational reason, pursued him to his death. The second appearance of the bullet’s adds to the first to begin to drive home how male youth of color find themselves not only the targets of oppression, but violently so. The translinear visual motif of the bullet adds depth to the story by emphasizing this horrific, violent trauma experienced by young Black and Brown men.

The translinear visual motif of the bullet adds depth to the story by emphasizing this horrific, violent trauma experienced by young Black and Brown men.

Similarly, the train serves as another visual motif. Here, the artists build translinear meaning by incorporating Afrofuturistic elements that graphically depict the long history of unjust police violence toward Black Americans. More specifically, by presenting the fantastical train of ghostly ancestors as an avenue to understanding the Black experience, Jennings and Robinson create translinear meaning that falls within the storytelling mode of Afrofuturist “racecraft.” Racecraft, according to John Jennings, “fuses some of the useful ideas of how [H.P.] Lovecraft deployed the monster in perceiving race relations with a mystical notion of how racism functions.” We find that through the perpetual motion of the train and the idea of the deceased victims restlessly searching for justice, we have a visual way of grasping the deeply embedded racism threaded in American institutions that young Black Americans face every day.


While Jennings and Robinson intersperse visual elements of Afrofuturism in the story, the dominant is that of gritty realism to powerfully convey experiences of Black Americans. Their line work and use of visual panels without text powerfully immerse readers in this harsh reality.


Jennings and Robinson visually depict the brutality of the police barging into the character, Cynthia’s house.



The focus on the visuals here work to convey the senseless, callous brutality of the police as they aggressively burst through the door and cause a pregnant character, Cynthia, to fall. The visuals invite readers to fully immerse themselves in the pain and suffering experienced by Cynthia. We experience her anguish and despair as she worries about the health of her baby while in agonizing pain. Without words, readers can take in these panels all at once and devote our entire attention to the emotionally charged scenes.


Jennings and Robinson continue to build a visual grammar—“grammatext” in Comics Studies parlance—to powerfully convey equally tense and emotionally charged scenes, including especially the moments when the story flashes back in time to other instances of the systemic brutalizing of Black Americans.


On other instances, Jennings and Robinson use line work, drawn-words that convey sound like CLANG, CLANG, CLANG as well as bold and bordered text to put an emphasis on the actions seen in the panels, making heard, if you will, the forcible, irrationally violent actions of the police. We can hear the clanging of the metal, the police banging down doors, and shot fired and ricocheting through the air.


I Am Alfonso Jones masterfully weaves together visual motifs, leans into Afrofuturism, and uses a line work and series of flashbacks that convey the gritty realism of long histories of oppression of Black Americans. In so doing, they create a powerful race-conscious narrative that at once calls out racialized police violence and celebrates the power of storytelling to open new paths for the future.


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