Whatever Happened to Dyno-Woman marks the fifth collaboration between UCR ARTS and Black Kirby. Previous projects include Black Kirby X: Ten Years of Remix and Revolution, Ebon: Fear of a Black Planet, Reflection Eternal: The Candyman Illustrated Syllabus, and Uncaged: Hero for Higher.

BLACK KIRBY is a shared pseudonym that is Stacey Robinson (Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Illustration, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign) and John Jennings (Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, UC Riverside). Black Kirby functions as a rhetorical tool by sampling and remixing comic legend Jack Kirby’s bold forms and energetic ideas combined with themes centered around Afrofuturism, social justice, representation, magical realism, and using the culture of Hip Hop as a methodology for creating visual communication. It also utilizes the notion of an alter-ego as a symbolic allegory for DuBoisian “double- consciousness” theory. In a sense, Black Kirby uses the comics medium as a conceptual crossroads to examine identity as a socialized concept through bricolage, pastiche, oppositional juxtapositions, and deconstruction. It is the artists’ hope to destabilize various ideas of “blackness” to promote a broader spectrum of black subjectivity.