Fantagraphics Blog Melissa Brinks

Mark Doox’s new art book, The N-Word of God, is a wry examination of White power, Black accommodation, “human” racial identity, and a broken American spirituality all seen through the lens of a gospel-like myth and a subversive sacred Christian iconography. Doox, trained as a monk in a Russian-affiliated Orthodox monastery, infuses his art with equal parts liturgy and his life experience as an African American man in the United States. His illustrations, beautiful in their intricacy, strike the viewer as religious at first glance and deeply subversive on examination. That isn’t just because they often place Black faces and…