Description

Milk White Steed by Michael D. Kennedy

Trade Paperback – Drawn & Quarterly – February 2025 – 284 pages

A series of individuals leave the West Indies and attempt to find their footing in the damp dinge of England’s counties. A child on his daily trike ride is stalked by a sinister, shape-shifting ligahoo. A blues singer’s wife hallucinates untoward revelations in the grips of high yellow fever when she inhales spores from psychedelic mushrooms growing unchecked in their apartment. A man dwells on his absent father, paints the man into a duppy myth, and bears the consequences of this fantastical undertaking.

Inspired by the folk tales and oral traditions of his Caribbean roots, Milk White Steed is a dreamlike venture into the messy truths of everyday West Indian lives: the abiding pursuit of the familiar and the vicious appraisal of their own otherness, all at once. Phantom desires, unchecked reveries, and surreal visions of the future flood the page in full-color. Kennedy’s decisive woodcut-inspired brush-strokes draw a striking portrait of the Black diaspora as it sees itself, always searching and yet forever seeing.