Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation — Octavia E. Butler

By Octavia E. Butler • Adapted by Damian Duffy • Illustrated by John Jennings

The past is not finished with us.

Octavia E. Butler’s groundbreaking novel takes on a powerful visual form in Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, adapted by Damian Duffy and illustrated by John Jennings.

Dana, a young Black woman living in 1970s California, is suddenly and inexplicably pulled through time to a pre–Civil War Maryland plantation. Again and again, she is drawn back into the life of Rufus, a white ancestor whose survival is bound to her own existence.

Forced to navigate the brutal realities of slavery while understanding the unsettling ties connecting her family across generations, Dana confronts questions of power, survival, identity, history, and what it means to know the past when you cannot remain safely outside of it.

Visceral and immediate, this graphic adaptation brings another dimension to Butler’s extraordinary work while preserving the complexity and urgency that have made Kindred an enduring modern classic.

Details

• Paperback graphic novel
• Based on Kindred by Octavia E. Butler
• Adapted by Damian Duffy
• Illustrated by John Jennings
• #1 New York Times bestseller
• Eisner Award winner for Best Adaptation from Another Medium
• Speculative fiction / historical fiction / literary adaptation
• Published by ABRAMS ComicArts

Why We Love It

Kindred does something extraordinary with time travel: it removes the comfortable distance between history and lived experience.

Dana knows the history she has been pulled into. That knowledge does not protect her from it. The result is a story that asks difficult questions about power, family, complicity, survival, and the ways the past continues to reach into the present.

Duffy and Jennings give that experience a visual immediacy all its own. This isn't a replacement for Butler’s novel; it is another compelling way into a story that refuses to stay safely on the page.

Continue with Octavia E. Butler

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