Parable of the Talents: A Graphic Novel Adaptation — Octavia E. Butler

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

The future Lauren Olamina is building will not go unchallenged.

Octavia E. Butler’s Earthseed story continues in Parable of the Talents: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, adapted by Damian Duffy and illustrated by John Jennings.

Lauren has survived the collapse of her childhood community and begun the difficult work of building something new around Earthseed, the belief system she has carried and shaped through years of upheaval. But the community she has created—and the people within it—face new threats as religious extremism and political violence take hold around them.

Told through a deeply personal story of family, belief, resistance, and survival, Parable of the Talents asks what happens when the future you are trying to build collides with people determined to impose a very different one.

Duffy and Jennings bring Butler’s uncompromising sequel into graphic form with powerful visual storytelling, completing their adaptation of the Earthseed novels with the same emotional immediacy and care they brought to Parable of the Sower.

Details

• Hardcover graphic novel
• Based on Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler
• Adapted by Damian Duffy
• Illustrated by John Jennings
• Part of the Earthseed series
• Dystopian / speculative fiction / literary adaptation
• Published by ABRAMS ComicArts

Why We Love It

Parable of the Sower asks what we might build when the familiar world falls apart. Parable of the Talents asks an equally difficult question: what are we willing to do to protect it?

Butler doesn't offer easy answers. She lets hope, belief, ambition, family, power, and resistance sit uneasily beside one another—and trusts the reader to wrestle with what remains.

Together, the two Earthseed books form a story that is both fiercely challenging and stubbornly interested in humanity’s capacity to imagine something beyond the world immediately in front of us.

Continue with Octavia E. Butler

• Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation
• Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation