Now a FX/Hulu Original Series from Branden Jacobs-Jenkins and Darren Aronofsky and starring Mallori Johnson and Micah Stock #1 New York Times Bestseller Winner of the 2018 Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium
Octavia E. Butler’s bestselling literary science-fiction masterpiece, Kindred, now in graphic novel format.
More than 35 years after its release, Kindred continues to draw in new readers with its deep exploration of the violence and loss of humanity caused by slavery in the United States, and its complex and lasting impact on the present day. Adapted by celebrated academics and comics artists Damian Duffy and John Jennings, this graphic novel powerfully renders Butler’s mysterious and moving story, which spans racial and gender divides in the antebellum South through the 20th century.
Butler’s most celebrated, critically acclaimed work tells the story of Dana, a young black woman who is suddenly and inexplicably transported from her home in 1970s California to the pre–Civil War South. As she time-travels between worlds, one in which she is a free woman and one where she is part of her own complicated familial history on a southern plantation, she becomes frighteningly entangled in the lives of Rufus, a conflicted white slaveholder and one of Dana’s own ancestors, and the many people who are enslaved by him.
Held up as an essential work in feminist, science-fiction, and fantasy genres, as well as a cornerstone of the Afrofuturism movement, the intersectionality of race, history, and the treatment of women addressed in the book still remain critical topics in contemporary dialogue, both in the classroom and in the public sphere.
Frightening, compelling, and richly imagined, Kindred offers an unflinching look at our complicated social history, transformed by the graphic novel format into a visually stunning work for a new generation of readers.
About the Author
Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was a renowned African-American author who was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Since her death, sales of her books have increased enormously as the issues she addressed in her Afro-Futuristic, feminist novels and short fiction have only become more relevant.
John Jennings, illustrator of Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside.
Damian Duffy, author of Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, is a cartoonist, scholar, writer, and teacher. He holds a MS and PhD in library and information sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where he is on faculty.
Nnedi Okorafor, PhD, is a Nigerian-American author of African-rooted science fiction and fantasy. Her works include Who Fears Death, the Binti trilogy and the Akata series. John Jennings is the curator of the Megascope list and illustrator of the graphic novel adaptations of Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred and Parable of the Sower. He is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside. David Brame is a talented comics artist who has worked on titles such as Box of Bones and Necromancer Bill. He lives in Mexico.
Praise For…
"Adapting any prose novel to the graphic format is an audacious undertaking at the best of times, but translating Octavia E. Butler’s fearsomely powerful work in particular must surely have been a herculean task. Yet Damian Duffy and John Jennings have managed it…A worthy and powerful supplement to a classic.” — The New York Times
“Awash in burnished ambers and potent violets, this illustrated adaptation of Butler’s 1979 time-traveling classic about a black woman from ’70s California suddenly transplanted to the 19th-century South amplifies the original’s visceral grace.” — O, The Oprah Magazine
