And we have lost Butler-storytelling genius, sci-fi and Afrofuturist master-who died in 2006. Science fiction and comics have gained more cultural status. We could point to a number of relevant major events that have occurred in the gap between 1979 and now: in addition to the Internet and the 9/11 attacks that ushered in a new age of global terror, the United States has witnessed a dramatic resurgence of racial violence and discrimination concurrent with a relegitimized vision of white supremacy.
Scripted and lettered by Duffy and drawn, inked, and colored by Jennings, the adaptation is mostly faithful to the original text, delivering a captivating graphic interpretation that both revivifies Kindred and introduces it to a new audience. Kindred has now been adapted into a graphic novel by collaborative team Damian Duffy and John Jennings, bringing what Butler called her “grim fantasy” to rich visual life. She set the dystopian Clay’s Ark (1984) thirty-eight years into the then-future because, her letters tell us, she felt this was long enough for the world to have changed drastically while still remaining recognizable. The number is significant: it’s a measure of time Butler herself used to predict major change. Butler’s Kindred (1979), her fourth and most widely read novel. It’s been thirty-eight years since the publication of Octavia E. Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Abrams ComicArts, 240 pages, $24.95
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