Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation - Hardcover

Butler, Octavia E.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 141970947X ISBN 13: 9781419709470

Publisher: Abrams ComicArts, 2017

Synopsis

Instant #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, and a cornerstone of the Afrofuturism movement, there are over 500,000 copies of Kindred in print. The intersectionality of race, history, and the treatment of women addressed within the original work 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 this title

About the Author:

Octavia Estelle Butler (1947–2006), often referred to as the “grand dame of science fiction,” was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena City College, and also attended California State University in Los Angeles and the University of California, Los Angeles. Butler was the first science-fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship (“genius” grant). She won the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award and the Nebula and Hugo Awards, among others.
 
John Jennings co-edited the Eisner Award–winning anthology The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. He is professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside and was awarded the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research.
 
Damian Duffy, cartoonist, writer, and comics letterer, is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and a founder of Eye Trauma Studios (eyetrauma.net). His first published graphic novel, The Hole: Consumer Culture, created with artist John Jennings, was released by Front 40 Press in 2008. Along with Jennings, Duffy has curated several comics art shows, including Other Heroes: African American Comic Book Creators, Characters and Archetypes and Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics, and published the art book Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture. He has also published scholarly essays in comics form on curation, new media, diversity, and critical pedagogy.

Review:

"A glorious tribute to Octavia Butler’s masterpiece. Extraordinary." (Junot Díaz Pulitzer Prize–winning author)

"Kindred is a perfect candidate for the graphic-novel medium—Damian Duffy’s taut adaptation and John Jennings’s tense, electric renderings vibrate throughout, pacing and containing, then pushing every ounce of discomfort to the forefront. Comics and science fiction exploit their greatest shared strength by illuminating the mundane that surrounds us, allowing any reader to critique and process our world with new vision." (Nate Powell Eisner–Award winning and New York Times bestselling graphic novelist of March, The Year)

"Wonderful. Captures the essence of Octavia Butler’s vision even as it demonstrates the superlative skills of Duffy and Jennings." (Nalo Hopkinson author of Skin Folk, The New Moon’s Arms, and Sisters Mine)

The timeliness of this release is important to note, as it revitalizes unresolved discussions around what it means to be a woman of color in America. Plus, the sense of frantic movement created by the artists’ colorful, layered outlines is a very cool touch. (IGN)

"Together, Duffy and Jennings manage to condense Kindred into 240 pages that are respectful of Butler’s original work while also feeling like a distinctly new story at the same time. In exchange for some of Butler’s scene descriptions, the book offers up a richly rendered, raw take on Dana’s experience, heavy with thick lines and blurred movement conveying her existential disorientation." (Gizmodo)

"Butler’s original novel is a powerful commentary on how the past informs the present and how we engage with both. But this adaptation makes an even more vivid statement about black Americans’ relationship with history. The kinetic lines feel urgent, messy, and visceral. The colors for scenes set in the present are muted while the colors of the past are vibrant, almost like a bright wake-up call to reality." (Slate)

"This graphic novel adaptation beautifully retells the story..." (Bustle)

"This adaptation of the classic science fiction/neo-slave narrative novel by Octavia E. Butler is required reading." (Vice's The Creators Project)

 "The heavily shaded, thick-lined, and rough edged art lends a grimness appropriate to a life of jagged brutality and fearful uncertainty. Both a rewarding way to reexperience the tale and an accessible way to discover it. " (Booklist)

"It’s gorgeous, powerful, and makes you realize how resonant this sci fi story, about a young black woman living in 1970s California who’s transported to the South in the period before the Civil War, really is." (Book Riot)

About this edition

• Publisher: Abrams ComicArts
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 141970947X
• ISBN 13: 9781419709470
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 256
• Illustrator: Jennings John