Promotional Information

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.

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 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, and was awarded the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He also co-edited the Eisner Award–winning anthology The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art.

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.

Reviews

"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*