Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

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.