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.
