Octavia E. Butler’s “Kindred” Gets A New Lease On Life In The Graphic Novel Adaptation

“I don’t have a name for the thing that happened to me, but I don’t feel safe any more.” In 1999, I became acquainted with the work of Octavia E. Butler and that acquaintance quickly grew into something more. I devoured Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents. Both of those books are eerily familiar to the tension in society today. I’d never been much interested in speculative fiction and didn’t realize that was even a genre that could be combined with the Black experience prior to reading Butler. In college, as I craved more and more from Octavia, I stumbled upon Kindred. Reading Kindred wasn’t easy. It hurt. It hurt in a way that I had only ever experienced with novels that dictated the lives of women of color who had been abused or suffered loses that I had either experienced or witnessed. Nonetheless, I devoured it the way I had done every other Butler novel. I swallowed it page by page, choking on its realness and truth… Going back to reread pages because this world that I’d sunken into couldn’t possibly be this real. Kindred tells the tale of Dana, a Black woman who is married to a white man in the 1970s and upon moving and settling into their new home is suddenly transported into the 1800s where she discovers that her fate is to save her own life-line. We are just shy of 40 years since its first publication and the unimaginable has happened. Kindred has a graphic novel adaptation. Just like its predecessor, it is not for the faint at heart. Damian Duffy and J…