Local authors Damian Duffy and John Jennings have adaptated Kindred, Octavia Butler’s classic time-traveling slave narrative, into a gorgeous graphic novel which was released two weeks ago. It has hit the New York Times bestselling graphic books list at #1.
The work is a collaboration with artist John Jennings, a former C-U resident who is now teaching at Harvard. They both were part of Eye Trauma Studios, and have worked together so much they were once known as J2D2. They co-created The Hole: Consumer Culture, and were both part of a Krannert Art Museum exhibition called Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics.
A full review is in the works from the SP Arts team, but I have seen preview pages from a pre-publication copy and I can say that the story and art are a beautiful, chilling, and evocative as the original. Possibly even moreso because the images are in front of you, and turning the page does not erase them from your mind.
I highly recommend finding a copy at either of our local libraries, comic shops, bookstores, or online. If you’d like to check out a few pages first, there’s a good slideshow at the publisher’s website.