Imagine suddenly falling through a tear in the fabric of space-time—especially if you land in a place and time inhospitable to your kind. That’s the situation of a young African American writer, Dana, abruptly cast from California 1976 to the antebellum South and the freedom of a bohemian life into the bonds of slavery. It happens, and then it happens again. That’s the plot of Kindred, the signal novel by science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler, visualized as a graphic novel by cartoonist-scholars Damian Duffy and John Jennings. Their adaptation retains the anxiety and brutality of the original text, transformed into a series of brightly colored captioned frames. Kindred remains Butler’s best-known story and the new rendition should expose her to new audiences.
