Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Kindred | 2017 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
| 2 | Parable of the Sower | 2020 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
| 3 | Parable of the Talents | 2025 | Octavia E. Butler | Buy |
Three of Octavia E. Butler’s novels have been adapted into graphic novels by writer Damian Duffy and illustrator John Jennings, published by Abrams ComicArts. The adaptations began with Kindred in 2017, which translates Butler’s time-travel novel about slavery into a visual form that uses the page layout itself to reflect Dana’s disorienting back-and-forth movement through time. Dark, detailed, and unsparing, the art suits the material.
Parable of the Sower followed in 2020, adapting Butler’s dystopian novel about Lauren Olamina’s journey north through a collapsing America. The journal-format narration of the original — Lauren records everything as a survival strategy — becomes caption boxes in the graphic novel, giving the adaptation a documentary quality. Parable of the Talents completed the set in 2025.
All three adaptations have been used in educational settings alongside the original novels, and the Kindred graphic novel in particular has reached readers who might not have picked up the prose version. Duffy and Jennings bring their own background in Afrofuturism scholarship to the work, and the adaptations treat Butler’s themes — power, embodiment, survival, what humans do to each other — with the seriousness the originals require.