As the novel progresses, she comes to understand the logic of the temporal wormhole she’s involuntarily stuck in: when Rufus believes his life is endangered, she is called to him once there, she can return to 1976 only when she believes her own life is threatened. Dana soon realizes Rufus is her distant ancestor. There she meets-and saves-a drowning white boy named Rufus Weylin. It’s 1976, and Dana is living with her white husband in southern California when, on her twenty-sixth birthday, she finds herself yanked without warning to a slave plantation in antebellum Maryland. Kindred is the story of Dana, an African-American writer and obvious proxy for Butler herself. And we have lost Butler-storytelling genius, sci-fi and Afrofuturist master-who died in 2006.
Science fiction and comics have gained more cultural status. We could point to a number of relevant major events that have occurred in the gap between 1979 and now: in addition to the Internet and the 9/11 attacks that ushered in a new age of global terror, the United States has witnessed a dramatic resurgence of racial violence and discrimination concurrent with a relegitimized vision of white supremacy. Scripted and lettered by Duffy and drawn, inked, and colored by Jennings, the adaptation is mostly faithful to the original text, delivering a captivating graphic interpretation that both revivifies Kindred and introduces it to a new audience. Kindred has now been adapted into a graphic novel by collaborative team Damian Duffy and John Jennings, bringing what Butler called her “grim fantasy” to rich visual life. She set the dystopian Clay’s Ark (1984) thirty-eight years into the then-future because, her letters tell us, she felt this was long enough for the world to have changed drastically while still remaining recognizable. The number is significant: it’s a measure of time Butler herself used to predict major change. Butler’s Kindred (1979), her fourth and most widely read novel. It’s been thirty-eight years since the publication of Octavia E. Butler, adapted by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, Abrams ComicArts, 240 pages, $24.95
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