Underrepresented voices are beginning to be heard loud and clear. When it came time to adapt Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” and later, “Parable of the Sower” to graphic novels, they were the obvious choices for this formidable undertaking. This was followed in 2010 by the seminal “Black Comix: African American Independent Comics, Art and Culture,” a collection of art and essays celebrating the vibrant, contemporary work of these independent artists. Reacting to the exclusive white, mostly male artists featured in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Hammer Museum’s exhibition “Masters of American Comics,” Jennings and Duffy mounted their own show titled “Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics” held at the Krannert Art Museum. While Butler’s novels were blowing the ceiling off the literary world, the artist and writer team of John Jennings and Damian Duffy were causing a similar eruption within the graphic arts. “I wanted to reach people emotionally in a way that history tends not to,” she once said.īutler’s prose are clear and specific and graphic, an ideal choice for an adaptation to the visual prose of a graphic novel. In “Kindred,” arguably her best-known work, a young African American woman travels back in time to personally experience the horrific life for enslaved people in pre-Civil War Maryland. Unite- Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed by those who see you as prey. Through Lauren, Butler tells us to “Embrace diversity. Wells, and Ray Bradbury by introducing heroines such as “Parable’s” Lauren Olamina, a fifteen-year-old Black girl who dares to undertake a perilous journey to make a new home for herself and her multi-racial, multi-gender followers.

Beginning in the 1970s, her narratives upended the primarily white, male-dominated genre of science fiction occupied by George Orwell, H.G. In 2020, the future Butler described is at our doorsteps and all too real.īlack women play commanding and powerful leading roles in many of Butler’s novels, hence the association with the term Afrofuturism. In 1993 when her tenth novel “Parable of the Sower” first appeared, 2024, the year in which it is set, must have seemed far enough away to hold a dystopian world of unprecedented crime, acute global warming, soaring joblessness, police services limited to the wealthy, and a pervasive fear of going outside. She helped reshape the genre of science fiction by offering grounded, naturalistic stories in which characters like herself could flourish.īutler also had amazing forethought. Through her writing, Butler challenged gender stereotypes in American fiction, white privilege in their narratives, and racism in her profession.

Butler was a visionary African American author, who imagined an alternate future for herself and our shared world.

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