How John Jennings and Damian Duffy Transformed Octavia Butler’s Kindred into the Most Powerful Graphic Novel of the Year

The novel, first published in 1979, has become a modern classic, and now the creative team of John Jennings and Damian Duffy have adapted it into a stunning graphic novel, published by Abrams in January. Jennings is the creator of Pitch Black Rainbow and the newly released graphic novel Blue Hand Mojo; Duffy is the author of Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics. The pair previously collaborated on the graphic novel The Hole, and they are the moving forces behind the Black Comix anthology. They are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new volume, Black Comix Returns.
When did you first encounter Kindred, and what was your first impression of it?
Jennings: I came to Butler later than most. So, I read Kindred after Wild Seed and I found it to be an amazingly striking and utterly terrifying look into the psyche of our country. Her writing was so beautifully bare and powerful that Kindred left a huge impression on me as a black artist who engages in speculative fiction.
Duffy: I first read Kindred when I was a sophomore in college. I majored in creative writing, and one of my professors recommended it to help me with something I’d written for class. The copy I checked out of the library had one of the more abstract cover designs, so I went in not knowing anything about the novel beforehand. It was one of the few novels I’ve read in a single sitting, I was so invested in and terrified for the main character.

Before you started working on this adaptation, how much of the story could you see in your head? Did you already have mental pictures of the characters and the settings?
Jennings: I think that whenever you read something like this, you start to have images that begin to churn around in your head. I did have some related to scenery and a few that were connected to a handful of the main characters. Dana, of course, I had an almost immediate idea of what she may look like.
Duffy: I have trouble remembering a time when I wasn’t thinking of Kindred in pictures. I started by doodling all over the margins of the novel, and I’ve since drawn out all manner of layouts and sketches of scenes while working through various drafts of the scripts.
How much did your individual visions sync with each other?
Jennings: Damian and I have been working together for over 12 years now in various capacities. We usually discuss projects in detail and have a cohesive sensibility when we collaborate. You have to trust and respect each other to have a true partnership. I know the talent that Damian has and I trust his wisdom on how to approach creating the best approach for a project.
Duffy: I was going to say that! But like, with John’s name in the spots where he put my name.

What visual aspects did you have to figure out for yourselves because they weren’t really described in the novel?
Jennings: One of the most daunting was trying to figure out what the “time travel” looked like. Dana doesn’t use a machine or technology so, we had to figure out interesting ways to show that. The effect was very subtle in the book.
She’d get sick to her stomach and then she’d fade into the past. We did a few things with panel design to help aid the transportation. For instance, Damian would break up the panel border show the disruption of space.
Also, color was very important in the translation of space/time.
Did you do any historical research?
Jennings: I did a great deal of visual research on the two eras. I purchased a lot of references regarding film and books. I also physically went to two former Southern plantations for research. Some of the photos I took directly influenced some of the imagery in the book.
Duffy: I mostly researched Octavia Butler. The novel, obviously, but also what she said about the process of writing the novel in interviews, her desire to make the reader really feel history, to empathize with historical events on an emotional level. I also researched 1976 a bit, but none of that made it into the graphic novel.
Are the characters’ appearances based on any real people?
Jennings: When we started we thought the book would have a more mimetic appearance and we sort of “cast” people that we thought would be the characters. However, once we decided to change direction, the character designs were a lot more determined by our conversations and imaginations.
Duffy: A couple people pointed out that Dana’s hairstyle looks like Octavia Butler’s, and I think that might have been something we discussed at one point, but I’m not positive we did that on purpose. It makes sense, since Butler used autobiographical details to describe Dana’s time as a struggling writer. But all I remember is discussing her having shorter hair so that when she’s in the past for months, it’s noticeable that her hair’s growing.

In the adaptation, the coloring is the reverse of what one might expect: The present day of the story, in the year 1976, is almost monochrome, while the events that occur in the past are in color. Why did you choose to do it this way?
Jennings: When the events in the story begin, Dana and Kevin are moving into their new home in Southern California. So, technically they are still in transition into their new home. It’s still a foreign space. In the book Butler describes how “vibrant” and “real” and “powerful” the past was. So, we thought that using color in the fashion would talk about how alienating 1976 can still be to an African American woman in the U.S. and how easy it would be to be in the past and be enslaved and have a sense of “home” that has somehow evaded her. The present begins to feel less settled and inviting and the past, where she spends a great deal more time during this story, becomes a surrogate home. This dimension of the story is very distressing and we thought that we could convey that via color.
Were there aspects of the novel that you had to leave out of the adaptation?
Duffy: Yes, there were a lot of scenes, or parts of scenes, that had to be cut out just for the sake of space. We had fewer pages than the novel to work with, and there are things you can describe in a paragraph of prose that might take multiple pages of comics to show. So, in the script we (our editor Sheila Keenan and I) tried to cut out scenes or parts of scenes that seemed to be reinforcing old character information, rather than revealing new things about who a major character is. I also left out or combined some minor characters.
Conversely, what do you feel the comics medium added—what are its strengths for this type of story?
Duffy: John and I both said from the outset that we wanted to make sure we did things that only comics can do as a medium, or that comics do well as a medium, because otherwise why adapt the story at all? So, for example, the scene where Dana and Kevin first see the plantation, we depicted with a map, which is a kind of visualization that I think works more seamlessly as part of a comics narrative, and actually kind of makes the fictional world more authoritative since it very definitely tells the reader where all these settings are, how they all relate to each other.
But I think John’s art is more impactful, since it’s sort of simultaneously enticing and terrifying in a way that is impossible for prose. John’s images make it even harder to look away from the historically accurate horror show of 19th century America that Butler depicted in her prose.

In the graphic novel it is clear that Dana is pulled back into the past when Rufus needs her, but it’s never clear what sort of mechanism is making that happen. Does Butler clarify that at all in the novel?
Duffy: No, the time travel is never explained, which is why Butler always argued that Kindred is fantasy, not science fiction. A “grim fantasy” were her exact words.
Can you describe your work process on this? How did you work out the script and layouts—individually or together? How much did you go back and forth on the art?
Duffy: With this particular project, I wrote a draft, sent it to Sheila, she cut things out and made notes, I incorporated her notes, rewrote parts, etc. We went back and forth a few times before the script was done, while John was working on character designs, figuring out the illustration style and so forth. Then John got the script, and did thumbnail sketches, pencils, inks, and then color (with the help of four color flatters). I lettered various stages of thumbnails, pencils, and/or inks for the black and white advanced reader copies Abrams printed out, and then went back and re-lettered as needed after the color art was completed.
Damian, how closely did you follow Butler’s words in terms of dialogue and description?
Duffy: The vast majority of words on the page are Butler’s, albeit sometimes shortened, in a slightly different order, or broken up between multiple panels for the purposes of pacing.
Did you write a script or screenplay treatment?
Duffy: It was a full script. I tend to overwrite and/or oversketch my scripts, and then John chooses which bits of script he wants to keep, but since this time we had an editor, the script was more screenplay-succinct than Alan Moore-overflowing.

John, how did you adapt your style for this story?
Jennings: Once we decided to do a more traditional illustration direction, we wanted to try and convey the notion of the book being a “grim fantasy.” So, the images became more grotesque to convey this. We wanted the images to have a sort of “dark whimsy” to them, yet vibrate with a jarring and uncertain quality. They are meant to be inviting and colorful yet crude, distorted, and a bit off-putting. We look at Kindred as a horror story more than anything and often that genre contains the darkly humorous with the sheer terror of an event.
What medium did you use for your art?
Jennings: I used traditional media for the initial images. So, I used three types of Sharpie brand markers to get the roughness right for the images. I then used my phone to take pictures of the inks and emailed them to myself. I haven’t used a scanner in years. I then cleaned up the inks in Photoshop with my digital WACOM tablet. I then sent the black and whites to Damian for lettering. He then sent me back lettered pages which I then sent to my production assistants. There were five of them working on this project. They did the flat colors on the pages and then sent them back to me. I then finished the rendering on the pages. When the final tones and edits were done we sent it over to Abrams for layout etc.
What was the hardest part of doing this adaptation?
Jennings: I think that the physical nature of this project was very daunting. The constant drawing and coloring. However, I wasn’t ready for the effect the narrative would have on me. I was spending hours and hours in isolation working on this project and the book is very brutal. Even with the sanitizing of some of the scenes of violence by Butler, the intensity of the type of inhumanity to black people is so visceral and salient in the story. It’s a heavy and painful narrative because of its truth. We are still dealing with the fact that America and its freedoms came at the destruction of an entire race of people. I found myself sometimes weeping onto pages. We basically had to become filters for a trauma that resonates through every system in our country.

Duffy: Yes, immersing ourselves in the very real traumas of the past which, as John says, continue to echo and resonate in the outrages of the present… that was difficult. And there were a couple weeks towards the end of production where we both basically gave up sleep, so I do think that John and I might’ve collectively shaved off a year or two of our lives. Additionally, I think another difficult part, especially for me in the early going, was being very aware of how important Octavia Butler’s work is, and really being concerned with doing her legacy justice.
What new insights did you get into the novel by doing this adaptation? In other words, how does it seem to you now when you read it?
Duffy: One aspect of the novel I don’t think I paid as much attention to the first couple times through was how much of the book is about not just intersections of race and gender, but also intersections of race, gender, and labor. There’s a part, prior to the time travel, when Dana talks about how she tried to work as a nurse, a secretary, and a teacher, but none of it meant anything to her because she wanted to write. Ironically, in the 1800s Dana ends up surviving by doing all three of those jobs to various degrees, in addition to cooking and cleaning. She finds the value in all that work, not just in keeping herself safe, or keeping her ancestors alive, but also in potentially making life better for the next generation, by teaching slave children to read.
I had read that one inspiration for the novel was how, as a child, Butler had been embarrassed by her mother’s work as a cleaning woman, but came to see her mom as a hero for putting up with it to make life better for her child. But I don’t think I fully appreciated how intricately it’s woven into the story until reading the novel nine or ten times.
Kindred is available now.