Octavio E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents: a Graphic Novel Adaptation. By Damian Duffy, John Jennings & David Brame. New York: Abrams ComicArts, 2025. 300pp, $25.99.
Review by Paul Buhle
Perhaps it is the ominous ecological signs that we have been living through, with a painful added irony, looking back on the declaration of Earth Day in 1970. No doubt it is the worsening of government in every sense with the first Trump administration and now the second. Whatever the reason, the work of the late and great Science Fiction author Octavia E. Butler is now amidst graphic novel adaptations, adaptations like none others. After a first streamed series adaptation of her novel Kindred, more are already in development. In other words, we are going to hear a lot more from and about Octavia Butler, the first SciFi writer to win a MacArthur (“genius”) Award and more famous in her death than she could possibly be in her own lifetime.
It is fair to say that Butler never deserted, through all her efforts, the ominous and only occasionally hopeful narrative that she adopted almost from the beginning of her work. If it sounds like Afro-Futurism, that would be accurate because she actually did much to invent the genre, so to speak, without giving it a title. Inasmuch as we live, all of us, in a time of ecological disorder and disaster, with the fragmentation of communities all around, and desperation never far away, she pushed the boundaries even further.
Within this daunting framework of her narrative, the situation of non-whites is precarious, to say the least. Whites are almost certain to get the last lifeboats off the sinking ship, and some of the whites will certainly be eager to kill anyone else seeking escape—another anticipation of Trumpism. Not to mention whites, really anyone in power, seizing every opportunity to exploit and degrade minorities along the way. Here is the Butler Dilemma: her nonwhites do not actually live in some distant continent like Africa, surrounded by other non-whites. Everyone shares a location—it happens to be Future California—also sharing a need for relationships, love, family and a means for collective survival. Non-whites or at least her non-whites, most of all women, have accumulated the historical, collective understanding that they need, if only they can express their full creative energies. Amazingly enough, this narrative also portends the possibilty of interracial relationships and even interracial marriage, something rare for literary science fiction to describe right up to the current century—interspecies sex and romance has, somehow, always been easier.
Butler manages this, not by the geographical escape but by blending a black culture-based spiritualism within a perpetually uneasy hybridity compulsory in the face of the struggle for survival. Only the gay, black SciFi master Samuel Delaney, who swiftly sought to help the young Butler, had dared to go so far in terms of race and sexuality. Butler takes what may be called the next step.
The Parable of the Talents is, in fact, the second outing for its two creators, Adaptor Damian Duffy and artist/professor John Jennings. Kindred (2017) won an Eisner among other awards and it was their effort that reached streamed film adaptation. They create with a sense of confidence that is observable on the printed page. A reviewer wrote of that work that the graphic expression, “brutally jagged, disorientating, gothic, and impactful art” had added a dimension to Butler’s work, a new angle of vision, something achieved in a small handful of past graphic adaptations going back to prize-winning woodcut adaptations of novels (Including Moby Dick) by Lynd Ward. But more jarring.
If Kindred travels back in time as a black woman in 1976—married to a white man—and finds herself on a plantation before the Civil War, then Parable of the Talents moves forward to 2032, seventeenth year of the Pox. A father-figure physician saves the life of an eighteen year old and they struggle to live, even to build a community, up in the mountains of Humboldt County.
Along with its precursor, Parable is certainly among the most ambitious graphic novels ever published, at least in English. Perhaps the narrators/artists might have chosen to reduce the level of detail, including dialogue? Or allotted more space for the physical settings? I think these questions will be distant, not even secondary, to devotees of Butler who are readers of graphic novels. To have devoted herculean efforts to this production is a sufficient accomplishment.
But consider this, in a book actually written and drawn a bit before the 2024 election. We are about halfway through when we realize that that corralling of homeless children, redirected into Christian indoctrination under the regime of a fascistic and power-mad president, is more of a prediction of Trump II than anyone could have predicted. “It is hard to imagine that it happened here, in the United States, in the 21st Century, but it did. [President] Andrew Steele Jarret scared, divided and bullied people into letting him ‘fix’ the country….his fanatical followers—filled with righteous superiority and popular among the many frightened ordinary citizens who only wanted order and stability—ran amok.” (p. 180).
Of course there were wars, which are viewed here as “useless, ridiculous, obscene” (p.181) and properly so. War feeds the Maw, and that Maw grows later on, even after a supposed peace is negotiated. Christianity is here at its worst, or among the worst in two thousand years of intermittent and self-righteous attacks upon non-believers.
Our protagonist, suffering horribly for herself and others, helps lead an uprising that shakes the scene around them even if a national government cannot be overthrown. A destiny of freedom may be reached across generations and across the cosmos if not on Earth. This offers, for Butler but also for current socialistic SciFi writers like Kim Stanley Robinson and China Mieville, a prospect of hope.
