Book Description Review “…the graphic novel is faithful to Butler, yet still fresh in its world building.”, USA Today“…alarmingly prescient and relevant…This accessible adaptation is poised to introduce Butler’s dystopian tale to a new generation of readers.”, Publishers Weekly“…Jennings’ work in the book is beyond stunning…”, The Beat Read more About the Author Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) was a renowned African-American author who was awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Since her death, sales of her books have increased enormously as the issues she addressed in her Afro-Futuristic, feminist novels and short fiction have only become more relevant. Damian Duffy, author of Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, is a cartoonist, scholar, writer, and teacher. He holds a MS and PhD in library and information sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign, where he is on faculty. John Jennings, illustrator of Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California at Riverside. Read more Customers Review: Relevant in the Age of Trump and the moral, economical, and environmental decay of America.Love love love this book
In Parable of the Sower, Lauren is a preacher’s daughter living in the broken world of the Los Angeles’ suburbs in 2024. Climate change has left the world short of water. The class battle has been fought—and won by the rich. Hope for the future is non-existent. But Lauren has a vision for a new God—a God of change. She feels all mankind is Earthseed, destined to move off the ruined Earth to other planets.It is amazing that Parable of the Sower feels like it was written yesterday because it is so topical. However, it was originally published more than twenty-five years ago in 1993.When I started reading, I thought this was a sequel to Kindred, which I loved in graphic novel format by the same author and artist. However, it is a completely different tale of how a religion gets started in a startlingly prescient world of the future. Unfortunately, the art was only done in a rough outline in my advanced review copy so I can’t review it here. But the art in Kindred was beautiful and evocative. Overall, this a good warning about what the future may hold for our planet. 4 stars!Thanks to Abrams ComicArts and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for my honest review.
‘The Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel’ is an adaptation of a work by the late, great Octavia E. Butler. The adaptation is done by Damian Duffy with illustrations by John Jennings.The story is told through the eyes of Lauren Olamina, a preacher’s daughter, living in a hellish near-future Los Angeles. Lauren keeps a diary of her life, and of Earthseed, a religious idea she is building on. While Lauren and her family are safe, the outside world will come barging in, and Lauren has to learn to use violence, even though she has an almost psychic connection with the pain of others. One terrible night, Lauren must leave what she knows and hit the road North, to hopefully better days.The burden of adapting is what do you leave out and what do you leave in. The adapter chooses to kind of refrain the whole Earthseed ideology making it better, in my opinion. The art in this was a whole other story. While I really liked the cover art, the art inside is really unfinished looking. I think maybe the artist was going along with the whole journal/sketchbook nature of what Lauren is writing in with the kind of rapid sketching you’d do if you were on the run, but it didn’t really work for me.I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Abrams ComicArts and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.
Parable of the Sower by Damian Duffy is a free NetGalley e-comicbook that I read in late November.Chapters/issues that take place 2024-2027 with material drawn on lined notebook paper, most others in rectangular cells through grey and blue marker-like sketches and scribbles, handwritten and Times New Roman quotations, dialogue, and journal-like narrative from Lauren, a preacher’s daughter who questions the status quo, cares for and teaches others, holds inner turmoil on the nature of God, overwhelmed but confident that she can make changes. It’s very dismal with themes of huge class stratification, hardship, acts of violence, earthquakes, martial law, wide use of drugs and guns, losses and gains within power structures, and missions to Mars in order to escape Earth; thought its primary conflict is of migrants travelling to somewhere better or to stay in one place within a penetrable, vulnerable fortress.
I received a copy of Parable of the Sower from Abrams ComicArts through Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.Parable of the Sower is one of my favorite books and it translates really well to the graphic novel format. I loved Lauren’s journal entries.This is such an important story and I’m thrilled at the idea of it finding a wider audience. |
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