Parable of the Sower

A GRAPHIC NOVEL ADAPTATION

BUCKLE UP. this one's a tough ride.

Damian Duffy and John Jennings

If you just found Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower on your ENG 150 course text list and were excited to see a new graphic novel adaptation to the classic Afrofuturist text, then read on before you accidentally bite off more than you can chew. It may seem intuitive: if there’s a shorter adaption of the book with similar text and drawings then that’s the one to read, but at least for Parable of the Sower that’s not the case. Although I can’t condone reading or watching some alternate version of a required text (especially while I’m writing a review for an English course), I certainly don’t recommend reading Damian Duffy and John Jennings’ graphic novel adaptation over Butler’s novel.

After reading another Butler novel, Kindred, I instantly added Parable of the Sower and Dawn to my ever-growing Goodreads “to be read” list. When I found the graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower, I was excited. Although the art style is captivating and the story is powerful, the blend of the two in Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation makes for an arduous, time-consuming read that won’t be as easy as you think to fit into your tight schedule.

PLOT OVERVIEW

Butler’s Parable of the Sower is a science-fiction, Afrofuturist novel where the current state of America is in in chaos. Written in 1993, Parable of the Sower is set from 2024 to 2027. The novel follows fifteen-year-old Lauren Olamina who lives inside a gated community in California, far from the horrors looming outside like climate change, economic crises, and racism. Lauren, upset by the fact that she and her family aren’t doing anything to help the broader community, starts to develop her own religion that she calls Earthseed. After the death of her loved ones, Lauren leaves her community to spread her religion to all those she comes across to create a new community born from the ashes of shared trauma. Lauren has a special gift, hyperempathy, which enables her to feel the pleasure and pain of others, to connect with people, and to provide them ideology that helps them cope with the brutal living conditions outside the gated communities. Most of the people in the reimagined world are addicted to a drug called pyro, which makes people want to start fires and watch them burn. As she goes along her journey, Lauren’s goal is to use her religion and preaching to guide humanity from the catastrophic current events to a less chaotic future.

Introduction to Earthseed and Lauren (2)

ART STYLE

The art style in Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation is insanely impressive, but it requires a lot of attention. The colors are bold when they need to be and muted when they don’t, which conveys Lauren’s emotions as she travels through the new world distributing Earthseed. Jennings, the illustrator, mentions that his “background is in graphic design, so I am always trying to capture the eyes in some way… color is important; it’s a storytelling asset. Everyone has different skin tonalities, and I am always really trying to bring that out. I tend to use darker tones on people of color so that people understand that they are Black” (Spector).

The darker tones he employs transfer to scenes that are deep blue and harsh red symbolizing the emotional vulnerability and anarchic frenzy respectively. The line work is bold and precise, but there’s a bit of a jagged, imperfect feel overall that works alongside the world-building present in the story to demonstrate the chaotic environment the population is withstanding. The shadowing is sometimes done with crosshatching, which makes the story feel gritty and difficult and reflects the characters in the novel and their poor quality of life.

Still from Jennings' iPad during the sketching process

The intricacy of the art style, however, is quite tedious. If you spend less than a minute looking over each panel, you will miss something. Since the graphic novel was entirely drawn and colored on Jennings’s iPad (as seen to the left), he included a depth of detail unachievable through sketching on a piece of paper. Combined with Butler’s elaborate prose and the large amount of dialogue, the meticulous art style hinders the comic's readability.

READABILITY

The readability is Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation’s biggest downfall. I’ve read graphic novels around the same page length as Parable of the Sower, but they all felt much easier to read. Perhaps it’s because most graphic novels I have read were aimed at a bit of a younger audience (11-17), but Duffy and Jennings stated that their intended audience for the comic was only 15+. The graphic novel adaptation is not a quick read. I had to re-read it twice just to feel confident in writing this review. There are a ton of ethical questions explored throughout the text like is it permissible for religion to save humanity? What does saved humanity even look like? Some are easier to understand and evaluate than others, but exploring the subtextual messages present in the text was mentally taxing work. I presumed the Parable of the Sower graphic novel adaptation would feel less like schoolwork than it did, so if you’re looking for an enjoyable, fast read then don’t pick up this comic.

Lauren's developmental process for creating her new religion, Earthseed (21)

Lauren understanding what's going on around her (45)

As mentioned earlier, the combination of dense prose, dialogue, and artwork requires a lot of willpower to parse through. As seen in the images above, there are a ton of words jammed into small panels. Trying to combine Butler's prose, the square notebook text, and Duffy and Jennings' dialogue, the circular bubbles, distracts from the art and overall message. As I flipped the page, I kept asking myself things like wait did her brother just die? Was that her even her brother? I had to put it down every ten pages or so because I was just re-reading the same panel over and over and over again. Even after reading it three times, I’m still not sure that I understood everything that happened or why it happened. Although the lack of readability made me dislike the comic overall, the plot is fascinating.

STORY

After my first read-through, I sparknoted the plot for the original Parable of the Sower novel and combed through the Goodreviews reviews for the graphic novel adaptation. I noticed a lot of small details in the plot that I never picked up on in the graphic novel and the prior knowledge made the second and third read more manageable. A couple of the authors of the reviews on Goodreads mentioned how they didn’t think the comic would be easy to follow if the reader wasn’t already familiar with certain themes and details from the novel. The reviews also mentioned that there were certain aspects featured in the artwork that wouldn’t have made sense if the reader wasn’t aware that they should be looking for them.

Jennings classifies Parable of the Sower as a work of ethnogothic science-fiction literature. Jennings coined the term ethnogothic, the juxtaposition of the gothic as an aesthetic that features horrifying African American experiences through the storytelling mechanisms of the text the readers can talk about the issues and hopefully move forward into a better space, to classify a much needed and growing genre (Duffy and Jennings). The enthogothic themes coupled with other wild, yet sadly predictable moments, like when an 18-year-old Lauren falls in reciprocated love with a 57-year-old man, make for an engaging yet disturbing storyline.

TV updates from 2024 on the current state of America (15)

More TV updates (15)

Climate change, inflation, untreatable diseases and other ills are plaguing Butler's version of America. So many people are oblivious since they have no means to consume the media. The parallels to current 2022 is almost spooky.

More TV updates (16)

Another difficult to understand aspect was where Butler’s prose stopped and Duffy and Jennings’ dialogue began. Jennings brought up how Butler’s writing is “tight and lovely in its preciseness, which lends itself to illustration very well,” that “it’s very descriptive, which is helpful for putting together graphic scenarios, and it’s extremely well researched, and that helps with the ephemera we can create. Also, she’s writing about power dynamics primarily, which is, of course, something that comics—and particularly American comics—are very concerned with” (Spector). Butler's words may be precise, but they're also too lyrical for a graphic novel.

The power dynamics prevalent in the text are eerily similar to current political events in 2022, which is beneficial for the first time reader who's unfamiliar with Butler's world. In Parable of the Talents, the sequel to Parable of the Sower published in 1998, Butler includes a presidential candidate who runs with the exact slogan “make America great again.” So, it’s insane how similar the events in Butler’s work parallel current American ones.

CONCLUSION

The graphic novel adaptation of Parable of the Sower is not objectively bad; the artwork is breathtaking, the plot is compelling, and the dialogue and prose are well written. The main problem I had reading it was that the reader is thrown into a world with no knowledge of its inner structure. There is such complex, detailed art combined with enigmatic, fancy words that it takes a ton of work to have even a slight understanding of the message or even just the main plot points themselves.

I haven’t read the original novel, so the fact that the novel would be easier to analyze is only an assumption, but Duffy and Jennings had huge shoes to fill in taking on one of Butler’s most famous works. In an NPR interview, the two laughed about how much pressure they felt throughout the entire process. In 2017, Duffy and Jennings published a graphic novel adaptation for Kindred. Since I've read Kindred, I wonder if that graphic novel would be less challenging to read.

Maybe it was my high expectations. Maybe it was the fact that I haven’t read the original novel. Or, maybe it is just too much crammed in such small panels. But, the combination of dense, lyrical prose and such intricate artwork doesn’t produce an easy Sunday morning read.

Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation did win the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story/Comic and the reviews are almost exclusively four and five stars, so I almost feel guilty for not recommending it, but from someone who reads around 150 books a year, it was one of the most difficult reads to get through that I’ve had in a while. If you’re a huge Butler fan who has already read Parable of the Sower and wants a new outlook on the novel, then you might love this adaptation. If not, then I think it’s probably best to pick up the original novel before reaching for the graphic novel version.

WORKS CITED

Butler, Octavia E., et. al. Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation. Abrams, Inc, 2020.

Duffy, Damian and John Jennings. “Conjuring Octavia Butler’s Prophecy in ‘Parable of the Sower’ Graphic Novel.” Interview by Stanford Carpenter and Cianna Greaves. NPR WYRP – 88.1 FM Baltimore, 20 Aug. 2020, https://www.wypr.org/wypr-arts/2020-08-20/conjuring-octavia-butlers-prophecy-in-parable-of-the-sower-graphic-novel.

Spector, Nicole. “John Jennings and Damian Duffy Are Disturbing the Peace.” Publishers Weekly, 1 Nov. 2019, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/profiles/article/81634-john-jennings-and-damian-duffy-are-disturbing-the-peace.html.

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