GVN Talking Comics Interview: Creators Damian Duffy And John Jennings For ‘The Parable of the Talents’

The Parable Series of Octavia E. Butler has been a favorite of critics and fans since its initial release in 1993. Also known as the Earthseed series, it started with Parable of the Sower and was followed up by Parable of the Talents in 1998. These works are just as viable and relevant today as they were when she wrote them. With this in mind, Adaptors Damian Duffy and John Jennings were brought on board to adapt these iconic works into a Graphic Novel form.

Duffy and Jennings were no strangers to Miss Butler’s work, as they won the Eisner Award for Best Adaptation from Another Medium for their graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s beloved best-selling novel “Kindred.” They followed that up with the Hugo Award for their stunning interpretation of “Parable of the Sower.”  Now, the creative team is joined by artist David Brame, reuniting with Abrams ComicArts to introduce a new generation of readers to Butler’s “Parable of the Talents.”

Recently, we sat down with the creative pair to discuss their creative beginnings and their latest efforts in bringing Miss Butler’s work back to the forefront. So, let’s welcome Damian Duffy and John Jennings.

Creative Beginnings

GVN: Thank you for sharing a bit of your time with us, John and Damian. Since we have not had the pleasure of speaking to you previously, let’s start with a bit of your creative beginnings. When did you first take an interest in writing and comic art, and whose work inspired that passion?

DAMIAN: Thanks for speaking with me! In kindergarten, when I had to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up, my answer was “arthur.” So, I suppose I’ve always wanted to be an author and always struggled with typos! I became obsessed with comics around the same time, age six, while sick with a cold. My dad got me a Spider-Man comic where Spidey also had a cold, and I have a distinct memory of coughing while reading a panel where Peter was coughing, and I thought, “Oh my God, I’m Spider-Man.”

The works of Scott McCloud, Dwayne McDuffie, and Alan Moore were also big influences on the way I think about making, and trying to make a living, in comics, and Brian Michael Bendis’s black and white crime comics inspired my first forays into self-publishing.

John: My mother was a huge influence on what I was reading. As a kid, I was really into reading and took a definitive interest in folktales, myths, and all kinds of visual storytelling. I was into Greek, African, Roman, and Norse mythologies. She eventually got me a copy of The Mighty Thor from Marvel Comics and that’s when my obsession with comics and graphic stories really took off. As for inspirations? I am a huge fan of Stephen King, Clive Barker and Walter Moseley. I was also inspired by Frank Miller, Richard Corben, and Neal Adams. Later The Hernandez Brothers, Colleen Doran, and Matt Wagner caught my eye. Let’s say that I had a very diverse palette when it comes to comics and it affected my style both as a storyteller and as a visual artist.

Mixing Academia and Artistic Creation

GVN: You both have impressive scholar resumes. Damian, you have an MS and PhD in Library and Information Sciences. These have been put to good use as a writer, curator, lecturer, and teacher. Between your educational pursuits and your comic work, which do you feel makes the biggest impact on those who are exposed to your efforts?

DAMIAN: Well, a guiding principle of Earthseed–the belief system Butler has her character Lauren Olamina preach in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents–is, “All that you touch, you change, all that you change, changes you.” Which, like a lot of Butler’s fiction, is very true. So, I can recognize that my work has had impacts on people, but it feels impossible to really understand the totality of those impacts. That might also be because all the time in grad school makes me feel like I need to do like a survey and some focus groups before I can make any generalizable claims.

I am certain that the graphic adaptations of Octavia E. Butler’s novels have had the most widespread impact of any of my work, in no small part because it’s work that comes with the honor and responsibility of not only making the story work in a different medium, but also to being a kind of ambassador of Butler’s impressive body of work and expansive legacy.

GVN: John, like Damian, you share a scholarly background and a remarkable educational resume. With that, you successfully manage to balance your academic responsibilities with your creative pursuits. How do you juggle those various aspects of your life, including teaching, editing, writing, and publishing? Additionally, what advice would you offer to a young person looking to follow in your creative footsteps?

John: I think the key is to remember that it’s all storytelling. The creation, the research, the work in the public, and the teaching. It’s all the same thing. It becomes easier once you figure that out. They are just different representations and aspects of the same whole. The more you see that and align those aspects of your creative life the easier it gets to move between them. Balance is about motion. It’s not static. If you see someone on a tightrope high in the air, they aren’t in a state of entropy. They are making adjustments constantly. That’s life. Always making adjustments. I’d say to young people that you can use my life as a start, but in the end, you will have to make your own way. My life is my life. They can take notes and be encouraged by the work we’ve done but they really have to figure out what works for them. Your mileage may vary.

The Pressures of Adapting Octavia E. Butler’s Iconic Work

GVN: You both have adapted several works by the renowned sci-fi writer Octavia E. Butler into graphic novels. These adaptations include “Kindred,” “Parable of the Sower,” and now “The Parable of the Talents.” After the success of the first two award-winning adaptations, did the process of adapting this third book become easier, or did the success of your earlier works add more pressure?

DAMIAN: In some ways, I felt the most pressure early on, with Kindred. I am very aware of being a cis hetero white male adapting the prose of a certified McArthur Genius, once-in-a-generation literary voice who was also the first preeminent Black woman science fiction writer. Not to mention, Kindred was a book I’d revered since reading it as an undergrad in creative writing.

I’ve said this a lot, but there were times while writing the script for Kindred that I worried Octavia E. Butler’s spirit was over my shoulder, shaking her head, saying, “No, white boy, just no.” So, yeah, that was a lot of pressure, and I was lucky to have such great collaborators in John Jennings, his team of coloring assistants, and our editor, Sheila Keenan, to be able to make a successful adaptation.

With Sower, I had a much better sense of technical things, like how many words I could get away with having per panel, or how closely to adhere to the source text. Because those boundaries were clearer to me, I felt freer to explore more experimental page compositions and narrative techniques, something that David Brame, the layout artist on Parable of the Talents, has helped push to be even more dynamic. But, with the Parables, the pressures of the work were replaced with the pressures of the world outside the work.

Since I started writing the Sower adaptation in 2016, I’ve had to drastically scale back my social media use, because Butler’s stark warning from the 1990s, of the dystopia we were headed for in the 2020s and beyond, feels like a documentary now. That reminder that crises and prejudices are so predictable, that the advancing chaos is observable and avoidable, and yet, here we are . . . it can feel overwhelming, sometimes.

Which is why Parable of the Talents has become an even more important book than when it was published in 1998. It’s a book written in the past, warning about the present, that gives us clear-eyed assessment of ways to survive and resist oppression and carve out some hard-won hope for the future.

John: We were fortunate to have dealt with the Kindred narrative before when Beacon Press was going to publish the graphic novel. The book was never finished and, I assume, the rights to do the graphic novel reverted to the estate. Damian and I were speaking about our book Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture at San Diego Comic Con and I happened to have my iPad with me to show publishers. Abrams was one of those publishers. I shared my work with Sheila Keenan and she liked what she saw. Five months later, we were signing a contract to do the book!

I think the main challenge for me with Kindred was the subject matter. It was definitely a grueling book to make physically. I actually injured my shoulder doing the inks for it. However, being a Black man in America, having to draw the horrors of slavery over and over was an emotional rollercoaster that I will never forget. I actually wept onto original art when I was doing certain scenes.

Parable of the Sower was difficult because the work was so prescient that it was stressful and traumatic to bring the story to life with our actual lived experiences echoing Butler’s narrative. It was absolutely surreal.

Making Creative Choices

GVN: As a follow-up, Damian, when adapting respected works like those created by Miss Butler, how do you decide which text or story elements are essential to retain in order to effectively convey the story in graphic format? It seems like a monumental task.

DAMIAN: Since the page count of the book is specified in our contracts, it can be quite challenging to fit these epic narratives into the allotted space. I’ve probably read each novel at least 14 times, doodling notes and cartoons in the margins, going over plot points, highlighting visual descriptions in the text, or my own ideas on visualizing particular scenes. By the time my read throughs are in double digits, I’m trying to make sure I have a handle on things like metaphor and subtext, trying to translate those techniques in prose into visual and sequential storytelling equivalents.

It’s usually world building details or character interactions that are re-emphasizing ideas that have already been introduced in other scenes that end up on the “cutting room floor,” but the specifics really vary depending on the story. For example, in Parable of the Talents, the protagonist’s daughter, Asha, sometimes takes over as narrator, from her perspective in the future as a grown woman who creates stories for virtual reality. So, in the graphic novel, Asha’s narration takes place in VR, with more fantastical visualizations than the grounded reality of Lauren Olamina’s narration.

The Benefits to Readers, Both Old and New

GVN: Now that you have adapted this third Octavia E. Butler book, if you had to express it, what would be the most important thing you would hope readers get from your adaptations? A renewed appreciation of her work for long-time fans in this visual format, or an introduction to her works for new readers who might not have been exposed to Octavia’s talents.

DAMIAN: Yes. All of the above. If I got to decide, I think I’d want every reader to buy the adaptations and the novels and maybe try to catch Toshi and Bernice Reagon’s Parable of the Sower opera if it’s in town. But, in the process of making and promoting these adaptations, I’ve met people who have never read Butler before, never read a comic before, never read both before, or have read many Butler novels and just as many comics, and I’m honored just to be part of making any of those reading experiences happen.

JOHN: I think that people should realize her genius and also check out the work by others who were inspired by her. I definitely hope that we have, in some way, helped to push Octavia E. Butler’s legacy into the future and that her work keeps inspiring and teaching many more generations to come. I think that we’ve done a decent job of capturing the stories that Octavia created for these three books. So, I’d be comfortable saying that, whatever medium suits you, treat yourself to her work. It’s bold, unflinching, and ahead of its time even now. There will only be one Octavia E. Butler and we were so lucky that she was here sharing air with us.

Future Projects

GVN: Thanks again, Damian and John for spending some time with us. Before I let you go, I want to give you both an opportunity to share any other projects you have coming up.

DAMIAN: Thanks again for having me!

I currently have a short story about the public domain comics character Fantoma, drawn by David Brame, and colored by John Jennings, in the book Lion Man Adventures from Rosarium Publishing.

And there’s a middle grade graphic novel called Remotely that I co-wrote with Ed Cho (writer of Little Guardians from Scout Comics), which I’m currently in the process of drawing, and we’re currently in the process of pitching.

And, finally, John and I have a new collaboration in the works, but we can’t talk about it yet.

JOHN: I have some very exciting things on the horizon that I can’t exactly talk about at the moment but, I can say that when the world sees what we’re up to, it will definitely be worth the wait.

Abrams ComicArts Graphic Novel Adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s ‘The Parable of the Talents‘ by Damian Duffy and John Jennings is available now where great books are sold.