Comics as a form of resistance: Black sense of place in Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

In this article, we present an analysis of Damien Duffy and John Jennings’s 2017 Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation , based upon Octavia E. Butler’s 1979 pioneering Afrofuturist science fiction novel Kindred . Like the novel it is based upon, this graphic novel adaptation evokes a world that is menacing and claustrophobic, in which the Black American protagonist’s unwilling compulsion to jump back and forth through time is juxtaposed against her intermittent physical entrapment in the Antebellum South. We focus on the ways the graphic novel’s creators have utilized the medium of comics to create a powerful graphic trauma narrative, one that evokes what Katherine McKittrick refers to as a Black sense of place. This Black sense of place, we argue, is born of trauma and resistance. The links between trauma and resistance are represented through the written word, through images and through the spatialities of page and panel.