WWW.PUBLISHERSWEEKLY.COM 33John Jennings and Damian Duffy have adapted Octavia Butler’s presciently
dystopian novel Parable of the Sower into a graphic novel BY NICOLE AUDREY SPECTOR
J
ohn Jennings is something of a comics Renaissance man,
holding numerous titles including illustrator, author,
editor, scholar, designer, and curator, to name a few; he
is also the newly appointed director of Megascope,
Abrams ComicArt’s new graphic imprint. “It’s always
daunting to talk about my career, because I wear a lot of
hats,” says Jennings, who is a professor at the University of
California, Riverside. He brings critical thinking focused on
race and representation in America to each of these roles, and
in the end, he seems less concerned with how he’s credited on a
project than with how the work gets done and with whom.
Arguably the job title that is most important to Jennings is
the unofficial one of collaborator. His most recent work is
Parable of the Sower, a graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s
eerily prescient dystopian novel, which he produced with
Damian Duffy. Slated for publication in January by Abrams
ComicsArts, this is the second Butler novel the duo has taken
on; in 2017, Abrams released their graphic novel adaptation of
Kindred. In both cases, Jennings is the illustrator and Duffy is
the adapter—but the lines of the roles blur, and “we tend to
tailor our collaborative process to whatever the story requires,”
as Duffy puts it.
“I love collaborating, because you get more ideas on the
board, you learn so much by sharing an experience, and you get
to feed off of each other’s energy, which lightens the load of
creation,” Jennings says. “You’re not just some lone auteur
toiling away in a studio—an [existence] that I find laughable,
because eventually you have to collaborate with the audience.
It’s best to get out of the way of your own ego early on.”
A great many of Jennings’s published books in the comics
space have been collaborations, most of them born out of long-
term artistic relationships. Well over a decade ago, the
Mississippi native met fellow writer and illustrator Duffy at the
University of Illinois, where Jennings was a graphic design
professor and Duffy was a graduate student (he’s now a faculty
member). The two clicked right away, Duffy says, bonding over