Not, of course, because of any sort of lack of quality but because it just hits very close to the mark of what we see on the news every day today. My saying as much is hardly revaltory; Octavia Butler's original prose novel Parable of the Talents was first published in 1998 so all of the elements were there and many a comparison was made between the President Jarret government in the book to what Donald Trump's second administration was shaping up to look like back when he was elected. What makes it terrifying here is that A) we are now several months into a second Trump White House and the most horrifying speculations made back in November are coming to pass, and B) it's actually illustrated here and not just words on a page; we're actually seeing the atrocities inflicted on and by the characters. I mean, I was only 20 or 30 pages in and seeing multiple passages that -- except for specific names -- could easily come from any news article from the past several months.
For those of you who haven't read the original, the basic story picks up about eight years after Parable of the Sower and continues to follow Lauren (now mostly going by her surname Olamina) as she develops Acorn, a community built up around her Earthseed idea that she started in the previous book. It follows the same basic format of the narrative unfolding primarily through her journal entries, but we additionally get retroactive insights from her adult daughter, Larkin. About halfway through the book, Acorn is decimated by a group of Christian fundamentalists who take the entire group that they don't kill outright as slaves. It's about 18 months of abuse, rape, torture, starvation, and generally dehumanizing behavior before the remaining survivors escape, and they split up trying to fend for themselves while searching for their children, who had all been adopted out to "clean" Christian homes. Much of the remainder of the book is around Olamina trying to find her daughter while continuing to promote her Earthseed idea.
When I reviewed Parable of the Sower back in 2020, I said...
One hallmark of good comic book writing, I think, is to know when to hold back on the script and led the art do the storytelling. It's easy to find examples -- in older comics especially -- where caption boxes and dialogue basically just reiterate what's being shown. That's also a challenge, I think, in adaptations, where there's a desire to include as much of the original author's text as possible. I think it's a sense of trying to "distort" or "edit" their work as little as possible. I haven't gone through Parable to do a word-by-word comparison, but it does appear like there was a lot of thought that went into what should be said versus what should be shown. And, if certain scenes were to be shown, how much dialogue might need to be added/removed relative to what Butler had originally written? Whatever ended up getting added or removed, though, the whole thing flows very smoothly, and I never feel like they've skipped over a chunk to save space.I think this all completely applies to Parable of the Talents as well. Damian Duffy and John Jennings do pretty much exactly as good of a job on this book as they did on the previous one, and David Brame -- who provided page layouts this time -- seemed to understand exactly where they were coming from in adapting Butler's work. I'm a little curious if having multiple narrators for this book made it easier or more complex. On the one hand, changing perspectives does offer some additional visual opportunties but with that comes the challenge of ensuring the reader is never at a loss from which one of those perspectives we're following at any given time. Perhaps made even more complex because Olamina's thoughts and comments are all in the present while events are unfolding, while Larkin's are all from at least a couple decades in the future looking back on things.
The other significant difference between the two books is that while Sower has a greater focus on climate change, Talents puts politics and religion more front and center. Sower had religion to it, of course -- much of Lauren's effort in that book is developing that religion in the first place -- but Talents puts a greater emphasis on the intersection of religion with politics. It's very clear that President Jarret draws in and exploits a number of his followers/voters using overtly Christian language and iconography, and many of the horrible elements throughout the book are done in the name of various relgious sects.
If you already like Butler's work, picking this up is a no-brainer. Originally published in 1993, Parable of the Sower was set in 2024 and, now that we've passed that year, was excessively prescient and I found to be useful in understanding where we are right now. Even if some of the specifics are wrong, the overall ideas were spot on. Parable of the Talents is (mostly) set in 2032, and I think will prove equally prescient, if not moreso, given the news items I've been seeing for the past several months. Parable of the Talents: A Graphic Novel Adaptation was published by Abrams ComicArts last month and retails for $25.99 US.
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