ILLUSTRATED MYTH: CULTURE & MEANING THROUGH GRAPHIC NOVELS

A Thesis Presented to the Honors Tutorial College, Ohio University

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Graduation from the Honors Tutorial College with the degree of Bachelor of Science in Media Arts & Studies

Haley Alishusky. May 2018.

INTRODUCTION

Exploring stories visually is by no means a new concept. Artwork, both stationary and moving, is something that has been a part of human history for millennia. The ancient Greeks illustrated their stories on pots, in wall paintings, and carved massive stories on the pediments of their temples. Depicting cultural figures, stories, and gods is something that has perpetuated even to this day as a major means of communicating with others. In my creative project, I wanted to combine this history of meaningful image with the stories that cultures told hundreds or thousands of years ago by adapting them into visual novels and telling these stories as comics.

This method allowed me to combine both my love of graphic storytelling, something I’ve enjoyed in the form of comic books and graphic novels for years, and my love of mythology into a project that explored both. By including both of these topics into a creative project, I was able to take things I learned in both my major and my minor, utilizing resources from both the

Classics department and the Scripps College of Communication.

RESEARCH

The first and original research topic for this project was how to make comics. I had no idea how to make a comic when I was going into the tutorial for Icarus. I had read webcomics and graphic novels in the past, but rarely made anything even remotely similar myself. I had a handful of very simple comic strips, but nothing with the dynamic layouts of modern graphic storytelling.

The term ‘graphic novel’ was not something that existed before about fifty years ago.

The term was first used by Richard Kyle in 1964 in an essay published in the comic fan magazine

Capa-Alpha. The graphic novel became popularized and the term more widely used after the publication of Will Eisner’s A Contract With God in 19781. Over the course of the next decade or so, Marvel, DC, and other major names in the comic industry gave the graphic novel the wide attention it deserved.

Merriam-Webster defines graphic novel as ‘a story that is presented in comic-strip format and published as a book.’2 This definition is fairly broad, but does have restrictions. A graphic novel is something that would not be considered a full story if published as a standard novel; usually these stories are shorter and accommodate a much more visual telling of the novel. A graphic novel is not a compendium of miscellaneous comics, nor an anthology. This is a story that is encompassed usually within one book and is a continuous story, though it is possible for the story to be split between several physical novels.

The earliest recognized American graphic novel is titled The Adventures of Obadiah

Oldbuck, written and drawn by Rodolphe Töpffer and published in America in 1842. Another early example of books being visual includes the 1897 Richard Outcault collection of The Yellow

Kid, a collection of the artist’s previously published comic strips.3

1 Schelly, Bill (2010) 2 Merriam-Webster.com 3 Beerbohm, Robert (2008) In the 1940s, the launching of Classics Illustrated gave classic literature a completely different spin by turning them into graphic novels suitable for younger audiences. From then onward, many graphic novels put out by Marvel Comics and Stan Lee were compendiums of lengthy story arcs of characters like Spider-Man, Doctor Strange, and the Black Panther.

However, it wasn’t until the mid-1970s that novels began to self-describe themselves as graphic novels. The first notable few are Bloodstar by Richard Corben, Beyond Time and Again by George Metzger, and Chandler: Red Tide by Jim Steranko. All three of these comics advertised themselves as ‘graphic novels’ either on their covers, dust jackets, inside covers, or introductions.

Will Eisner’s A Contract With God was immensely successful both commercially and critically; it allowed for the term ‘graphic novel’ to become more widely used and familiarized the public to the phrase. However, Eisner takes no credit for coining the term nor for creating the first graphic book. 4

Modern graphic novels vary widely in both style and format. While all tell their stories visually, the themes, content, and target audiences can be very different from one to the next.

While graphic novels may appeal visually to younger readers, there are many that have been published recently meant for more mature audiences as authors and publishers alike have realized that adults want to see visual works as well. These more mature graphic novels usually bear darker themes, art styles, and content than those aimed at younger readers. There is also

4 Arnold, Andrew D. (2003) the subgenre of graphic novels that are specific adaptations of previously written works from both classic literature and modern stories told within the last few decades.

As an art form, the graphic novel and comic have expanded beyond the physical world of publication. While bookstores will carry entire sections of visual novels and comic books, there are thousands of artists whose entire audiences exist virtually. These artists draw and share their comics over social media to the following of dozens to thousands of dedicated fans who consume their content for free. Sites like Patreon and Ko.Fi are benefitting these creators, giving the fans of these artists the opportunity to support them financially for rewards such as early access to content, bonus physical content, and tutorials written by the creators themselves. This system is fairly new and began within the past few years, but there are already thousands of online artists able to both reach massive fanbases and to profit off of their dedication to their craft without ever needing to speak to a publisher.

The graphic novel has evolved over its near-200 year history, though it remains the same at its core: a story, available to the public via a variety of means, told using art and images and the outpouring of the souls of the artists themselves.

Mythology is something that exists as something so much more than fiction. While it can be widely accepted today as a form of folklore, when the stories were told they meant so much to the cultures that told them. They were religious stories, tales of old gods and their victories and losses, of their children and the havoc or peace they gave the world. These stories told of how one should behave and how one should never behave, often leaving an easy-to- follow guideline for how to live a life.

Mythology should not be regarded solely as fiction. These stories were and continue to be important to the cultures that created them. Some cultures still follow the beliefs and guidelines laid out for them centuries earlier and their legends and stories should not be thought of as something that is incorrect or wrong.

However, the studies of these stories and what they mean to people both past and present is vital to the continuation of the messages these stories are meant to convey. While some may not carry meaning that is valid in the modern day, the fact that a culture thought it to be important enough to keep track of is a perfectly good reason for researchers nowadays to make sure that the stories are perpetuated.

These stories were often meant to explain natural phenomenon. Zeus is the king of the gods and the god of lightning. Storms and thunder were his domain, and the ancient Greeks used him as a reason to explain those things happening in the natural world. If a dangerous storm ravaged a fleet of ships and men were killed at sea, they believed someone had angered

Poseidon and the storm was his wrath.

While we have scientific reasoning for these phenomena, one must understand that the

Greeks did not. They wanted to understand what was happening, and assigning these domains to certain deities helped them do so. When bad things happened, they could blame the gods and try to make themselves better people in an attempt to please the Olympians and stop whatever punishment they may be receiving. Often this included more intensive rituals at the temples to the gods, better offerings, and the listening of many to the lessons taught to them by the stories people told of the gods.

Icarus, in particular, is a good example of a story that gave ancient Greeks a guideline for how to behave. Both Icarus and his father Daedalus exhibit hubris; they think of themselves as equal to, or better than, the gods themselves. Daedalus proves this by asserting that he is one of the smartest, most ingenuous men in Greece. He attempts to prove this by murdering his nephew, Perdix, when he begins to show promise as a scholar and inventor. Icarus shows his hubris by flying too close to the sun on his wings of wax. He rose too close to the gods, and the sun god Helios shot him down.

Both of these characters, inherently, are not bad. They are not meant to be villains in their story. However, they both behave in a way that the gods deemed unacceptable, and were punished for it. Their story lives on until today, referenced in media such as Lin-Manuel

Miranda’s Hamilton, and its longevity proves to modern scholars that its meaning meant a lot to the Greeks. If it hadn’t, we would not still have the story to this day.

While modern society may not necessarily take the same kind of warnings from these stories, the fact that we have access to them is vital to how our society has developed over the past two thousand years. These tales hold no religious connotation for modern Muslims or

Christians, but their meanings have echoed through the teachings of philosophers and scholars for generations. As a society, it is important to look at myth and see where we came from and acknowledge that our own development owes itself to the centuries of history that came before and to the stories that each culture tells about how to be a decent human being. PURPOSE

One of my major focuses for this project was to take myth and make it more accessible to, ideally, younger audiences. When I was younger and really interested in myth, it was difficult to find sources that made it easy to understand. The language is always very dense and often the content of mythology isn’t exactly suitable for kids. There’s a lot of sex and death especially in Greek and Roman myth, so it isn’t exactly aimed at audiences younger than maybe middle school.

Almost all of the initial research done to look into the making of comics was completed via the instructional books of Scott McCloud. McCloud, an American cartoonist and ‘comic theorist’, wrote three books I referenced heavily over the course of my thesis project:

Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006). These three books outlined the basics of not only laying out pages, but how to place and organize dialogue, how to improve flow on pages, how to design characters and keep them simple enough to draw over and over again (a piece of advice I regretfully ignored), and many other tips and tricks that I found valuable as someone who was only just starting out.

Alongside these more practical books, I also read through a number of graphic artist

Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series. These graphic novels are exactly what my comics were aiming to be-- stories (in this case, true historical stories) that were meant to both educate and open the world of history to younger audiences. There are topics in his books that could be considered difficult for younger audiences to tolerate. For example, one book is focused around the Donner Party and we all know how that ends. I really took influence from how Hale addresses mature issues like these and did my best to keep my stories as kid-friendly as possible.

Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series also served as an important factor of my process. His written works take Greek and Norse mythology and flip the stories completely by basing them in the modern day. Several of his novels have been adapted into graphic novels, themselves, and I referenced the difference between the original books and their graphic adaptations to get a better idea of how to take an existing story and make it visual.

In order to test how well I had done with that once each comic was finished, I would hand it off to Beth to have her son Jaxon, who at 11 is right in the middle of the intended age group, read through them. While he never really had anything bad to say about any of the comics, it was still reassuring to hear that he enjoyed them and that they weren’t too complex for him to understand. It is not a major test group by any means, but it helped to keep me on track regarding how mature I was able to get in both the content of the myths themselves as well as the language used in the comics. My goal was always to make these stories accessible. If

I used vernacular that was too advanced, I would lose both the interest and the understanding of my target audience.

Once I finished Icarus, though, I realized that I would need to do much more research into other myth and other cultures. I basically knew Icarus’s story off the top of my head by the time I made his comic. The others involved a lot more reading and shuffling through webpages and books in the classics library in order to find myths I could use. This project had initially included seven myths. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that this number of comics was far too large for a year-long project, so much of my cultural research on Mayan, Welsh, Maori, and African myth did not end up making it into the final project. However, I knew very little about Inuit and Japanese culture and mythology and some basics about Norse myth. All three of the subsequent myths after Icarus involved a lot of supplemental research in order to make sure that they were accurate to both the original stories and to the cultures they came from.

Fenrir’s research laid mostly in how I was going to tell the story and the general information about the myth. I did not know the parts of Gleipnir off of the top of my head, nor did I know much about the Nine Realms of Norse mythology. I did a lot of supplemental reading via norse-mythology.org to know more about the general world of Norse myth and went from there.

Sedna was, I think, the myth I did the most research for. Native Alaskan myth is a little difficult to nail down because different groups of people have different versions of every story, and I didn’t want to be disrespectful in the way I told it. I utilized the version of the myth I found on the website polarlife.ca, which told the version of the story that included the man becoming a bird halfway through. I searched for different Inuit clothing and hairstyles to keep the characters looking like they truly belonged both in the myth and the environment. I wanted these characters to look familiar to someone who may know the culture as opposed to people just plonked down into a story that wasn’t necessarily about them. These characters are Native

Alaskans. I wanted to make sure that they looked the part. Urashima Taro, thankfully, was also a story I knew a bit about going in. Japanese myth as a whole is not something I’m incredibly familiar with, but this story in particular was one I had come into contact with in the past. I was able to take a story I knew a little bit about, expand my knowledge on the story, its origins, and its characters, and interpret it in the best way I possibly could. I utilized both English translations of the story and took inspiration from a 1967 children’s book of the same title as the myth, illustrated beautifully by Chihiro Iwasaki.

Book binding was something that Beth and I agreed on a while back, but we had never really solidified the plans to do it until maybe a month before the deadline. It included a lot of

YouTube tutorials on the subject and honest hoping for the best by the time I actually got around to them. I had never done anything like that before, so I ended up texting a couple of friends who had bound their own sketchbooks in the past and asking for advice. It was by no means the easiest part of this project, but it was challenging and worth the effort in the end, I think.

A major influence on this project due to its impact on me as a young reader is Rick

Riordan’s Percy Jackson series. The books revolve heavily around Greek mythology and give young readers a good look at the stories without addressing some of the more inappropriate elements to them. I wanted to be able to follow in this trend a little bit by taking myth and making it accessible to younger readers by putting it in the context of a comic book so it isn’t just a block of text. I know as a kid I always loved to flip through graphic novels, and if I had found one that was both graphic and mythology related, I would’ve lost my mind with excitement. This project, as weird as it sounds, is something that I wanted to see as a kid. Another main focus of this project was to address some lesser-known mythology. Greek myth is pretty well-known overall, so Icarus wasn’t really a risk and more of a passion project than anything else. Norse mythology, while having gotten a spotlight thanks to Marvel’s Thor, isn’t as consistently known. Japanese mythology doesn’t seem to have been something

Western cultures have picked up on very heavily, so it was fun to explore the culture and what myth means to Japanese people today. Native Alaskan myth was completely foreign to me and likely would be to most people. I really had to dig through the internet (and the Classics library in Ellis Hall) to find anything on Inuit myth, and I really loved doing that research. I hope that my taking these myths and turning them into a small collection of comics helps other people learn more about cultures with which they aren’t familiar.

The final point of this project was to take everything I learned over the course of my four years at Ohio University and to compile it into a single, tangible project. I took semesters of myth and culture courses through the Classics department and several tutorials on the generation of comics and graphic novels with Beth. If it were not for my opportunity to create tutorials that fell directly into my pool of interest, I would never have been able to organize a project of this scale. I was able to take three years to build on skills involving both adaptation and art in order to create this project. Having never made a comic prior to my first tutorial, my layouts and understanding of how pages work have both improved. Comparing my art from

2016 to my art from 2018 is jarring; I had not realized how much I had improved over the course of about two years. In the end that was another major part of this project for me: I was able to not only have a collection of four full comics, but also a relative timeline of my own skill as an artist.

PROCESS

Each of my comics followed the same general process. Thankfully, establishing that process with my first comic, Icarus, made producing the other three much faster and smoother.

This entire project started as a vanity tutorial; comic design has always been something in which I’ve had an interest in, so when presented with the opportunity to create one myself through a tutorial, I jumped at the chance. I had spent the past year or so taking classes and tutorials related to art and animation and had a design for Icarus in mind already. It only made sense to select that particular myth to adapt into a comic based on my previous work in both

Media Arts and Classics. On top of it being one of my favorite myths, I was able to utilize a design I had already created as opposed to starting completely from scratch.

Choosing the myths depended heavily on the length of the story and whether or not it could be appropriately adapted for younger audiences. My purpose was to ensure that these stories could be accessible to audiences who struggled to understand myth due to the density of the material and because of that, the stories could not be ones that included content that could be considered inappropriate (which meant no sex, but evidently, the murder of a giant crow-man made it through the screening). Once the myth was determined to be acceptable content-wise, I had to verify that it wasn’t too long to fit within my 12-page constraints. This length was not necessarily the easiest to aim for, but it wasn’t exceedingly long and allowed each myth to have more than enough page space to tell the story to its best potential without feeling rushed. A couple myths, such as Fenrir, needed to be stretched a bit and others needed to be shortened to fit that requirement. A Welsh myth that I had designed a couple of characters for ended up being scrapped completely due to the length of the myth itself; I could not adapt it to fit within 12 pages, and adding one at the end that was longer than the others would’ve thrown off the whole project.

The other three myths went through a completely different selection process. I had initially planned to make this a series of seven different myths before realizing that simply was far too ambitious of a project if I wanted the time to produce work of a professional quality.

However, I had still researched several potential myths from cultures I hadn’t been able to include (African, Welsh, Maori, and Mayan mythology had all been considered) on top of the three that I did utilize.

Research was fairly minimal for Fenrir; I knew a lot about Norse mythology prior to plotting out the comic, so research was very much a cursory glance over the assorted gods and making sure that I was getting the details of Fenrir’s story right. His story was fairly short, so I had to draw out some details and emphasize others. The two-pages about the chain Gleipnir wasn’t necessarily something I had expected to include when I was first plotting out the comic but I think that it added so much more to the story without feeling like the action was being delayed. My favorite part of the researching for this particular myth was looking into Norse runes for the cover. I had never really considered that as being a vital part of the comic, but I wanted to include the runes as I had included parts of the Greek alphabet for Icarus. The symbol on the cover of Fenrir’s comic means “to bind an enemy” and I found that both appropriate and aesthetically pleasing for the cover of a book, so I utilized it there and within the comic itself.

Sedna was one of my favorite myths to research. I didn’t know much about Native

Alaskan mythology and culture, so being able to track down websites and books to use for inspiration was really interesting. However, it did take me some time to figure out what myth I would be doing, and once I did decide, I needed to determine which version of the myth I wanted to utilize. Many tribes had different versions of Sedna’s story, so I had to go through and pick which one best reflected my purpose and had the content that I was comfortable with sharing. I had originally picked a totally different version of her myth in which she instead has… relations… with a dog man and has three dog-human-hybrid children but I figured that probably wasn’t appropriate and instead chose the version of the myth with the crow man. I personally prefer the version I adapted, but I sometimes do consider what the other version of this myth may have ended up being like had I made it instead.

Lastly, Urashima Tarō is a myth I was kind of familiar with, but not in a way I was aware of. The 2006 video game Okami was focused heavily on Japanese mythology and had a sub-plot that explored this particular myth. I had figured, upon playing the game for the first time, that it was simply something they had written for the game. When I read up on the myth this past year, though, I realized just how much influence the game developers had taken from mythology, and it made me much more excited to generate my own take on the story.

Once I finally had the myths picked out, it was a matter of taking each one individually and following a series of about eight steps to realize it as a full comic. These steps varied slightly from Icarus and Fenrir to Sedna and Urashima Tarō due to the differences in medium, but I will address that particular issue when I analyze of different ways of making the comics.

The first step following selection was adaptation. I had to take each myth and stretch/compress it to be about the length of a 12-page graphic novel, write out the narration so it made sense, and decide whether or not I wanted to include dialogue. Icarus had included dialogue, but none of the other myths really did; I feel that the more omniscient narrator voice told the story of the myth well enough without having to force dialogue. If I ever go back to

Icarus to update the art, I think I would alter the way the story was told to match the other three myths a bit better as well.

The second step was character design. I researched the culture the myth came from, their clothing, appearance, anything I could do to make the myth feel as accurate to the source material as possible. Icarus, again, suffered a bit for being the first comic. Despite knowing a lot about Greek culture through my education, that comic is more stylistic than the others. Once again, this is definitely something I would change if I come back to this project eventually.

Sedna in particular benefitted a lot from this step, however. I did a lot of research into Inuit fashion and style, so the characters were a lot of fun to design. I took a lot of subconscious inspiration from Avatar: The Last Airbender for this story and didn’t realize it until long after I had finished the comic. The color scheme of the comic, mainly blue with gradual introduction of reds and dark grays, was intended to really play off of the peaceful appearance of the ocean and its ability to quickly become violent. The third step is blocking. I would take a smaller sketchbook and draw quick sketches of the pages for the comic; I would place the boxes and the speech bubbles and do fast thumbnails of what I wanted inside each box. This step never took long to do, but it required a lot of focus because these pages were usually the bones on which I ended up building the comic. If something looked wrong on the main page, it would usually lend itself back to the thumbnail and the fact that I may have not focused enough on making sure everything looked okay early on.

The fourth step is dialogue and narration. This is when I would go in and fill all of the speech bubbles and ensure that the flow of the story made sense. Sometimes I would have to come back to this step later on in the process and alter dialogue or narration to make more sense with the images within the boxes, since it’s always possible for the thumbnail plan to change later on if something isn’t working.

The fifth step is full-on sketching. I would go through and typically sketch all 12 pages at once (or over the course of several days) to make sure that the boxes would look good with each other. Sometimes things would need to be adjusted in this stage, but it rarely affected the full comic. This stage also could cause some issues. If I couldn’t get a sketch right, I would leave certain panels blank while I moved past this step and come back to them later. There were a couple of panels in Urashima Tarō that I had to do this with and return to due to issues I had with making sure the panels lived up to my expectations. The next step is lineart. This can be even more finicky than sketching for me, but It really just includes finalizing the artwork and preparing for any coloring that would be happening. This step worked out to be much faster with Sedna and Urashima Tarō than with Icarus and Fenrir solely because I was doing the linework in ink. Once it was down, that was it; there is no undo button for traditional art, which caused me to be both more thoughtful with where I placed lines and take more slight risks with how I was doing the inking.

After that, all that was really left was color and shading. Depending on the myth, this could vary from full-color (Icarus) to mostly monochromatic (Sedna) and would be more or less difficult depending on what it was. Icarus took ages to color properly because I thought it was a great idea to do my first comic project in full-color. Urashima Tarō, with its grayscale color palette, made it so much easier on me. Once it was inked, I took a couple of alcohol markers and went to town. It took me maybe a couple of hours to do color blocking as opposed to the weeks I spent on Icarus.

The (actual) final step is to wrap everything up. This usually included any last-minute edits to dialogue or narration, little tweaks to color or artwork, and the cover and reverse cover images. After all of that, all that’s left is to put it all together and bind the books. The cover symbols were usually something from the culture associated with the myth.

Icarus has a delta (Δ), a Greek uppercase D, to symbolize his connection with his father,

Daedalus. Fenrir’s symbol, as mentioned earlier, is a Norse rune for “binding an enemy”.

Sedna’s symbol is one associated with the ocean. Urashima Tarō’s is simply the Japanese script for his name (浦島 太郎). The back covers, on the other hand, were meant to be small informational tidbits to give a bit of context for each myth. Icarus’s back cover grounds his myth in reality via geography. Fenrir’s explains a bit of rather difficult-to-understand Norse mythology. Sedna’s gives her story context in the religion of the people who told her story.

Urashima Tarō’s touches on ways his myth has been adapted in the modern day.

Book-binding was not something I had much experience with. Minus watching the occasional YouTube tutorial on how to do it (never with any real intent on doing it myself), actually doing it was a new experience for me. I really loved the idea of having physical copies of my comics, so making three sets of my work was actually… very cathartic. It was a very pleasant way to do a send-off to this project that I’ve invested actual years into, and I’m very happy with how they turned out.

I took each comic and had them professionally printed, front and back, before folding and punching holes through the paper. I then took thread and stitched the pages together and attached them into a small, faux-leather cover (also corresponding to the style of the myth) with the symbol of the myth on the front cover.

The medium of each comic was not really something I had considered to be different for any of them until I spent a semester in Los Angeles. My personal computer was not running

Photoshop the way it should’ve been, and drawing in large files like the ones I had used for

Icarus and Fenrir was not working out. It was frustratingly slow and I knew that I would need to figure something else out. After a lot of consideration, I decided I would try to do at least one of the comics traditionally. Sedna was a myth based around the ocean-- why not try to do watercolor? My lack of general knowledge regarding watercolor painting became very obvious when the pens I used to initially ink the comic with turned out not to be waterproof. I had to redraw and re-ink a solid portion of the comic because the smearing and bleeding was irredeemable.

Thankfully, though, the newer version of the comic turned out even better than the original one, despite my frustration and the loss of time.

The decision to do Urashima Tarō as a traditional comic as well didn’t quite appear until after I finished Sedna. Despite the delay due to the Ink Disaster of 2018, Sedna was an exponentially faster process than either of the first two comics. I knew that if I wanted to get this last comic done in time, it would be much smarter for me to simply do it traditionally. I finished it in a matter of weeks, as compared to a semester or longer for some of the other comics, and some of my favorite panels that I’ve ever drawn came out of that last comic. I’m so happy to be done with them all, though that won’t stop me from going in and nitpicking the art from two years ago.

PROPS

The props, much like this whole project in general, started out as kind of a vanity project. I’ve been doing cosplay as a hobby for nearly eight years and I wanted a chance to apply that knowledge to my school work. While discussing Icarus at some point during my research, it came up that crafting the wings was a real possibility for this project. I spent the spring break of my junior year accidentally hotboxing myself in my garage with spray paint fumes as I built life-size prosthetic wings with the intention of being able to rotoscope animate what Icarus would look like in motion. The wings were a huge hit, and everywhere I’ve taken them since they draw the attention of tons of people. They’ve gotten a little roughed up since last year, but I fully intend to fix them up and potentially display them at home.

Of course, this only ended up being an issue regarding the other three comics; if I made something for Icarus, it isn’t really fair to ignore the others and leave them simply as comics. So, as I made the other three comics, I kept in mind the fact that I could bring to life a certain part of them.

With Fenrir, the obvious choice was to make Gleipnir, the chain that would bind him until the apocalypse. I drew and still visualize the chain as golden, but for the physical, tactile version of it, I wanted to employ more of the myth. Gleipnir is made up of six impossible things that make it impossibly strong: the beard of a woman, the spittle of a bird, the breath of a fish, the sound of a cat’s footstep, the roots of a mountain, and the sinew of a bear. I wanted to embody those six things with six specific colors of embroidery thread and weave them together to make a rope about ten feet long. Obviously the original Gleipnir would’ve been much longer and stronger in order to contain a rampaging disaster wolf, but even being a scout as a child didn’t quite prepare me for the amount of braiding that would’ve needed to be done to make it even longer than it did end up being.

I had some interesting issues trying to decide what I wanted to make for Sedna’s myth.

She didn’t really have anything specific in the story, so I turned to the more physically recognizable look to the bird man. I had considered making his raven-feather cloak, but dealing with that many feathers was rather daunting, so I went for his mask instead. Having never been forced to make a papier-mâché volcano in elementary school, this was a brand new process for me and I proceeded to make an absolute mess out of it. I used bird-skull-shaped wall decoration that my mom had as a base, covered it in foil, and layered papier-mâché all over it.

Once it was dry, I primed it with watered-down glue, and painted it with the design I used in my comic. It was a much bigger hassle than I ever expected it to be, but I did come out of it with a cool hat so I’m not complaining.

And finally, Urashima Tarō. I knew that, having absolutely no carpentry skills whatsoever, I would need to find a small box or chest that would work as the box gifted to him by the princess Otohime. Upon my supply trip to Joann Fabrics to get the embroidery thread for

Fenrir, I found an assortment of boxes that were suitable. I debated for a while before deciding on the hexagonal box you see in the comic now. I slapped some glue onto it and rolled it in decorative sand, attached several seashells, and bound it with twine to make it a little more nautical in theme. This, out of all four, was the only prop I made prior to the final comic, so I was able to use it as reference for whenever I drew it in. It was a little weird to be able to be so free with its design, but it was a welcome change after having to painstakingly recreate the mask from Sedna’s comic.

CONCLUSION

I think one of the most interesting parts about this project is the fact that I can see how my art has developed over the past two years. While that doesn’t really sound like that long of a time, when I’ve been drawing near-constantly the improvement is fairly major. Not only has the quality of my art improved, but my understanding of comics and plotting out panels and things like that has also gotten better overall. I know how to lay out pages and boxes so they will complement each other instead of distract. I have a much better grasp on narration and adaptation of stories, of character design, and of art as a whole. It kills me to look through the

Icarus comic because the entire time my hands are itching to redraw it. While I doubt that will be happening any time soon, I’m glad that I can look at it and know that I’ve improved. Since I couldn’t stop myself, here’s a comparison of one of the original Icarus panels versus one that I redrew for this paper:

I learned more than I ever really thought I would from this project. The composition of comics and graphic novels is so much more complicated than I would’ve guessed, and I still have so much to learn. I want to be able to take everything that I’ve learned through researching this process and apply it to several ideas I have for webcomics and hopefully

(maybe) get something published someday. I don’t really know how to go about doing that, but

I feel like this project has given me more tools than I ever assumed I would need to begin that process and I’m incredibly excited about it!

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