Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Comic!
I had the initial idea to produce a graphic novel of the Metamorphoses when I was an undergraduate student at John Cabot University, in Rome. Like many of us who have dedicated our lives to the study of the ancient world, I was introduced to classical mythology at a young age. I heard my teachers read out the stories of Icarus and Daedalus, Theseus and the Minotaur, Hercules’ Twelve Labors and others. I not only heard, but also saw, picture books being naturally filled with colorful illustrations.
Since then, I have had a yearning not only to know, but also to see the classical world. I’m not too old for picture books — no one is — but I have moved beyond synthesized and sanitized versions of ancient myths. I am now a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, aiming for a career in academia. I read original texts, printed in black-and-white by Oxford or Harvard University Press.
Yet I have not abandoned my colorful childhood fantasies about the ancient world. It is a natural part of reading to imagine a world of shapes, colors, and movements behind the black-and-white text, but for me the scenes and pictures in my head are so intense that I cannot keep them all inside. In July of 2014, I finally decided to turn my favorite poem (and subject of my PhD), Ovid’s Metamorphoses, into a graphic novel. Just over two years later, I am up to almost fifty pages, with a readership that spans seventeen countries and five continents (according to Google Analytics, at time of writing).
At the time I was first considering the comic, the movie 300 (2006) — based on Frank Miller’s 1998 graphic novel of the same name — was still fresh in our minds. Clash of the Titans (2010) had just been released, and the bile-like taste of Troy (2004) still wasn’t quite washed from our mouths. It was a moment of both increased interest in classical myth and history, and a time when movie studios butchered classic tales for box office profit.
I don’t expect 100% historical accuracy — after all, 300 is about as faithful to the historical Battle of Thermopylae as the Iliad is to the historical Trojan War. Nevertheless, I felt dismayed at what I saw as unambitious and cynical Hollywood schemes to mine the ancient world for cheap plotlines.
I will reserve further criticism of this era in filmmaking (except to say that I have warmed to 300 slightly since then) — my point is that audiences were hungry for the ancient world, but were fed with sanitized and distorted pap. Against this backdrop, I wanted a means to let people see what I saw in ancient texts; I wanted them to see it in vivid color, and have it thrill them like the blockbuster movies had.
At the same time, another medium was rising in prominence, one that I felt could give me the means I needed: webcomics. They began appearing online in the late 1990s and early 2000s. For the first few years, they tended to be poorly drawn, poorly written, convoluted, escapist fantasies. Nevertheless, there was something quite compelling about them: they were uncensored, often unedited, and came straight from the creators. Readers could follow updates as they were created or binge-read archives, usually for free. Moreover, both sides could engage in an on-going discussion of the content, thanks to blogs, comment sections, and forums. The medium, for all its early crudeness, offered possibilities to artists and writers like never before.
Webcomics have improved over the years, partly due to the growth of the medium, which brought in new artists and saw the old ones improve with experience, and partly thanks to influence from the Japanese manga style, which helped give rise to the strong tradition of magical realism and biographical narrative in webcomics — check out MegaTokyo (2000-) as an early example. With expansion and increased relevance came the propagation of genres. Webcomics diverged and evolved to aggressively target specific readers. My fellow PhD students are often fans of PHD Comics (1997-), and I have yet to find a mathematician, engineer, or physicist who doesn’t read XKCD (2005-).
I read broadly (I am currently following twenty-eight webcomics), and I try to read like a writer. I look at what is being done in my favorite comics, from the writing to the art to the interactions between authors and readers, and learn from it. Many comics found success when they blended certain key elements in their writing: diversity, alternative narratives, and magical realism. There also seems to be a general affinity for topics such as philosophy, transhumanism, alternative religion, and alternative politics.
All of these are elements and themes of the Metamorphoses. The characters, places and even generic modes of the poem are quite diverse; the poem’s interest in gender and the non-male experience makes it quite topical today as well. The episodic narrative style suits the comic format, and keeps readers guessing at what the next story’s style will be. Philosophy, religion and politics are constant themes. Finally, transhumanism and magical realism are the bread and butter of the Metamorphoses’ plot.
I asked myself, whether the Metamorphoses might translate well to the webcomic format, or even excel in popularity, and I am still waiting for the answer. Despite being two years old, the comic is in its relative infancy. Many webcomics don’t find success or many readers in the first few years; they are kept going by the sheer will of their (usually amateur) creators. While I am proud to have garnered the readership I have, including a few Latin teachers who have told me they use my comic in their classes, there is still much to be done to fully connect my comic and website to the wider webcomics world. This connection is fundamental not only to my success as a creator, but also to the comic’s success in generating conversations about Ovid and the reception of classical mythology in the digital age.
One of the most fascinating aspects of webcomics is the medium’s reliance on paratext. That is, the materials surrounding the main text: the website, the blog, the comments section, and social media. In 2015, I presented to the Classical Association Conference (CA) in Bristol on the potential for webcomics to develop critical communities outside of academia. I was especially intrigued by comics such as Happle Tea (2009-) and Hark! A Vagrant (2006-), which draw on, among others, classical mythology and history to create short-concept humor comics. Their comics are not only well researched, but also come with blog posts and discussion among readers about the ancient sources behind them.
Neither comic is written by an academic (although Kate Beaton, author of Hark! A Vagrant, has a degree in history and a background in museum work). Likewise, their readership includes many non-academics, who engage with the authors on their subject matter through forums and comments, creating a kind of network of amateur classicists. This is the audience I hoped to target when I launched my comic.
After I had determined that a comic based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses could fit well into the webcomics medium, and that the medium had cultivated audiences keen to engage with authors on classical subjects, all I needed to do was decide how to execute the project.
This proved easier said than done: I am not a trained artist, nor did I have much experience in writing comics at the time. I had only a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, a copy of Photoshop, and a dream. During my time as an undergraduate, I worked to learn figure drawing so I could actually use those things. I was fortunate to have a friend, Massimo Menghella, who wrote the Italian-language webcomic Rotte Clandestine, and gave me what guidance he could over coffee breaks while we worked our respective jobs. My greatest fear was that I would end up butchering the art and turning off readers. I struggled until I felt that I could produce something that would begin to do justice to the epic weight of the Metamorphoses.
In 2014, I launched the first few pages, which covered the proem and the introduction to the cosmogony (creation of the universe). I had settled on a pseudo-vector style of art that combined a limited colour palette with line drawings. Here is what it looks like:
Webcomics readers are used to a variety of art styles but still expect a certain clarity of drawing and a balance between cartoonish-ness (the western influence) and realism (the Japanese manga influence). So I followed the principles of Andrew Loomis’ guides to figure drawing, combined with a manga-style awareness of background detail.
The comic’s art is not only an aesthetic question — it needs to be able to help tell the story. The art must stand in for the poem’s descriptive passages. This meant I needed to be very careful in how I depicted people, objects and actions. Ovid’s text is very self-referential, and character types, situations, and even bits of scenery repeatedly show up throughout the poem. Whenever I draw a scene, I need to think about how I will end up referring to that scene artistically the next time it is repeated. The art has to be handled as carefully and with as much attention to the future as the text does. It is a difficult aspect of translating the Metamorphoses that might not be apparent to those unfamiliar with the text.
The writing of the comic is thus a balancing act between text and representation. I realized before launching the comic that I wanted to stick very close to Ovid’s text. I had abandoned ideas such as adapting the Metamorphoses into a modern fairy tale — such as in the webcomic Things Change (2006–2009) — or creating an abridged version. Luckily, webcomics can have long lifespans, and the medium is well known for some narratives that take years to unfold.
I decided on one guiding principal for my translation and adaptation: “if Ovid describes it, I will draw it; if he says it, I will write it.” This has meant that I go through the Metamorphoses line-by-line, taking into account each word as a part of the sum total that makes this poem excellent. My process is long, and I have not even finished the first of fifteen books in my two years of writing. Nevertheless, I feel that I am creating something that is truly a direct (not objective) translation of the Metamorphoses which is my singular hope for this project.
The writing process starts with the text. I divide the lines of the poem into sections for individual pages. Usually, these sections are about 10-lines long, but can be as short as two lines (see page 2), or over 20 (see page 13).
Having defined the section and produced a “school-kid” (i.e., as literal as possible) translation, I write a panel-by-panel script. I try to keep the characters’ dialogue and Ovid’s narration (where I include it directly) true to the sense of the Latin, but update it to sound more familiar to modern audiences. With this script defined, I draw, using a combination of my graphics tablet (I’ve since upgraded to a Wacom Intuos Pro) and Photoshop.
My specific techniques have changed over time and are still evolving, along with the format of the text-bubbles and the translations below the comic. It’s all part of the process of refining the comic as I go, taking into account feedback from readers and new developments in the worlds of translation and webcomics.
I am proud of the small readership I have garnered already. I am particularly thrilled by the readers who tell me that my blog posts are almost as interesting as the comic itself. Each comic comes with a blog entry that includes the corresponding lines of the Metamorphoses with my translation, a discussion of the literary and scholarly background to the lines, and any relevant notes on the production of the given page.
I was inspired to do such detailed blog posts mostly by Happle Tea, whose author outlines his background research, usually with a humorous tone. His blogs are a delight to read and quite informative. I adopted his style, but also drew on the scholarly tradition of textual commentaries. Because I go line-by-line when adapting the comic, I often make recourse to commentaries on the Metamorphoses, such as the Fondazione Valla series or Bömer’s commentary, citing the commentators’ notes and adding a few of my own. This makes my blog posts into a kind of commentary themselves; they are unique, however, in that they are aimed at the general public, not academics or even students. It is one of the small ways I hope to introduce and popularize academic practices among my readers.
I do not want to leave my readers with the impression that I am “objective” in my treatment of Ovid, however. While I try to take into account scholarly opinions and historical contexts, my comic is a fundamentally subjective exercise. The attention to detail comes not from a quest for “authenticity” but from a desire to communicate what it is like to read Ovid as an Ovidian scholar. I know that there are many great textual translations of the Metamorphoses, and that my readers don’t need me to tell them the story perfectly. When they come to read my comic, readers are essentially getting a glimpse inside my head while I read Ovid.
Subjectivity allows my comic to innovate in the details. I can choose how to dress my characters and fill in the blanks where Ovid doesn’t explicitly describe things. It is not an entirely new strategy for translation, but it has not been done, to my knowledge, in the realm of webcomics before.
Developing new paradigms for translation and webcomics has always been an important goal for this project. As you have seen, this article has been as much about my own sources of inspiration as it has been about my work. I see my comic as the sum total of my literary interests, and as my way of giving back to both a discipline (Classics) and a medium (webcomics) that have given me so much. In turn, I hope to inspire other creators and readers to think more critically, even more laterally about engagement with ancient texts. I want to simultaneously show my fellow classicists the possibilities for online and multimedia engagement.
The results are yet to be seen. Nevertheless, I am proud of what I have accomplished so far. I went from not being able to draw or code a website to taking my vision of the Metamorphoses to people the world over. All the while, I have immersed myself in the black and white of the text, drawing out its vivid colors and painting them for the whole world to see.
Charlotte Northrop is a PhD student in Classics working on characterisation in Ovid’s Metamorphoses at the University of Cambridge (St. Catharine’s College). She writes the Metamorphoses webcomic in her spare time.
