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| Ross MacDonald illustrates the cover of Penguin's edition of Graves' Greek Myths (2012). |
Ross MacDonald has made Greek mythology even cooler with his
illustrated cover of Graves’ Greek Myths (Penguin
Deluxe Classics 2012). The original comic strip narrates an amusing history of
the gods from Gaia and Ouranos right through to our present. With a few learned, but decidedly stylized strokes,
this master of modern satirical comicbook-illustration steals the show from a
blockbuster reprint that delivers Robert Graves’ lapidary
classicism behind a splashy cameo by Rick Riordan. MacDonald’s contribution is
the most rewarding element of this marketing flash.
Robert Graves (1895 – 1987) filled the middle of the
Twentieth Century with literary classics such as I, Claudius, love poems, and translations of Apuleius and Suetonius for Penguin.
His encyclopedic The
Greek Myths, appeared first in 1955, “the first modern dictionary” on the
subject. Though it was set in a two-volume format, Graves’ Mythology packed even more learning into subsequent editions that
soon followed in 1957 and 1960. The current Penguin version weighs in with
nearly 800-pages and includes each of Graves’ introductions. The Graves
collection is the peerless English
account of all those myths and offers a truly stirring array of most variants
for all those variegated myths and collects all the documentation to assure that
you’ve got all the material to back them up. Did I say "all"?
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| Ross MacDonald starts his theogony with Gaia and Ouranos taking a Hollywood dip. |
Don’t judge this book by its cover. MacDonald’s 10-frame
strip belies the tome’s stolid, rechercée interior dustiness. Gaia and Ouranos fill
the first frame, headlined by the caption “With Incest, Betrayals”. A couple
embraces: he clothed in stars, all square-jawed, Bryl-creamed and darkling.
Iconically, the image of the ringed planet Saturn holds his cape on his pecs.
He dips his dreamy lover back in a moment of passion; she, in a verdant
plunging gown, coos from her in the speech balloon “Ooh, Son…” Never mind the
apparent confusion between Cronus (Saturn) and his father Ouranos (Uranus). Open
to Graves 6.a to confirm that “Uranus fathered the Titans upon Mother Earth.”
MacDonald’s cover tells quickly how the gods came, affected
humanity, and then abandoned us once. The graphic myth riffs on Marvel and DC
prototypes. The gods “all seemed to just … vanish!” In frame seven, astonished
Gothamites in circa-1945 suits and fedoras look longingly into the empty skies
above their metropolis, and only a winged oxford of a departing Hermes leaves
at super-heroic speed the cloudy blue globe far below in frame eight. Frames
nine and ten bring the double perspective tableaux, as a caped-crusader Ares
ponders dusk-lit skyscrapers, “waiting” like the Dark Knight himself to descend
and resolve human ills once more. The gaudy
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| Ross MacDonald's Ares broods over the Gotham-dämmerung. |
For me the image of Artemis on the front flyleaf is the most
clever of all the mythological vignettes here. Is it the virgin-huntress’s icy-blue
skintone? Is it that pesky bustier, or the subliminally fertile crescent moon on
her brow that attracts? MacDonald imagines Artemis in eye-glasses, like a co-ed
from Barnard. She of the winsome smile and a quiver-full of lethal darts. Caveat
Actaeon! The ingeniously bespectacled Artemis is the best moment in this
cleverly divine apparatus. The back flyleaf has Perseus and Medusa and
Andromeda in no apparent interaction; amongst them Icarus incongruously skirts
super-heroically near the sun. Open Graves 73.k to read of the connection
between Perseus, Andromeda, and the Gorgon, then his note to learn how it’s all
related to Marduk and Isaiah and Astarte the
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| Ross MacDonald's Artemis of Morningside Heights? |
Riordan’s contribution to this whole enterprise deserves
attention. Penguin won’t let us overlook it. It’s even billed on the book’s
spine. The seven-page introduction tells the warmly familiar story of how Riordan came to write
the Percy Jackson series to help his son cope. Graves’ Myths
were reportedly instrumental. And since Riordan’s days in the middle-school
classroom, Graves informed his mythological research. So, here is the apprentice’s homage to his venerable forebear. I can’t help thinking, though,
that the best thing about the Percy books is their modulation of classical myth
to our normalized world. How unlike Graves they actually are. Haley Riordan,
Rick’s son, was blessed by his father’s creative adaptation of classical myths
to the world he was learning to endure. Thumbing the nose at stodginess of
classical narratives, Percy and his creator have ridden the elevator to the top
of the heap. The result, Percy Jackson and 33 million copies sold. Tables
turned, Penguin now uses Riordan to market Graves.
I’ll keep using Graves. The marketing sleight of hand won’t
put me off. I hope, however, that Penguin does not confuse the market and
undermine the availability of its more nimble handbook, The Penguin Dictionary of Classical Mythology by P. Grimal, ed. by
Stephen Kershaw from A.R. Maxwell-Hyslop’s translation (Penguin Reference
1991). [My current copy is a 2009 reprint.] That's where I'll send my students for a paperback dictionary of Greek myths. The Grimal/Kershaw Dictionary
goes so much more easily into the backpack and delivers the information you
need for most myths without Graves’ hit-and-miss speculation on the origins of
all things. Save Graves for the library; take Grimal/Kershaw into the field.
And Ross MacDonald’s comic book theogony? Though utterly out
of place on this book, MacDonald has produced a genuinely amusing addition to
the modern reception of classical myth.
— M
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