Odysseus on the Brain? Let’s Talk to Gareth Hinds About His Own Odyssey!

Dunno if you happened to notice, but last week Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey appeared in theaters everywhere. It’s sort of “AN EVENT” (all caps) and it got me to thinking about what we have to offer on the children’s literature side of things. I mean, I know that in my library every single adult translation of The Odyssey is checked out right now (they’re even checking out the physical audiobooks on CD!!!). But the George O’Connor Olympians series only sort of covered it with Ares, and sure we have that fantastic new Erin Bow book that talks about it via a cat and a raven on quest (Witchward Bound), but do we have a straight up graphic novel adaptation to turn to?

We do. And we have for a while.

The Odyssey by Gareth Hinds was originally released in 2010 but this is the kind of material that simply does not age. Plus Gareth’s the kind of guy unafraid to adapt Shakespeare into graphic novels for crying out loud (the fact that he once tackled The Merchant of Venice still floors me). Today, he stopped by to discuss the re-release of one of his best known, and best beloved, titles:

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Betsy Bird: Gareth! Boy, it’s just absolutely lovely getting a chance to talk to you about some of your work today. I know you’re releasing a deluxe edition of your Odyssey from a number of years ago, as well as preparing for the release of The Aeneid in early 2027. I’ve any number of questions to lob at you, but let’s just get the ball rolling with some basics. You’ve specialized in graphic novel adaptations of classics (be they Shakespeare or Poe) for any number of years. The idea of tackling something as epic as Homer doesn’t even begin to describe how daunting such a project would be. What was your initial impetus for creating these books?

Gareth Hinds: I’ve always liked old stories. I loved Beowulf, Homer, and Shakespeare when I read them in high school. For my senior thesis in art school I wanted to do a graphic novel—but I knew I wouldn’t have time to both write and draw an original story, and I also felt like my writing was the weak link in my previous attempts at comics, so I decided to adapt an existing story—a Brothers Grimm fairy tale called “Bearskin.” I really enjoyed that process, and I was able to self-publish Bearskin with just enough success to make me think I should try adapting something a little more well-known. I wanted something that connected ancient literature to the modern superhero genre, which was the mainstream of the comics industry, so I decided to do Beowulf (again self-published). Beowulf sold reasonably well in comic shops, but when I took it to an English teachers’ convention, that changed everything! Teachers were so excited to have this as a tool to introduce young people to the classics—I literally could not process sales and sign books fast enough. Knowing that there was a real need for these books, and that I could help give students (and even adults) who struggle with these works a more positive experience—maybe even help them love these stories the way I do—was a huge inspiration for me to continue to adapt the classics. 

Around that time my work was featured in The Boston Globe, and Liz Bicknell at Candlewick Press saw the article and called me with an offer to re-publish Beowulf plus whatever classic I was adapting next. Candlewick was just getting into graphic novels, and they really knew and appreciated the educational market, so my books were a great fit for their list. I’ve been working with them on all my classic adaptations ever since, with the exception of Graceling—which I’d call a “modern classic” (my collaboration with Kristin Cashore, published by Clarion Books).

BB: I had no idea it all started with Bearskin (one of my favorite tales). Wow. So I know that your The Odyssey initially came out in 2010 and The Iliad in 2019. With the release of The Aeneid next year, what lessons have you learned in the intervening 17 years? What did you do differently in The Aeneid that you may have wished you’d done with The Odyssey?

GH: One thing I (and Candlewick) definitely learned from The Odyssey is that for a book of that length and complexity, you have to leave a lot of editing time at the end, because otherwise you run out of time to fix things. With The Aeneid we built more time into the schedule, so the finished book is much more polished, and the drawings are both more consistent and (in my opinion) more beautiful.

Also this book contains more backmatter than The Iliad (which had a lot) and The Odyssey (which had relatively little).  With each of my books I’ve done increasing amounts of research and consulted with more scholars—in part because so many scholars have been discovering my work and are excited about helping me bring their favorite stories to life in sequential art. I’ve been bowled over by the generous amounts of time many of them have given to reviewing The Aeneid at multiple stages. Their insights have helped me understand these stories better and they’ve made the adaptation process even more interesting. I still allow myself a lot of artistic license, but now my decisions are usually informed by insights from experts, which feels great, and hopefully makes my books even more valuable tools for readers and educators. 

One specific thing that’s very different: I was able to retell The Odyssey without any third-person narration, but because  The Iliad and The Aeneid are so much more complicated, I found I had to use narration to convey the plot. That gave me the opportunity to include and/or illustrate some of the amazing metaphors used by Homer and Virgil, though using narration also made it more challenging to keep the right balance between text and images. 

BB: Along the same lines, did The Aeneid pose any special challenges that you hadn’t encountered before? 

GH: Although it’s technically shorter than The Iliad or The Odyssey, The Aeneid includes a lot of material and covers a ton of ground visually and geographically, making it challenging to abridge without losing important bits. I also found that I could best capture the tone of the poem’s narration and the grandeur of its major speeches by writing them in iambic pentameter. That was an extra challenge that I almost certainly wouldn’t have tried earlier in my career. 

Another challenge was that I had complex feelings about The Aeneid when I first read it—both because it is so obviously inspired by Homer, and because it was essentially commissioned by Augustus Caesar as part of a PR campaign to convince the Roman people that he was a god. But young fans of my Odyssey and Iliad were asking me for The Aeneid (believe it or not!), and the more I discussed the poem and its history with scholars, the more interested I became in capturing the scope and poetry of Virgil’s epic, showing the fall of Troy, and dissecting the poem’s role as propaganda and a creation myth for Rome. After working with it for over three years, I really do love it, and I hope readers of my adaptation will too!

BB: Here’s a question. There are innumerable translations of The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid out there. When you’re selecting the text for these books, is there a particular translator or source that you prefer to use? 

GH: With each of these adaptations, I’ve compared many translations before getting to work on my script. What I found was that I needed to re-write the text in my own words in order to get it down to a reasonable length for a graphic novel. I would read a section in my 3-4 favorite translations, then put them aside and write my own version. For The Odyssey and The Iliad those were Fitzgerald, Fagles, Lattimore, and E.V Rieu. (I did my books before Emily Wilson published her translations, otherwise her name would absolutely be in that mix.) For The Aeneid I again used Fagles and Fitzgerald, but I found my #1 favorite was Shadi Bartsch, and I also used the side-by-side version by H.R. Fairclough.

BB: Glad you mentioned Emily Wilson in there (and makes sense that you were doing all of this before her translations). You’ve already alluded to them, but I’m curious about the responses you’ve received to these books over the years? How are people finding them, using them, and enjoying them? 

GH: I’ve been incredibly gratified by the responses to these books. The Odyssey has been especially popular—in large part because it’s been adopted by teachers and schools all over the country (most often in middle and high school, but sometimes also at the college level)—but both The Odyssey and The Iliad routinely show up on school summer reading lists, get touted on social media by homeschoolers, and make their way into the hand of kids much younger than I ever would have expected. I get fan mail all the time from parents and grandparents of kids as young as 6 who write to tell me how much their kids love these books and read them over and over again. I’ve also had a few people reach out to me to say that they became classics majors as adults because they fell in love with my adaptations as kids—what could be cooler than that? 

BB: With the completion of The Aeneid, is this the final leg in a kind of trilogy, or are you not quite done with the Greeks yet? And what are you working on next? 

GH: I do think these three books make a great cohesive trilogy about the Trojan War—but I’m not done with the ancient world just yet. My wife Alison Morris and I are collaborating on a nonfiction picture book set in Classical Greece, so I’m just moving a few hundred years forward in time for that. I haven’t committed yet to my next graphic novel adaptation, so I honestly don’t know what’s next (and I’ve got a very long “wish list” of titles I’d love to tackle!). But I think there’s a strong likelihood that at some point I’ll adapt another classic text with connections to Homer/Virgil.

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Love all of this. Huge thanks to Gareth for taking the time to talk to me today. You can order the all new edition of The Odyssey right now and look for The Aeneid March 16, 2027. Also, he’s currently doing a Flat Odysseus challenge (in the vein of Flat Stanley) that is officially a hoot. Check it out!

Filed under: Interviews