Jessai Flores

Graphic novelist and artist Gareth Hinds read “The Odyssey” for the first time in high school. His teacher could tell that he enjoyed it then, so much so, he told me, that “We were reading a section of ‘The Iliad’ and my teacher handed me ‘The Odyssey’ and she said you’re gonna really like this.” She was right. Hinds has spent his career coloring in Homer’s lines.

In the first installment of the Directed Studies spring series of colloquiua last Tuesday, Hinds presented to the program about his work adapting classics like “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” into graphic novels. Hinds has adapted not only Homer’s epics but also several of Shakespeare’s plays, including “Romeo and Juliet,” “King Lear” and “Beowulf.” He is currently working on an adaptation of Vergil’s “Aeneid.” (That announcement elicited an excited gasp from the Directed Studies crowd. Nerds.)

Hinds has had a talent for art since he was in elementary school. When Hinds writes and illustrates a graphic novel version of a classic, he reads it in as many translations as he can find, over and over, until he can decide how he wants to retell it, and what colors and lines and shapes he wants to use to represent the tale for what he takes it to mean. Hinds explained, “I was basically getting around my own writing weaknesses by choosing the greatest texts in the canon [to adapt].” He’s participating in a tradition of translation too, translating narratives from poetry to art. He’s narrating old stories anew.

After he had some success in publishing, Hinds realized that the market for his graphic novels was kids, school-age and younger, but also their teachers. Teachers don’t teach “The Odyssey” for students to memorize facts about the heroes or gods that it depicts. It’s not taught in as many high schools as it is only for the quality of the poetry either (most read it in translation from ancient Greek — but who knows who wrote it anyway?). Teachers teach the classics, like Homer’s epics, because they preserve some truth about our world that we can still appreciate these 2,000 years later. There’s little else that gives us that access to the past. Professor of Classics Pauline LeVen quoted another professor who says, “We don’t read these texts [“The Odyssey” and “Romeo and Juliet”] because they’re great. They’re great because we read them.” We will always be reading and rewriting them. Hinds thinks so too.

In his lecture, Hinds displayed the technology he uses to write and illustrate his graphic novels. Homer could never have imagined the tools Hinds has access to. There’s a geometry to a panel of a graphic novel; Hinds can pace Homer’s stories how he wants by manipulating that geometry, shrinking some boxes and flattening others. Hinds suggested in his presentation that there is a rhythm to that pacing that is poetic. Once Hinds had his margins laid out and panels squared away for us on the screen, he then got to do his magic. Professor LeVen told me, “my favorite part [of his presentation] was seeing Mr. Hinds drawing in real time and making the head of Menelaus emerge out of three strokes of his pen!” The Menelaus Hinds drew may not have looked like one Homer imagined. But he’s Menelaus nonetheless. Professor LeVen added, “this was a fascinating opportunity to see poiesis.” 

Poiesis is a Greek term for the process of making something new. Hinds’ “Odyssey” is a tale of characters and adventures and questions he imagined anew, through poiesis. 

Hinds had to arrange and rearrange the three lines that made up Menelaus’ head a few times over until he was satisfied (and I’m sure he will change it some more before he finalizes that panel). The lines were there from the start. He just had to play with them. I asked Professor LeVen what students like ourselves might take away from this part of his presentation and she answered that “finishing a draft is the most crucial part of the process: once you’ve conceived of all the pieces, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, (even if not initially in that order) you can rework them as much as you want, and share that draft to get feedback. That is true for an academic paper or a creative endeavor: but you need to have that finished draft out to get to the genius piece that is in your head.” 

There’s a method to the business of essay-writing. There’s research to do and rubrics to follow and drafts to write. We can program our brains to crank out essays and problem sets and presentations. But that gets boring. There’s opportunity for poiesis everywhere in education, if we seek it out.

Hinds’ advice to aspiring artists, or to students with essays to write, is to pay attention to the mechanics of the method while remembering that when you are writing or drawing or doing math, you are doing poiesis. Hinds is a particularly talented artist. But he encourages everyone to draw, or create whatever they can. “I think it’s rewarding to make art for its own sake,” he said. He’s made a career out of it.

Hinds thinks kids and adults alike should always be making art. Kids should “keep drawing even into adulthood even if it’s not something that they’re making a living at,” he insisted. He elaborated on the importance of method: “one of the most rewarding mental experiences we can have is [entering] the flow state, and one of the fairly reliable ways to get into the flow state is drawing or writing something that you know requires some application of skill but is not high stakes.” In the context of interpreting the classics, or even in the context of doing math, the methods that we use are not new. Perhaps Hinds’ methods would be new to Homer, yes. We don’t write and do math so that we can retain information about subject-verb agreement or theorems about calculus, though those are important. Hinds doesn’t write graphic novels because he loves adjusting the margins on pages of panels. 

Our education should be about poiesis. And even though to me it looked like Hinds was performing magic by drawing Menelaus on the screen, that drawing didn’t come from nothing. You have to understand and appreciate the old if you want to try to do anything new. And if you want to appreciate the new, go check out one of Hinds’ books from Sterling. They are beautiful.