By Patrick Callahan
Holt, Jordan. Theseus. Carthage Press, 2021–2023. 2 vols.
Adapting material from Ancient Greek myth for a modern audience is not new in Western popular culture. Christopher Nolan’s forthcoming adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey, following seven years after the Assassin’s Creed video game installment of the same name, testifies to society’s persistent entertainment and fascination with legendary heroes and the monsters they slew throughout the archaic Mediterranean. And this is to say nothing of the slew of contemporary novels, from Terence Hawkins’s Rage of Achilles (2009) to Madeline Miller’s Circe (2018), populating themed displays at bookstores across the United States. When it comes to graphic novels, the medium is immersed in a cultural inheritance from antiquity: Wonder Woman, Detective Comics’ most famous heroine, takes her Amazonian identity from the legendary “de-breasted” (a-mazonos) followers of Artemis. Indeed, Greco-Roman art and drama have influenced the artistic style and storytelling patterns of comic books ever since the form’s arguable beginnings in illuminated editions of these very myths and histories.
Jordan Holt’s Theseus (2021-2023) contributes to both the ongoing cultural interest in Ancient Greece and the tradition of Classical influence on the comic medium through its webcomic treatment of the myth of its titular hero. Holt’s background as a communication arts professor at Lee University gives him the academic chops to defend his innovative take on Theseus while his skills as a comics artist make his work pleasantly accessible to a non-academic readership: a rare combination among those in the ivory tower! In the three hundred and sixteen colorful pages of the two physical volumes released thus far, Holt brings to life the early travails of the legendary Athenian hero most famous for his labyrinthian confrontation with the Minotaur. But reader, beware: there is no Minotaur in these pages, only raging bulls and mazes of figurative sorts serving as precursors to the eventual conclusion of the tale – a conclusion promised, as the back cover of Volume Two teases, in a forthcoming third installment. The comic in the meantime provides plenty of action, showing an under-confident but surprisingly capable teenaged son of royalty making his harrowing journey from the town of Troezen to the city of Athens, armed with his father’s aesthetically unappealing sword and sandals that his mother insists he must don for the journey. Theseus excels both in its visual storytelling and adaptation of its sources, consistently amusing readers with its hero’s impish antics—even if some of Holt’s specific narrative decisions risk detracting readers from the webcomic’s Ancient Greek environment.
Modern renditions of Greek myth are quick to pay homage to the source material they adapt, and generally, their authors’ remarks include modest acknowledgements of the ways in which their stories depart from that material. Holt continues the practice of documenting his ancient sources, but he does so with a degree of self-deprecation and fourth wall breaking befitting of his cheeky take on the legend of Theseus. On the copyright page of both volumes, the following disclaimer sets the tone for the panels and pages to come: “This graphic novel is based upon the account of Theseus’ life as penned by Plutarch in the beginning of the 2nd century AD, ruined and illustrated by Jordan Holt.” On the back cover of each volume, in ink-brushed capital letters, our author further emphasizes the degree of his departure from Plutarch’s biography with the following warning: “THIS IS THE DEFINITELY INACCURATE STORY BEHIND THE MYTH”. Such statements indicate the type of novelization that Holt’s readers can expect, for Theseus is as much a tribute to the creative practices of the broader Ancient Mediterranean world as it is a faithful adaptation of one particular version of the myth written eighteen centuries ago.
The escapades and Classical allusions in these two volumes reward the reader approaching them with some prior experience with Plutarch and the world in which he lived. Plutarch, the Imperial Greek biographer renowned for his series of parallel lives of famous Greeks and Romans, preserved for us many of the multiple, competing versions of the myths of these two cultures. He lived and wrote at a time of rampant sophistry as Rome’s dominion over the Greek-speaking parts of the Mediterranean led many Greek authors to retreat into the labyrinth of their own eight-centuries-old literary tradition. More often than not, their retreat produced sharply self-aware texts whose apparent signs of scholarly erudition betrayed their authors’ claims of scholarly ignorance. Holt charmingly celebrates this sophistic tradition by including many sweeping references of his own to various elements of Greco-Roman myth that might not have been expected from someone so quick to deny his familiarity with his source material.
Holt’s disclaimer about his novel’s “definite inaccuracies” also recalls the writings of Lucian, Plutarch’s Syrian contemporary whose True Histories – a parody of Homer’s Odyssey in which the main character visits not only the underworld, but also the moon – begins with a similar sentiment: “Those who happen upon this book,” Lucian writes, “should know that I only tell lies.” Holt’s retention of the parodic element sets his webcomic apart from other adaptations of Classical works, many of which risk taking their subject matter more seriously than their contemporary audiences would have. Both volumes of Theseus contain four chapters, each of which is introduced in Greek characters (minus their diacritical marks, in Volume One) and a quotation from a Classical author. For example, Chapter One – “πρωτος κεφαλαιος βιβλιου” (protos kephalaios bibliou) – begins with Laocoon’s line from Vergil’s Aeneid: timeo danaos et dona ferentes, “I fear the Greeks—even bearing gifts.” Such quotations, along with parodies of fan mail throughout Volume One and drawing tutorials and fake personal ads in the chapters of Volume Two, preserve a self-referential element of postmodern sophistry that Holt’s disclaimer foreshadows.
Volume One begins on an aerial shot of Troezen, with smoke rising from the shrine at the heart of the town, behind which modest hills overlook a small harbor. Theseus, scrawny and on the cusp of adolescence, struggles up one such hill to meet his mother. When he arrives, Aethra gives her still-panting son instructions to lift a massive stone on a different hill, on the opposite side of the town. Holt comically conveys Theseus’s understandable exasperation at receiving these instructions. The medium of the graphic novel also allows the smooth conveying of the lapse of years which occur as Theseus attempts this first of his labors. When Zeus himself makes his way into the narrative, Holt’s depicting his skin in a blue tint effectively expresses the difference between the gods and the mortals. Zeus’s trollish act of kicking the stone that had been Theseus’s bane for several years encapsulates the dynamic between the Olympians and their subjects which Holt carries through his two volumes and indicates one sophistic break from the version of the myth preserved in Plutarch’s Life: in Plutarch, Theseus has no trouble lifting the stone himself, and the act demonstrates his heroic fortitude, whereas in Holt’s version, the need for Zeus’s help presents readers with a much less intimidating and inspiring version of the hero.
While establishing this tonal shift in the novel’s portrayal of its protagonist, Zeus’s act of kicking Theseus’s assigned stone nevertheless launches the hero’s journey of self-discovery. When his mother sees the stone unturned and attributes the act to her son (who tries to correct her, albeit without much persistence,) she reveals to him his noble origins. Theseus’s father is Aegeus, the king of Athens and a man beloved by the gods. Now that he has (ostensibly) proven himself worthy of his lineage, he must travel to the Athenian metropolis and claim his princely birthright. Along the way hijinks ensue which are found in Plutarch’s own account, but standard components of the Theseus myth such as his encounters with the club-wielding Periphetes and the tree-bending Sinis receive more extensive treatment in Holt’s rendition than they do in the author’s source material. It is no exaggeration to say that Holt writes more about Periphetes and Sinis in a predominantly visual medium than the biographer himself had written.
Holt’s decision to populate Theseus’s journey with even more sensational monsters than the myth normally contains risks diminishing the drama of his labors and taking us out of the world of archaic Greece (this is more of an issue in Volume One than in Volume Two.) The hero’s first escapade takes place at the Troezen harbor, where an unnamed ferryman warns Theseus of the monster lurking in the sea between them and the port of Athens. Regrettably, the ferryman refers to the monster as a “Kraken.” Although sea monsters such as Scylla and Charybdis abound in Homer and Hesiod, the Kraken is in origin a creature from Norwegian culture, and its presence here therefore detracts from the mythic landscape of Athens and Troezen. Theseus’ response to the ferryman’s warning of taking the presumed less foreboding route to Athens by land contrasts Plutarch’s account in another beat of this less paragonic mythological figure. Plutarch applauds the hero’s decision to travel on foot for the exact opposite reason: that such a journey would be immensely more dangerous – and therefore require considerably more bravery – than a short, Kraken-less jaunt across the sea.
Volume Two largely continues the pattern of portraying Theseus’s episodic travails, but now interspersing the narrative with sweeping images of the locations our hero visits and the gods who take peculiar interest in him. This is where Holt’s graphics skills give the greatest sense of the immensity of Theseus’s labors. Multi-page renditions of the walls of Athens and Marathon emphasize the magnitude of these places and even out the pacing of the narrative. Full-page portraits of Olympians have much the same effect: Athena, Poseidon, Hephaistos, and Artemis each receive an entire page to show off their awful divinity. The series thus far ends with Theseus united with his father and, tricked by Eros, pursuing Poseidon’s prized bull in order to win the affection of Aphrodite. Throughout, encounters with beasts of burden foreshadow the encounter with the bull-man to come.
Holt populates his two volumes with several Greek proper names and Ancient Greek script, contributing to Theseus’s mythic atmosphere and providing a vehicle for some thoughtful allusions to the rest of the Classical Mediterranean world. For example, when the Olympians discuss whether they favor Theseus’s quest to unite with his father, their discussion is aided by a blackboard on which readers of Greek can make out the names of Hercules, Oedipus, and other victims of divine shenanigans. And when a silly hedgehog chirps the sound “meep” in Greek characters (μῖπ), his chirp itself is funny, but all the more delightful for those who recall the proverb of the archaic poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog, only one,” that is, how to make an adorable, squeaky sound. Yet for all their power to immerse readers in the world of the myth, Holt might have improved the immersion experience by different choices of quotations for each of his chapters. Seven of the eight quotations are indeed in Greek, but only one comes from Plutarch himself, and their relations to the events in their respective chapters is not always intuitive. Holt correctly adds aspirant and accent marks in Volume Two, but the absence of such marks in Volume One makes the use of Greek here feel incomplete. Particularly unfortunate is the quotation that opens Chapter Two, where Bias of Priene’s famous statement, “Most men are [morally] bad”, is translated as “Most men are ugly”; and the word for “men” – ἄνθρωποι (anthropoi) – is misspelled as ἄνθροποι.
Despite these problems (to which only the most pedantic reader is likely to object,) Theseus remains a welcome addition to the world of popular literature based on Classical antiquity. Holt’s knack for visual storytelling shines through every panel, and as a good recipient of Greek myth in the style of Plutarch and contemporaries, his faithfulness to the praxes of his stated source material is clear from the clear demarcation of those instances in which he differs from Plutarch’s account. I look forward to the third and final installment of the story.
