Gareth Hinds's Blog

My wife and I recently returned from our annual trip to Maine. Sadly this year the occasion was the memorial ceremony for our dear friend and artistic genius Ashley Bryan, who passed away at the age of 98. To say he was beloved on the tiny island of Islesford (aka Little Cranberry Island), and throughout the book industry, is a huge understatement, and to us he was family. We absolutely had to be at this memorial, even though there were significant logistical hurdles.

We drove up with stops in Delaware, Boston, Portland, and at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, which has a lovely exhibit of Ashley’s work (alongside the Wyeths, Leonard Baskin, and other important American artists).

Then we met up with a crew of amazing authors with whom we shared a house on Great Cranberry Island (just a short hop from Islesford and the closest accommodations we were able to find). Linda Sue Park, Renee Watson, and Vaunda Michaux Nelson. We were later joined by Ashley’s wonderful editor Caitlyn Dlouhy.

Sketches of the boat rides, the islands, and the ceremony (more on that below):

The ceremony was absolutely beautiful. We all wore pins we’d made from a “Beautiful Blackbird” craft station at the Farnsworth (Alison’s great idea!) After the ceremony there was a reception with two amazing cakes, plus a slideshow and a show of Ashley’s paintings in the local gallery, and then his family went out in a parade of boats to scatter his ashes.

We felt truly blessed to celebrate him with so many of his friends and family and even more so to have known him and spent so much time with him over the years (every year since 2007). Thank you Ashley, and thank you, Islesford. We love you.

If you want to see more of my Maine paintings, click here.

One of the coolest things that may occasionally happen to an author is receiving foreign editions of your books. There’s not a whole lot of money in foreign editions, but the wow factor of seeing your book in another language is really hard to beat. This is even more true when it’s a graphic novel, and you get to see the foreign translation juxtaposed with your illustrations. And best of all, with sound effects!! This new Romanian edition of The Odyssey and The Iliad is bringing me great joy. The publisher is Humanitas Junior.

Folger’s last production before major renovations is a delightful romp in 70’s chic. Here are my sketches:

I did a lot of sketching at events last weekend.

Thursday – Politics & Prose hosted two incredible writers of short stories, Karen Russell and Ted Chiang, moderated by Everdeen Mason.

Friday – Hyattsville started its Summer Jam series with live music by The Roustabouts (including my neighbor Pete Daniels on fiddle.)

Saturday – Gaithersburg Book Festival was excellent as always. I did a panel first thing in the morning with Megan Whalen Turner, and then stuck around and sketched some of the other cartoonists (Alex Graudins, Andy Hirsch, Dave Roman, Michael Cavna, and Malaka Gharib).

I’m back from San Francisco, and with that the Iliad tour is complete. I want to note that I still have some upcoming events, listed below, and then I’ll give a quick recap of how the tour went (in summary: awesome). Read on if you’re interested!

5/18 – Gaithersburg Book Festival, Gaithersburg MD
6/21-6/24 – ALA Annual, Washington DC (table 3909)

7/6-7/7 – Nerd Camp MI
11/22-11/24 – NCTE, Baltimore MD (booth 341)

…

Event Recap
DC Events: An incredible launch party at Vigilante Coffee in Hyattsville, with approximately 150 people!

 

That same week, a lovely school visit and public event with The Curious Iguana, Urbana High School, and Delaplaine Arts Center.


A wonderful event at the Takoma Park MD Library – with great photos by Maurice Belanger.


Boston Events: Porter Square Books was packed with long-time friends and supporters.


An Unlikely Story has the best event space of any store I know, and a very good crowd came out, PLUS I got to meet one of my personal fav illustrators of comics and children’s books, LeYuen Pham, for the first time. She makes me look lazy by drawing a portrait in every book – in this case a double portrait!



Then it was off to the LA Times Book Fest (no pics of that, sadly) and the Texas Library Association (here’s their “Texas Tea” which was a sort of speed-dating with tables full of librarians).


Then the last leg: San Francisco, or rather, the area around SF Bay. First, Mrs. Dalloway’s in Berkeley (in conversation with Pam Turner, author of Samurai Rising and many other great nonfiction books):


We did a brief window to visit to SF itself and do touristy stuff. Here’s an obligatory selfie, and I found and signed my books at Book Passage (in the Ferry Building).


The tour finished off with Books Inc, Kepler’s, and Hicklebee’s. This is Books Inc. in Mountain View:


Kepler’s:


And Hicklebees:


Below is the full list of places I went. Sadly I didn’t get any good pictures from my events at Left Bank, Politics & Prose or Bank Street Books, but those were lovely events too.

2/28-3/1 – Write To Learn, Osage Beach MO

3/4 – Left Bank Books, St. Louis MO

3/12 – Politics & Prose, Washington DC (official launch date!)

3/13 – The Curious Iguana / Delaplaine Arts Center, Frederick MD

3/15 – Local Launch Party, Vigilante Coffee in Hyattsville MD

3/18 – Takoma Park, MD Library

3/21 – Bank Street Books, NY, NY

3/24 – An Unlikely Story, Plainville MA

3/25 – Porter Square Books, Cambridge MA

4/4 – State of MD Literacy Association, Baltimore MD

4/13 – LA Times Festival of Books

4/17 – Texas Library Association, Austin TX

4/27 – Mrs. Dalloway’s, Berkeley CA (with Pamela Turner)

5/1 – Books Inc., Mountain View CA

5/2 – Kepler’s Books, Menlo Park, CA

5/3 – Hicklebee’s Books, San Jose, CA

 

…Plus a dozen school visits. Whew!! It was a blast, and it’s good to be home. Thanks for reading!

 

Here’s a roundup of the amazing (to me) press coverage The Iliad has received.

 

“Magnificent…..Mr. Hinds has had to trim a great deal from Homer’s tale, but he retains most of the best-known scenes, much of the violence and poetry, and all of the pathos. The graphic-novel form works well to give us a sense of the cinematic vastness of the conflicts of gods and men, of the strange beauty of a thousand fires winking on the plain at night, of Bronze Age warriors cutting their way into each other “like reapers who start from either end of a rich man’s field and with sharp scythes bring the barley tumbling down in armfuls.”… Those who know the epic will find an engrossing and rewarding account: gory, affecting, unforgettable.” —Wall Street Journal

 

“Unpacking The Iliad as a reader is one thing; adapting it for comics is a hurdle of a different magnitude. Enter Gareth Hinds, the Vermont-born artist who has reworked literary classics from Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe and more. His magnificently realized graphic telling of The Iliad — in its wealth of muted watercolored hues and evocative landscapes… Hinds’ figure-drawing strengths are made known when the first spears are hoisted — battle sequences are awash in gouging and decapitations, with bearded, brawny warriors, in detailed scale-armor breastplates, brandishing swords and ornate shields. Teeth bared and faces bloodied, they leap and lunge at one another, encircled by single-stroke motion lines as horse-drawn chariots conjure clouds of dust. Even as Hinds excised some battles for length and clarity, it’s a bloodbath. Anything less would dishonor the sentiment so critical to Homer’s text.”—Los Angeles Times

 

“This is no mere comics adaptation of an ancient classic. Through his intricately illustrated panels, Gareth Hinds brings us The Iliad’s depth, brutality, and power. A Herculean effort worthy of the original.” — Gene Luen Yang, Michael L. Printz Award winner for American Born Chinese

 

“Gareth Hinds is responsible for breathing new life into the ancient epic.” — Hollywood Reporter

 

“Sing to me, O Muse, of the rage of Achilles”: a rousing graphic rendition of Homer’s great epic…An expertly crafted rendition and a welcome invitation to younger readers to immerse themselves in the ancient past.—Kirkus Reviews

 

“With his graphic novel retelling of The Iliad, Gareth Hinds  has created a work of such scope and power that it boggles my mind. It truly lives up to the — dare I say it — epic scale of the original poem.”— George O’Connor, author of the New York Times best-selling Olympians series

 

“Through brutal and beautifully rendered imagery, the book adds a level of translation to the original epic.”—Comics Beat

 

“Hinds takes painstaking efforts with his fine-lined watercolors to depict each character in a readily distinguishable way, even while in pitched battle, fully armored. The excellent visual guides, maps, and notes aid in this task and further contextualize the epic’s time, place, and significance. The most striking scenes are the battles, presented in intimate detail and in awe-inspiring, sweeping overviews. Hinds’s relatively plain language retains just enough meter to hint at the cadences of the work, and, together with the dynamic art, creates an accessible entrée to an enduring classic.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

 

“Hinds has excelled in creating literary adaptations that remind you what an artistic achievement bringing literary classics into the comics medium can be.” — Comicon.com

 

“This modern graphic novel retelling of Homer’s epic immediately draws in readers with its artistry and readability.”—School library Journal

 

“Epic—and painstakingly researched.” — Paste Magazine

 

“Exceptionally compelling version of the episode of the Trojan War handed down through Homer’s Iliad. …. Readers who have struggled to follow the poetry of the standard text or to become emotionally invested in a summary will have no such difficulty here; Hinds has truly produced an easy-to-follow, engrossingly cinematic blockbuster on the page.” — The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

 

“Monumental.”—Impulse Gamer

 

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY review

https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-7636-8113-5

 

KIRKUS

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gareth-hinds/the-iliad-hinds/

 

PW Profile

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/79322-q-a-with-gareth-hinds.html

 

COMICON.COM Interview

http://www.comicon.com/2019/02/22/the-bronze-age-gets-eloquent-gareth-hinds-brings-us-the-illiad/

 

FANBASE PRESS

http://fanbasepress.com/index.php/press/reviews/item/9716-gareth-hinds-shares-his-insights-into-the-iliad-in-advance-of-his-graphic-novel-adaptation

 

GRAPHIC POLICY 10 Reasons to Read THE ILIAD

https://graphicpolicy.com/2019/02/26/10-reasons-to-read-or-re-read-the-iliad/

 

ALTERNATIVE MINDZ News Story

http://alternativemindz.com/2019/02/candlewick-press-to-publish-gareth-hinds-graphic-novel-adaptation-of-homers-the-iliad/

 

COMIC CRUSADERS News story

https://www.comiccrusaders.com/candlewick-press-to-publish-gareth-hinds-graphic-novel-adaptation-of-the-iliad/

 

FIRST COMIC NEWS News Story

https://www.firstcomicsnews.com/candlewick-press-to-publish-gareth-hinds-graphic-novel-adaptation-of-homers-the-iliad/

 

CONVENTION COLLECTIVE News Story

http://theconventioncollective.com/sandbox/3945

 

FANBOY FACTOR News Story

http://fanboyfactor.com/2019/02/candlewick-press-to-publish-gareth-hinds-graphic-novel-adaptation-of-the-iliad/

 

MAJOR SPOILERS

http://majorspoilers.com/2019/02/27/candlewick-press-to-publish-ogn-adaptation-of-homers-the-iliad

 

HYATTSVILLE WIRE

https://www.hyattsvillewire.com/2019/02/27/gareth-hinds-iliad-graphic-novel/

 

HYATTSVILLE LIFE AND TIMES

http://hyattsvillelife.com/local-artist-brings-new-life-to-classics-with-his-graphic-novels/

 

COMICS BEAT

https://www.comicsbeat.com/exclusive-peek-behind-the-creative-process-of-gareth-hinds-adaptation-of-the-iliad/

 

COMICS THE GATHERING

https://www.comicsthegathering.com/content/stephengervais/12420/candlewick-press-publish-gareth-hinds%E2-graphic-novel-adaptation-iliad

 

FREAK SUGAR Exclusive Water coloring Video

http://www.freaksugar.com/check-out-our-exclusive-reveal-of-this-watercolor-process-video-for-the-iliad/

 

RIVERFRONT TIMES

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/artsblog/2019/03/01/the-best-things-to-do-in-st-louis-this-weekend-march-1-to-4

 

IMPULSE GAMER interview

http://www.impulsegamer.com/gareth-hinds-interview-the-iliad/

IMPULSE GAMER News Story

http://www.impulsegamer.com/candlewick-press-to-publish-gareth-hinds-graphic-novel-adaptation-of-the-iliad/

 

GRAPHIC POLICY press release

https://graphicpolicy.com/2019/03/04/candlewick-press-to-publish-gareth-hinds-graphic-novel-adaptation-of-the-iliad/

 

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY Comics To Read This Month

https://ew.com/books/2019/03/06/march-comic-preview-invisible-kingdom-detective-comics-ms-marvel/

 

WALL STREET JOURNAL Review Round up, 3/11

https://www.wsj.com/articles/childrens-books-ancient-battles-and-accidental-twins-11552058081

 

PASTE MAGAZINE Excerpt

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2019/03/rediscover-the-iliad-in-gareth-hindss-rousing-grap.html

 

HOLLYWOOD REPORTER

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/iliad-graphic-novel-read-an-preview-1193447

 

A lot of my readers are not aware that the hardcover editions of The Odyssey and The Iliad have art in them that does not appear in the paperback editions.

At the beginning and end of a hardcover book is something called the Endpapers (or simply “ends”). These are usually separate sheets of paper that are used to bind the inside pages to the cover.

Here are the endpapers I created for The Odyssey (click to see larger!)

These are all actual vase paintings from classical Greece. Some of them are explicitly scenes from The Odyssey, others I just found thematically appropriate to allude to the story of Odysseus. In some cases I changed what kind of vessel they are painted on — in real life some are tiny and some are huge, and I wanted them to be more uniform in size.

For The Iliad, I chose a different approach. Here I use shields to tell the story of the lead-up to The Iliad. Again, you will only get these if you get the hardcover; but now at least you can see what you’re missing. In the book they’re printed in blue.

The designs on Greek shields tend to be much less narrative than the vase paintings, so in this case I didn’t use real historical ones. (Quite a few of the shield designs inside the book are real, though not necessarily from the Bronze Age — but these I made up to tell the story, stylizing them in a way I think is reasonably consistent with Greek shield painting.)

They summarize the story of the beginnings of the Trojan War, as follows: (1) the founding of Troy, (2) Thetis and Peleus, (3) the Apple of Discord, (4) the abduction of Helen, (5) invoking the oath of the Achaean Kings, (6) Odysseus and Achilles being tricked into revealing themselves (as, respectively, sane and not a girl), (7) the fleet launching, (8) the sacrifice of Iphegenia at Aulis, (9) the archer Philoctetes bitten by a serpent, (10) the beginning of the war, (11) Chryses’ appeal to Agamemnon, and (12) the plague-arrows sent by Apollo.

Those, by the way, are all cool stories you should look up if you don’t know them

Dear Friends,

The Iliad comes out in less than two months, and I have now updated the official Iliad page on my website with information about how to pre-order it, and about my many events and appearances this spring and summer. All Iliad-related resources and info will be linked there, and spread via my email list and social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram).

Thanks!

-Gareth

I have neglected the blog, it seems! I’m going to work on that, but I’ll also mention that I’ve been posting more on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook recently. I’m back today to post sketches of Folger Theatre’s current production of Macbeth, set in London’s Bedlam Asylum. This conceit adds a lot of atmosphere as well as some very interesting layers of complexity around the murders, which may be part of the play or part of an inmate uprising. Here are my quick sketches (iPad Pro w/ ProCreate app).

Last night I went to see Shakespeare Theatre Company’s production of Camelot. The performers were all wonderful, the costumes spectacular, the set and lighting modern in a way that worked to make it feel fresh, and the ending unexpectedly powerful. Like, really powerful and relevant today. Definitely recommended. Sketches done on iPad Pro with Apple pencil and Procreate app.