Today we kick off something new – we have not one Director’s Commentary (our feature where creators have a space to talk us through some of their work in their own words), but a whole themed set of them to come this week. Back at the start of this year fine publisher Myriad Editions held the First Graphic Novel Competition as part of the First Fiction literary festival. The winner – in this case Gareth Brookes with The Black Project (see here) – is to be published by Myriad next year. But I heard from one of the judges, noted author and comics fan Ian Rankin, that his fellow judge Bryan Talbot had been lavishing praise on all of the final shortlist nominees.
In fact Bryan was of the opinion that all of them were worthy of consideration for publication, which is high praise from a creator of Bryan’ standing. And that set us to thinking – it is great that such prizes exist to nurture new talent and wouldn’t it be great to be able to do something to show off the work off all the nominees to readers? We talked with them and Myriad and I’m happy to say they liked the idea of each creator doing a special Commentary post to talk us through their entry, so we are kicking off today with Con Chrisoulis who gives us an extensive insight into creating Dryland; over to Con:
It was really not my intention to make this commentary at all, at least until I finished and collected, the first book, but after ending up one of the finalists in the First Fictions graphic novel competition, I was asked to expand on the speech on the origins of Dryland that I made at the University of Sussex, during the award ceremony; besides these requests, Joe Gordon of the Forbidden Planet blog (Forbidden Planet being one the greatest comicbook shops in Britain) asked that I send in to his blog a detailed commentary on my competition entry that he would upload for the world to see! Thus the following quite detailed analysis was written.
Prologue
When I was born in 1977, in a small town called Terang in the outskirts of Victoria, Australia, it just so happened that my grandfather was visiting our family from Greece; his first ever trip on an airplane and the first time he’d been outside the country since he fought in the war. As I was the second son to be born to my parents, as tradition would have it, since my brother was already named Leonidas, after him, I was in turn to be named after my maternal grandfather, Demetrius. Alas, the events that occurred not only changed my name, but they forged their way into my subconsciousness and motivated the creation of this very graphic novel.
On the night I was born my grandmother called and insisted that I was to be named Kostas. Apparently, the ghost of a long lost relative had visited her in her room and instructed her to do so. My mom thought that this was some kind of way to get me to be named too after my father’s family and thought that it was silly, but my grandfather, who was staying with us, above the fish n’ chips shop we had in Terang, insisted that this should be done so, otherwise it would be bad luck not to do so. Thus I was officially name Kostas (and not Konstantinos, as this is the full Greek name and Kostas is an abbreviation of it– I mention this because it will pop up again).
Anyhow, this long lost relative Kostas Chrisoulis, who I was named after, apparently was the brother of my visiting grandfather’s dad. Therefore my great-grandfather’s brother. Kostas, like my grandfather and his father before him was raised an orphan, and after hunting down and unsuccessfully attempting to kill his father’s murderer (another story for another book), he managed to escape Greece and immigrated to the States in the 1910s. He had a family there and in the ’50s all contact was lost with his family, as the last letter my grandfather received was from his American wife telling him that his uncle had died and that his two daughters are safe and sound. Unfortunately, we would hear all these stories from my grandfather orally (until he died in 1988), as all the letters and all the photos of Kostas and his family had been lost when the family house in our hometown of Palairos (aka Zaverda) in Western Greece had been burnt to the ground in the late ’50s.
Strangely enough family houses being burnt to the ground have played a weird and strong part in our history and a similar situation occurred to my mother’s side of the family when the Germans shot her grandfather as he tried to save his children from being burnt alive in their house, as the Nazis were burning all the houses in the vicinity to avenge a hit and run from some guerilla rebels. So both sides of the family experienced a similar situation of being left essentially homeless, and in some instances orphaned, due to circumstances beyond their control. This circle closed when my parents’ fish and chips shop (and our home) was burnt to the ground in the late ’70s, forcing us to move to the state’s capital, Melbourne.
The above events and the fact that I was named after some long lost relative who only a handful of people had even heard of and even less people alive knew personally, led to my querying anyone, from a very young age, about this relative, our family’s history and so on. It was not until the internet came into my life that I managed to make some systematic research and tried to find any information possible on his family’s whereabouts in the States. i searched and I searched, usually changing the man’s name to Gus (as they would usually rename Kostas/Konstantinos whence arriving at Ellis Island) to searching for any reference to my home town as Zaverda or Zaverta or Zeverta (which is the old Slavic name of my town, which was officially replaced with the ancient Greek name of the area, Palairos after the 1821 revolution and the Bavarian government’s ethnic cleansing policy); Zaverda is still in fair use, orally, as the preferred name of choice for my town, however no official map or government paper has ever used that name. i figured that the man would never have called his town of birth as Palairos, ’cause only the government in Athens would have called my hometown that back in the 1890s when he was born.
Thus there were results.
A daughter-in-law of one of Kostas daughters, Karen White, had ran some searches for relatives in some ancestor-searching-site and had left a message to communicate with her should someone know any info. I did and I soon found myself talking to Connie Chrisoul Morris (yep, Ellis Island had shortened the name to Chrisoul). We talked and talked through e-mails and my folks were quite excited with these events. Any doubt as to whether they were the real deal were swiftly cast aside when she sent me a photo of her father and he was the spitting image of my dad (I still get shivers down my spine whenever I remember that moment). About a year after these events we invited Connie to my brother’s wedding which was to occur in Zaverda/Palairos. The year was 2005.
(above)Two of the messages that I found on the internet whilst researching the whereabouts of Konstas Chrisoulis, which eventually led to the family reunion
I picked up Connie and her daughter Carol (who’d also been searching for some clues for years) from the airport, they slept at my apartment in Athens and the next day we took a cab on a 350km trip to Palairos. Connie couldn’t speak Greek at all, but luckily the years my folks spent in Australia helped them communicate and chat all day about Kostas, the States and te family. I really can’t feel what Connie felt in those moments, or when she started recalling, whence eating our traditional dishes, all those memories of her father, but I sure could understand that feeling of longing to belong somewhere or reconnecting with a past long thought lost. She connected particularly with my father, Vlasis, who I suppose reminded her of her dad, and he took them to trips to the old town, on the top of the mountain, where she gathered some soil, as well as our family grave. Very touching moments.
Preparing Dryland
As I was already doing comics in Greece at that point for about 6 years, slowly making a name for myself, the above events had inspired me to the point where I realised that it was time to do the “Big One”. That huge graphic novel that every creator fears to begin. I started researching here and there, but never really began until 2008 when I started a two-year Film Editing course in Athens, in which we had weekly Screen Writing lessons. That is when that class introduced me to the acclaimed screen writing guru Syd Fields, who in turn introduced me to Aristotle’s Three Act Structure from his book Poetics. I then realised exactly how I had to build my story in order to emphasize the drama and to build towards a catharsis, that redemptive final act.
The problem I faced now was which story do I choose to retell? There were just too many. On my next trip back home in 2009, I started researching the birth and death certificates to try to find some sort of clues as to what the exact times and ages my ancestors lived in, their causes of death and so on. And that is where I found Kostas’ registry of birth. It mentioned “Chrisoulis Konstas, son of Demetrius, born in 1890″. Yep they had officially named him Kostas at birth, instead of the full name Konstantinos, just like me. The chances of this ever happening in Greece are one in a million. Even if you do mention to the officials that you will be calling your son Kostas, the officers will definitely note down the full Christian name Konstantinos as the full name. Thus all my Australian documents list me as Kostas, while all my Greek documents as Konstantinos. These strange turn of events motivated me even more to put the story to paper.
When I gathered all the tales around the first thing I realised was that there was no way that I could fit all that information in one book. The second thing I realised was that a series of horrible deaths had befallen my family and they all interlinked with each other, as one parent’s death would affect the next generation so strongly that the tragic circle would repeat Itself again and again. The last thing I realised was that I would need at lease 6-8 books just to get the hard core tragic tales out there. As I had to make a choice soon, in order to begin the graphic novel at last, i chose the tale of my great-grandmother’s death. A tale that would not only pay tribute to the woman herself, but also to my grandfather, Leonidas, a survivor of possibly the hardest times my land had lived. It wasn’t hard to decide what to name the series. Dryland is the English translation of my small region’s unofficial name, used derogatorily by both inhabitants and neighbours. The Greek word Ξηρόμερο/Xiromero (pronounced Ksi-Rho-Me-Rho) means dry or barren land, the name a monument to the hardships the, mostly, farmers faced after years of warfare and droughts. The province is still one of the hottest areas to be in during summer in Greece; and it’s definitely still barren, the mountains consisting mostly of unstable, rocky ground, which in conjunction with the quite frequent earthquakes makes for a hostile place to live in as a farmer. Mind you, when the weather is great in summer, it’s another beautiful, Greek paradise, that makes you forget all the above situations.
(above) A map of Greece with Acarnania highlighted. Acarnania today is part of the joint Aetolia-Acarnania regional unit. Xiromero (Dryland) is a non-official name that the inhabitants of western Acarnania call their land. They refer to themselves as Xiromerites (Drylanders). Palairos (or unofficially Zaverda, as the town is called by her townsfolk) lies in the Bay of Palairos facing the Ionian Sea islands of Lefkas, Maganisi, Scorpio, Cephalonia and Ithaca. At the time that the story is based not much importance was given to the sea (other than for trade or transport). Most people made a living as nomads with their stock, travelling from mountain to prosperous valley, season after season. The Acarnanian mountains were by consent the harshest of them all.
Page by page commentary on Chapter 1 of Dryland (Book One)
On to the graphic novel itself, and specifically this first chapter of the first book of Dryland. The story begins with the engagement of a young man, Nidas, with Voula, the daughter of a wealthy goat owner (in pre-war Greece, just 70 years ago, owning 1000 goats was still considered a feat). Nidas is the shortened form of Leonidas, used primarily in my province of Xiromero/Dryland; he and Voula are my paternal grandparents.
As a brief interim I’d like to add that as I was indeed trying to find new ways to write a longer story, having just studied Aristotle’s Three Act Structure, I was also in quite a chipper mood to investigate new ways of positioning my panels and therefore in the storytelling structure of the graphic novel itself. Therefore those first 20 pages, mostly drawn within my Film Editing school (in my mandatory English lessons class, where a register was taken and which lessons I happily ignored in order to draw), were an panel structure experiment and, if I’m not mistaken, none of the pages have a similar panel grid (other than the spreads)! Hey, innovating is fun! Keeps the juices flowing!
In regards to the first image you see, a rough of the cover (a man and an old woman trapped in a snowstorm under a tree) all I wanted to emphasize there is the harsh nature of the events that will follow. It is not a spoiler in the sense that showing Auschwitz on the movie trailer of Schindler’s List is not a spoiler. How the events ended up are history; the real tragedy lies in the mysterious way that they unravelled.
I used the device of the letter written to his Uncle Kostas, firstly so I can reconnect the origins of my wanting to tell this tale with the discovery of my relatives in the States, secondly so I can move the narrative onwards with some straightforward catching up with what’s happening and lastly to introduce the reader to another character, Uncle Kostas, who will be the lead in another Dryland book.
In these first pages, the young man is treated with some disrespect at first (due to the fact that his family is so small and he is the owner of a very, very small amount of goats) and some facts about my grandfather’s childhood starts creeping up, like the fact that he grew up an orphan and his grandmother raised him, until she also died. My grandmother Voula could talk for hours about how much livestock her father owned before his own demise. She was so proud of him and her well-off days in the Greek countryside.
After Nidas is introduced to Voula’s huge family in turn brings in his brother, the only family he has, other than his Uncle Kostas in the States, who has a constant chip on his shoulder. An argument is about to begin because he’s to uptight to shake hands with anyone, but the spirits return back to normal and a dance of Chamiko begins (Chamiko is a traditional Albanian/Greek dance that is danced by men, very slowly in our region, where the lead dancer shows off his prowess and strength, by doing air kicks or balancing on one leg).
Giotas (short for Panagiotis in Xiromero and my grandfather’s younger brother) was a head case, to say the least. He died in the late ’70s, so I never got to meet him, but his temper is legendary. In his life and times he managed to elope with the daughter of one of the wealthiest landowners in the Peloponese (only to have her disowned); he was put in jail for this after a month’s long …boat race from isle to isle and in the end he lived as a farmer himself on the mountains of Aigio (where his temper led him to more trouble, like doing jail for poking a man’s eye out, after he’d insulted him, with his spoon). He even stabbed my grandpa once over some stupid argument. So anyhow, as Jetties will also play a pivotal role in one of the next books, I need to establish him as a menacing dude, who you’re kind of afraid of, but also want to hang out with. The charm of the wild one, the outsider; ’cause although the stories of Giotas’ outbursts seem outlandish and plain violent, the family kind of chuckles with a weird pride whilst retelling them. I know I do.
When my great-grandfather escorts Nida outside to take a breather and have a smoke, the conversation spans from Nidas poor upbringing (a chance to expand upon the character) to illegal tobacco trading in the region (tobacco trading had been monopolised by the government and even rolling paper was sold under government or royal consent). When my Nidas realises that his father-in-law is in on the trading he eventually agrees to help out and earn some money for himself, as well as fit in with his new family. I’ve decomposed this double-spread below, so you can see the flow of the conversation (the two men talking about the illegal trading and lighting, smoking and extinguishing their smokes, each from their own perspective).
After my grandfather and his brother were orphaned (too long a story to also retell here, plus I have to keep some cards to myself) they were separated, one, my grandfather Nidas, sent to some relatives in the isle of Lefkas, while Giotas remained in Palairos/Zaverda with their grandmother. When she died of malaria in 1933, the two brothers were reunited (Nidas being only fourteen) and they lived together in a hut their father had left them. Some relatives gave them some goats to begin a herd, but the times were already too tough and they never managed to really make it as goat herders. They tried several occupations, but they constantly befell upon hardship.
The scene where Nidas’ Father-in-Law gets on his case is purely to establish the fact that it was a male-dominant society and family and he had the final word in what would happen. Also, having a temper will also explain his stance when he won’t be able to rationalise the situation when the story tragically ends.
I added Psarris, Nidas’ old horse, to the mix, ’cause my own father is so fond of retelling all the adventures he had with him in his own younger years when the horse was even older. Psarris had been ploughing all his life, carrying wood, wheat and milk on his back and obviously was also used for horseback travelling within Xiromero. His name means white haired and he was too, in his own hard-earned way, a part of the family.
In the following scene, where Nidas is being slanted by another son-in-law of my great-grandfather, I needed again to create a backdrop for what was to follow in the story’s resolution. Being accepted into the family probably meant the most to Nida, and to gain that, after so many years of being on his own, was far more important than owning any flock of sheep or goats or whatever. More the reason why the end of the first book has far bigger repercussions than one could tell.
What can I say about the below panel! I just needed to get this in the book somehow. Just like most towns in Greece, underneath its ancient ruins lie the traditions and the superstitions which were seeped into the subconsciousness of the later generations. Thus the reference to the Golden Hog at Kechropoula is a story that many old Zaverdians will be glad to tell you. Kechropoula is the medieval name of the ruins of the acropolis of Ancient Palairos, about 3km west of the modern town.
Even today the residents of the town are afraid to walk too close to the ancient site, as they fear it is haunted. Should you do so a Golden Hog with its little golden piglets will appear and devour you. I’ve heard lots of people claiming to have seen the Golden Hog and my grandparents always used to scare us into doing various tasks or to behave cause the “Golden Hog” will come and get us (a bogeyman of sorts for our town, amongst the myriad bogeymen of our region).
Strangely enough, as I also happen to be a history buff, I’ve researched the significance of the specific animal in our region from ancient times to present. Besides the obvious scary parts in the Odyssey, where Circe turns Odysseus’ shipmates into pigs (Odysseus/Ulysses being from Ithaca, practically across the sea from my hometown), and besides the fact that the Calydonian Boar hunt took place in a neighbouring town it must be stressed that pigs were considered symbols of death in Ancient Greece, due to their nocturnal habits. I also found a passage in Lucian’s Dialogues of Courtesans that mentions: ‘I find Chareas, as they say, so smooth; he’s an Acarnanian sucking-pig’. Acarnanian pigs were apparently so succulent that they were used as terms of endearment in ancient times to describe someone as dearly loved. I don’t know how this slipped into medieval society, how it became a golden hog scary tale and then seeped into the era I’m writing about, but the fact is that the province had a special relationship with pork! Souvlaki anyone?
The final page of the first chapter concludes with the six protagonists heading towards Mount Perganti, a part of the Acarnanian Mountains that surround Nidas’ world.
Even today the Mountain is revered by all the people of the region. From the mountain and it’s natural source Korpi the region managed for years to gather their precious water for their homes (the source was sadly sold to Nestle years ago, who now bottles it and sells it worldwide). One of the most sacred monasteries in the area, Panagia Romvou (dedicated to the Virgin Mary), is built on a plateau of this mountain range between the town of Monastiraki, where Voula and her family are from, and Vato (close to the path where the group is heading).
I subtracted all grey scaling from the figures in this splash page, as I was trying to capture an ominous scene, that feeling where the reader is starting to realise that this will lead somewhere dark.
A place of no hope.
Mountains do that to you. The awe that their enormous, godlike, size spreads to the human population has caused many adventurers to go on vain journeys to conquer them.
How can someone truly conquer a mountain?
By placing a little flag on top of that gigantic heap of rock and soil?
When it comes to mountains, the only thing that man truly conquers is his fear. And this fear is what motivates that ominous feeling that the reader is provided once faced with that mountain that fills the entire page.
Just so I won’t leave you there at the end of the first chapter, wanting, hopefully, for more, I have included below a tiny preview of things to come in the following pages, where Nidas follows his in-laws in order to learn the tricks of the trade so he can take over their tobacco smuggling business.
As the first third of the Aristotelian Three Part Structure is about to end, the point of no return, the most integral part of the theory, is about to reach its climax. Nidas is about to embark on an adventure beyond his control and his, and his family’s, fate is about to be snatched out of his fingers.
That’s it, folks! I hope this preview and commentary intrigued you enough so as to seek the published edition when it comes out and I hope that you revisit my website soon, as more treats will await you as the series unfolds and is developed furthermore!
Leave a Reply