Prometheus’s punishment casts a long shadow over present-day global turmoil in the first volume of the Ignatz winning cartoonist’s graphic novel saga Tongues (Pantheon, Mar.).
What got you thinking about the myth of Prometheus?
It was the idea of Prometheus still being there. He was chained to this mountaintop however many millennia ago. What
if he’s still there, forced to reckon with his creation? The relationship he’d have with the eagle that comes every day to execute his punishment also piqued my interest. It’s torturing him, but it’s also the one mind he gets to interact with—his one friend, basically, for thousands of years. Birds generally talk in my work.
The origin of language becomes an important theme. How did that figure in?
In the classic story, Prometheus brings fire to humans to give them an advantage over the animals. I think it’s understood to be the beginning of technology, but it has all these metaphorical echoes—the intellectual spark, warmth, telling stories around the fire. To me, the idea is that he stole language, and that was the thing that angered the gods. Language is halfway to divinity in a certain sense.
The remote setting for most of Tongues isn’t specifically established, but it was hard not to think of Afghanistan.
I return in Tongues to a character who appeared in my first book, Dogs and Water, which I started working on in 2003—the second Gulf War had commenced. So the featureless wilderness that the character was walking around in became basically Afghanistan-slash-Iraq. It’s a site of deep conflict for thousands of years—and it sure is right now. When it takes you six years, eight years, 10 years to do a story, it’s interesting to watch the world interact with your story and then stop interacting and then come back. When I started Tongues, the U.S. was still in Afghanistan. Then we left. But events have proved that, in fact, that part of the world is going to be relevant for a long time.
I felt there was some ambivalence in the book as to whether or not giving fire to humans was a good idea in the first place.
There’s a lot of modern storytelling about somebody saving the world, or saving humanity, and it’s always a given that that’s a worthy endeavor. But maybe that’s a question worth grappling with. We are a complicated species. Our minds aren’t really built to spin out the multivarious consequences of every little thing we invent.
How did you devise the imaginative panel layouts?
I find drawing rectangles and measuring squares sort of tedious. With Tongues, I wanted paneling to be a part of the story. A panel in comics is like a sentence in prose—a single idea or single moment. Twelve rectangular panels of the same size on a page create a sense of rhythm. But panels can also frame the sensibility, lend a feeling. Panels, I think, can be like the music that surrounds the lyrics in a song.
Your books don’t shy away from weighty themes. Is it daunting to weave those big questions into a narrative?
I’m not a philosopher. I’m just a person who thinks about history and human nature and wonders about stuff. For me it’s more fun to play with than the incidental events of my life.
An excerpt of Tongues is below.