November 18, 2014, by Tara de Cozar

Classics does Thought Bubble

By now you’ll know all about Prof Steve Hodkinson’s work with acclaimed comics writer Kieron Gillen on Three — we’ve blogged about it here, here, here and here. And we told you that last weekend Steve and his Classics colleague Dr Lynn Fotheringham were speaking at a couple of Thought Bubble events — the Comics Forum conference on Friday 14 November and the main comic convention on Saturday 15 November.

Well, I went too, live tweeted both events from the @UoNresearch account, and storified both streams.

The Comics Forum tweets are here.

The main Thought Bubble tweets (from an event recorded for Kieron’s Decompressed podcast) are here.

Once Kieron uploads the resulting podcast, I’ll post it here.

And if you read Three and it changed the way you thought about Sparta, or taught you something new about it, email Lynn and tell her — she’s collecting evidence of how Steve’s work with Kieron impacts both academic and non-academic audiences.

I always enjoy listening to Steve and Kieron talk about their collaboration on Three. Despite going into the project with a determination not to get hung up on whether the helmets were slightly off, Kieron obviously made a commitment to getting the story, characters and settings as historically accurate as possible. And Steve — who had no clue about the comics-making process before working with Kieron — obviously enjoyed the process thoroughly. Hearing how working on a fictional account of three Helot slaves made him see his research into the lives of the Helots in general in a new light was really heartwarming. Time allowing, they both said they’d like to work on a potential sequel. That said, time is something that both of them are very short of, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

And at the end of the Decompressed talk, Kieron presented Steve with a page of the original inks from Three from him and artist Ryan Kelly. A really lovely gesture that Steve was clearly touched by.

And here’s what the page ended up looking like, once Jordie Bellaire added the colours.

 

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