Category: Art

Elizabeth 1– Locations – SOURCES

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The locations in the comic were not easy to research, not least because many of the palaces Elizabeth lived in no longer exist today. Greenwich palace, where Elizabeth was born, was demolished; Whitehall palace, where Elizabeth spent a lot of time in, was mostly demolished in a fire; Richmond palace, where Elizabeth died, was also mostly demolished. Surviving palaces, such as Windsor Castle, Hatfield House and Hampton Court, all fell into disrepair after her reign (especially in the Oliver Cromwell era), and so look little like they originally did today.

Here is an image of Chelsea Manor, where Elizabeth spent a portion of her teenage years with her stepmother Catherine Parr. The history of Chelsea Manor and the image comes from this British Landownership Records, but the image itself is of the rear side of the Tudor manor, and shows 17th Century additions that did not exist in Elizabeth’s time. All in all, not a reliable depiction of the original, and the building no longer exists today.
Hatfield House is where Elizabeth spent her time after she left Catherine’s manor, and where she first received news of her accession to the throne. Hatfield house is actually much larger than this–most of it was demolished. while this picture from ElizabethI.org only shows the banquet hall.
Elizabeth riding to see her half-sister Mary 1, and here is the gate of Anne Boleyn at Hampton Court Palace from Wikipedia.
Since there are very few historic buildings in England that still has period-era Tudor architecture, most existing references are recreations such as this Henry VIII bedchamber from Hever Castle. We know from locations such as Hardwick Hall, an Elizabethan country manor, that Tudors favour extensive wood-panelling everywhere, so much of the backgrounds in this comic have a lot of wood panelling even as it’s not entirely historically accurate.
We have no true idea of what Elizabeth’s ships looked like in the battle against the Spanish armada since so many were retrofitted merchant ships, but here is a recreation the Mary Rose, which is a carrack-type warship from the reign of Henry VIII. While not accurate to Elizabeth’s navy, this is a raised shipwreck that last saw action in 1545, about 40 years before the Spanish battle, and so carries a fair amount of Tudor accuracy even as it’s inaccurate to Elizabeth’s time.
The tomb of Elizabeth 1, which is located in Westminister Abbey in the Chapel of Henry VIII. There’s multiple renditions of this (from the British Museum), and it exists in modern times, so it was pretty easy to find references of it.
  • Some of the remaining sources come from the movie “Elizabeth: The Golden Age” (2007) starring Cate Blanchett, and while some scenes are fairly accurate such as Elizabeth’s coronation, a fair amount of this movie is inaccurate both in plot and in the background details.
  • The movie’s depiction of Robert Dudley’s betrayal of Elizabeth is particularly irritating, because while Robert wasn’t entirely “faithful” to Elizabeth (having secretly married more than once after his wife’s death), he seemed loyal to her until his death and never seemed to have ever considered rebellion.
  • The movie’s depiction of Elizabeth’s sexual “adventures” was even stranger. Due to Elizabeth’s traumatic early life experiences with childbirth and marriage involving her father’s wives, she probably had a fair amount of body horror relating to both of these things. Being a king’s daughter and potential heir to the throne also meant that she knew her body was also never truly hers, and that any mere suggestion of pregnancy is instantly a political affair, and may endanger her life and her claim to the throne. Coupled with the fact that she was surrounded by ladies-in-waiting and councillors almost 24/7 makes the suggestion of any kind of physical affair unlikely.

KOOKIE Magazine #6 – “The Heartsmith”

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Hello, all! I have a short, 6-page colour manga/comic out with KOOKIE magazine called “The Heartsmith“, which is available in issue #6 (March 2019). It’s a lovely little all ages story for girls aged 8+, and it’s about heartbreak and the strength between different generations of women. I got sent two copies of KOOKIE, and the colours turned out lovely in print! Buy the magazine here!

Wu Zetian – VISUAL SOURCES

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The best thing about researching visual sources for Wu Zetian is that she has been meticulously documented in multiple TV dramas and movies (check Wikipedia for that full list).

There has been a number of pop cultural productions of Wu’s life story, but in terms of historical accuracy, the most reliable is probably the 1995 TV series “Wu Zetian” (starring Liu Xiaoqing). Being produced by the Chinese government means that the accuracy factor was probably quite strict, and so I drew some cues from it for my art. You can watch the entire series on Youtube.

Above is an example of the artwork I did that used cues from the 1995 “Wu Zetian” TV series. However, I should stress that I took some artistic liberties with the depictions, for my own ease. An example would be the last panel (pg15), which shows Wu Zetian sitting in on court sessions behind a screen next to Gaozong. In real history, the screen was behind Gaozong, not next to him, but that would have been impossible to show properly in a comic panel, so I moved it. On the other hand, after Gaozong’s death (pg20), Wu did move the screen from behind the throne to next to it.

The TV series covered most of my art sources, so the rest of it I got from the book “China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty” by Charles Benn (2002), Oxford University Press, Oxford.

The Rooster – by Omar Musa

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Hi everyone! It’s been a while I’ve posted, but the good news is that Reuters wrote an article on me and my (feminist) comics on historical queens. It was a good interview too, with many thanks to Michael Taylor. It’s super-gratifying to have my work acknowledged.

The Rooster

This is a poem by Indonesian poet Omar Musa, which I was asked to adapt into comics form by the Cordite Poetry review from a while ago. Here it is, finally, in its full form.

The Adaptation Process

Omar Musa’s poem “The Rooster” is an exploration of masculinity, mostly about the difference between a man’s perception of himself, and of the man’s actual reality. For that reason, I’ve divided the poem into 2 ‘columns’, the left showing the man/rooster as he actually is, and the right hand side showing the man/rooster as how he sees himself.

There are, however, two things that occupy the entire width of the page – neutral scenes of nature, and the parang, which is a reference to death. Since death and nature takes everybody in the end, these things straddle both columns.

A rooster is a common, traditional representation of manhood, so when the rooster (as a symbol) is ultimately killed and discovered to be simple-minded and hollow, the meaning of the poem is quite clear. In a way, I saw the poem as about the de-throning of masculinity. So on the left-hand side, the rooster is depicted as old and mangy, where as in the right-hand side, the rooster clearly sees itself as strong and powerful.

The same applies to the depiction of the man (the narrator) in the story. Since this is an Australian poem, I wanted to work some themes of migrants and displacement into it. On the right-hand side, the image of the man is that of a white, patriarchal kind of figure, meant to represent the “Aussie battler”, which is still a very common depiction of a “typical, Australian male”. On the left hand side is an older, non-white man, which I think is a better representation of the changing face of Australia. However, despite Australia’s racial melting-pot, people still tend to see the “quintessential” Australian male as a “white, blue-collar, fair-dinkum” sort of bloke, which I think is a stereotype that at least needs to be changed, if not torn down.

Last of all, is the ‘blood on the cuffs’ at the end. This as represents a ‘lingering remnant of violence’, which I interprete as a man’s need to defend his idea of himself against those who would attack that idea. A lot of male-on-male violence happens because someone is questioning a man about his ‘manhood’, so I drew blood-trails from the cuffs back to the rooster to the right-hand side of the page. The blood is only red when it’s on the cuffs, because the threat of violence only becomes real when you do violence in real life.