. . . Because you can never have enough drawings of Greek Goddesses, right? Or, like my classmate in college said when I turned in yet ANOTHER Greek Mythology-themed piece - "Typical Gallagher subject matter". ALL THE GODDESSES ALL THE TIME!
You can find all of these Power Ladies in either my Etsy Shop or my Storenvy one!
In celebration of my webcomic Gods & Undergrads returning this month, I'm throwing a SALE PARTY and you're all invited!
Just use the coupon code CHEAPGODS to get 15% off Gods & Undergrads merch (or, really, any merch in my store) AND when you get a G&U book, I'll draw in it the Greek God of your choice!
Like this here Poseidon (who hasn't shown up in the comic ... YET) I did for a fellow reader:
So come on down to my shop and get some 15% off things! It'll help the comic and me and we'll all celebrate Greek Mythology Nerdiness together!
(psst - and if you haven't seen them, I also have a whole slew of Greek Gods inspired prints!)
One of the nerdiest things I love to do is scrutinize appearances of Greek Gods in pop culture (like this post about Disney's Hercules). Here we go on another one, yay!
LATEST POP-UP SIGHTING: Supernatural, Season 8, Episode 16!
So in this episode, Prometheus (aka the Titan who gave fire to mortals and royally pissed off Zeus) is embodied in a drifter Sam & Dean discover, who dies every day. The cause of his death is random, anywhere from cars hitting him to sudden heart attacks. This is an homage to the nature of Zeus's punishment for Prometheus in the myths, which was to strap Prometheus to a mountainside and let an eagle carve out his liver every day for a tasty snack. Every night, he would die. Every morning, he'd get resurrected just for the fun of it.
Apparently, Zeus had lost track of Prometheus and he'd fallen to earth, hence him dying by random means and not the daily eagle attack. So Zeus sent out his best assassin, a.k.a. daughter Artemis, goddess of the hunt, to go after him.
Things I liked about this portrayal of Artemis/Zeus:
Things I didn't like:
All in all I was happy to see them represented, as always. And props to making Artemis strong but also a thinking, feeling goddess (albeit still in a leather pantsuit). Yay!
A couple of years back I created this drawing of the Three Furies having fun, hanging out Sex & the City style for the back of my 2nd Gods & Undergrads book:
Because really, why do they always have to be so angry and upset? Maybe they like to kick back a few cocktails every now and then too!
So, since I've been itching to do some new prints lately I figured I'd continue with some vignettes of the Furies, out and about in their every day life. I've got two so far, but already have ideas for more in the series. If you like 'em, I've got them for sale in my Etsy and Society 6 shops!
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Woop! Getting all ready over here for the Gods & Undergrads book 3!!
It will be 122 pages, black and white, manga sized (that's 5 1/4" x 8"). Featuring the last two chapters of the series, sketches, plus a couple lovely fan art pieces from these cool friends/wildly talented folks:
The book will be released early September (round about the time of the Baltimore Comic Con / SPX back-to-back weekends in comics yay spectacular) BUT if you pre-order it now, you get a choice of one of three of these nifty little prints:
Each are 4" x 6", printed on Epsom Matte Ultra Premium Presentation Paper. PLUS if you pre-order, you'll get a free sketch IN the book of whoever ya want! Just drop me a line when you pre-order and tell me which print and which sketch you desire.
[button color="blue" size="medium" link="http://lipstickisspress.storenvy.com/products/2064451-gods-undergrads-book-3" target="_blank"]Pre-order HERE![/button]
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I've mentioned before that I'm spending the month of July spiraling down the (eek, ever increasing) page count to finish up the 3rd Gods & Undergrads book. Now it looks like it really IS all coming together - heh heh, sure there wasn't any doubt - and it will be available in time for Baltimore Comic Con, SPX, all those good things. I.e. Fall time, where I for one will be happy to be done sweating and wearing shorts. This book will contain the last 2 chapters - all about death, hanging out in bars, Hades, weird glowstick hand powers, boy trouble, and Lelaina's descent into ... well I'm not going to ruin it for you! Plus I'm going to throw in some extras at the back of the book like character sketches, inspirations, and a few guest artists, to boot! I'm pretty excited about it so I wanted to give everyone a STAY TUNED STAY EXCITED YAY! And once again, if you'd like a refresher to the comic without actually reading all the pages of it again, check here for the cute one-page chapter summaries. And if you DO want to read all the pages from the beginning, I've added a wee Introduction page in an attempt to organize this ginormous comic into something that makes reasonable sense. So until then, I'll keep putting up chunks of pages every Wednesday until the STARTLING CONCLUSION. Eeeeeeeee! I'm going to come up with some fun gift to give those of you who pre-order. Stay tuned!
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Whew!
I think I'm done for a little while. And by done, I mean I won't be traveling to exotic, far-off lands every other weekend. Now it's time to relax and make COMICS again! Hooray! So, sorry for the delay, but since I rolled back into town this week, all my Bonnie/Gods & Undergrads updates are going to be a wee bit late this week. Or "fashionably late", as I prefer to call them.
Allow me to say a hearty hello to all of you who came by to visit me at TCAF, holy crapola what an amazing show that is. If only all comic shows were in libraries and all of them packed to the gills with amazing readers! So much comics love and excitement all over the place, I got really spoiled. Besides having a fun time catching up with my pals Tim Fish and Greg Lockard, I ALSO got to be part of an amazing podcast DINTERVIEW (dinner + interview, according to Becky Cloonan) with Paul Pope, Becky herself, Glyn Dillon, and Jimmy Aquino of Comics News Insider. Li'l ol' me, chilling with some serious comics heavy hitters, trying to keep my laugh from being a cackle and attempt to add something to the conversation. You can find that interview here, and Jimmy also posted a one-on-one interview you can find here!
Sigh. Such fun times! I'll be over here beaming, so in the meantime check out some sketches I did at the show:
Also, I created these little family seal drawings for some of my Gods & Undergrads characters. Once I clean these up a bit, I'll be selling them as prints.
As promised, here are the three latest editions to my Greek Gods series!
Hera's always a bit of a tough cookie to interpret. Wife of Zeus, mother of Hephaestus and Ares, perpetual scorned wife. Personally, I like to think of her as a dangerous multi-tasker. Sort of the ultimate conservative, political wife with the no-good but powerful husband. She's always painted (a bit unfairly) as nothing but a vengeful, jealous goddess out to punish every pretty little nymph this side of Olympus. But Hera, she's got her own thing going. She has the whole of Mount Olympus to run!
And now for her kids!
Poor Hephaestus. Judged from the start to be weak and useless, Hephaestus has proven his worth a million times over any other god on Olympus by keeping them stocked in armor and lightning bolts. Dude can make ANYTHING. Which is why, I guess as a reward, Zeus hooked him up with Aphrodite. Way to pay him a backhanded compliment, Zeus.
Because of course, here's who Aphrodite cheats on Hephaestus with ...
His brother Ares! Because what would the goddess of love be without the goddess of war? Ares has got to be the ultimate favorite child of a goddess who's constantly undermined by her husband - big, brash, ridiculously impulsive, destructive. Does it matter that he doesn't really think before he acts?
I can't wait to add more gods and goddesses! Let me know who you guys would like to see next.
Besides the fact that I'm obsessed with Greek Mythology and have included Eos in my comic, this day always makes me think of Eostre from Neil Gaiman's American Gods. All rosy, plump, and eating her bounty in San Francisco. :)
Hooray! Gods & Undergrads (my weekly webcomic about a girl at college and her Greek God relatives) resumes again today! I'll be posting a page a week, every Wednesday. Today there's a special block of pages to get the engines rolling!
Click here for the latest and here for an archive of everything so far!
For those of you who don't know, I started doing comics way back in 2000 with Gods & Undergrads, my first foray into webcomicking. (and for those of you interested in my process, I go into the details on my four part process for creating comics here!)
Gods & Undergrads is the story of Lelaina Pentheus, a college sophomore. At the beginning of the comic, she's applying for residency on campus. And over the course of 2 1/2 books, Lelaina meets friends, falls in and out of love, and discovers that her relatives are Greek gods.
When I first started G&U, I was pretty regular with updating the comic. But, over the years my updates grew more and more sporadic. Many people stopped reading, many people yelled at me, and most people suggested I stop doing this comic already. So while all that was happening, I worked on other comics and even created a NEW webcomic - Bonnie N. Collide, Nine to Five. Buuuuutttt ... well, I never wanted to stop doing good ol' G&U.
I'm just not finished with the story yet. What makes it awkward is how much the story and the art and the style have changed over the years. Even though I look back at the earlier pages (and the later, let's be honest) and I cringe, I'm going to keep plowing ahead until ... well, until the end.
Anyhoo. This is a LONG, drawn out way of saying that where we last left off in the story:
What crazy shenanigans are going to happen to the undergrads of Troy University next? Find out DECEMBER 12TH, when Gods & Undergrads continues!! Wooooo!
In the meantime, here are some links to help you catch up/start the story:
There's a new Bonnie up! And hey, have you guys noticed the character page I created for it? There's also one for Gods & Undergrads! Hooray!
Aaaaaaand scene. That's it for this chapter, everyone! I wanted to leave it on a quasi-cliffhanger, or as my boyfriend would call it, an "Oh shit, it's Mystique" moment. Which is a reference to the first time I saw X-Men in the theater. When Mystique first appears on screen, revealing herself as Senator Kelly's aid in the helicopter, this dude in the back of the theater was TOTALLY SHOCKED and said out loud, "Oh SHIT, it's Mystique!" Priceless.
For this chapter, I wanted to deal almost entirely with Anthony's descent into the Underworld. At first I thought about making it just about he and Hermes' journey together, but then I decided to split it up into sections - each one dealing with one of the stages of grief. As Anthony eventually accepts his death, his wounds return, and it finally becomes real what happened to him. And even though the build-up is kind of scary and sad, the reality is - kind of no big deal. Hades was the general underworld of the population - it's where everyone went, good or bad, which I always loved about Greek Mythology. Rather than going down to hell or up to heaven, you got ferried to one place, and sorted out later. I know I barely touch on Hades and Persephone in this chapter, but I'm saving them for later. I didn't want them to steal focus from the guy we've journeyed with this whole time - not yet anyway.
Oh - and they're big on purpose. ;)
Thanks everyone for reading, and please feel free to share your thoughts on this page, or any part of this chapter!
***UPDATE: Gods & Undergrads returns on Dec. 12, 2012!! EEEEEEE!***
Oh, how I wish the title was "final countdown" and I could see Gob's magic intro. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/1418162]
But by countdown, I mean the countdown to the end of Chapter 6 of Gods & Undergrads! Woooo! Gasp! There are only 4 pages left, my friends, so starting next Tuesday, January 17th I'll post a page a day. It's not terribly dramatic, since really there's only a few pages left, BUT STILL. I like to pretend this sort of thing is a big deal.
In case you need a recap of what's happened thus far, you can check out:
Then come back next week for the startling conclusion! (okay ... still, not startling, but EXCITING!)
Plaques will forever make me think of Sarah Vowell and her love for them ... and since I just completed re-listening to Assassination Vacation for the zillionth time. Made extra special this time when I noticed this link about hottie Powell!
Click here to read!
I already mentioned in this post how I've been obsessed with Greek Mythology for a while now. I believe it started with this book:
And then it grew into an uncontrollable gorging every time I went to a thrift shop with a book section:
And peaked when I tagged along with my college's Ancient Studies Club to go to a trip to Greece in 2000.
Why was I so obsessed? Here's the thing. I was raised Catholic. Holy communion, weekly Mass, confirmation, awkward Sunday School taught by my father - the whole bit. And I knew I wanted to believe in some aspect of religion and myth and legend - just not all of it. Some parts were fun and story-tastic and awesome. Others, not so much. What I was really lacking in my religion was variety. All I saw were contradictions - think this way but act another, strive for this even though you'll never ever get there, hate yourself, love everyone in theory but also judge them, etc. etc.
Then middle school and sixth grade English and Greek Mythology entered my life. Two elements getting it on, twelve titans, twelve Olympians, nine muses, three fates, three graces, three furies ... and a plethora of combinations and gods for every possible thing you were into. The more books and epic poems I read, the more I established my own opinion on what each of the gods were like. I kept trying to rationalize their behavior and give them personalities beyond what I'd read, so they'd fit into what I wanted them to be. It wasn't very difficult, which proves why they've stuck around in modern culture for so long.
So what do you do with all this lovely subject matter, which has already been tackled to death in every possible form wayyyy before you were born? You find some way to express your love and interest in it, using the tools at your disposal.
Tomorrow! Turning ideas and wishful thinking and a love of comics into story.
Monica Gallagher is a comic book creator, illustrator and freelance designer making work for hire with a positive, feminist spin.
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