1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed
Glynnis Fawkes on bringing the Bronze Age to life through cartoons
In each installment of “The Usonian Interviews,” The Usonian spotlights a storyteller from a different corner of the globe. This week, The Usonian spoke with cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes about her new collaboration with historian Eric H. Cline—1177 B.C.: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2024), a graphic novel adaptation of Eric H. Cline’s work of history, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press, 2021). Order the graphic history from Bookshop, Amazon, or directly from Princeton University Press.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The views presented by the interview subject are the opinions of the subject and do not represent the views of the author or this newsletter. Browse the full interview archive here.
THE USONIAN: How does one become a cartoonist? And then, how do you become an “archaeological cartoonist”?
GLYNNIS FAWKES: I’d been interested in the ancient world since I was a teenager. I studied fine art and painting. Today, there are several programs in cartooning specifically—[such as] where I teach, the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. When I was school in the late 90s, there wasn’t such a thing.
I’ve always been interested in how certain aspects of ancient art are similar to comics. There’s something about the image that’s narrative-plus-text. My undergraduate thesis at the University of Oregon was on Greek Athenian vase painting, which looked similar to comics to me.
I drew comics because I wanted to capture moments in time and what I was observing around me. And in a way, that’s similar to what archaeologists do—recording what they find from the past through information and artifacts. There’s a similar impulse—wanting to capture some kind of observation about what living life is like.
How do you become a cartoonist? It was an accident. When I was in my MFA in Boston, even as I made more serious paintings, I drew many comics about what was happening in my life, but I always put humor into both of those efforts.
And then when I went to Cyprus [on a Fulbright grant], I just kept drawing cartoons as a way to warm-up for larger paintings. They were always short—the longest one was two pages. Usually just single-panel, a scene, or something that came up in the reading I was doing about Cypriot archaeology—I was often in really direct conversation with the work of Vassos Karageorghis—I thought of jokes as I read his work.
TU: What drew you to Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.—how did this project come to be?
GF: In Cyprus, I met and eventually married John Franklin, who was also in Cyprus, working on his book, Kinyras: The Divine Lyre. John got a job at the University of Vermont, so we moved to Burlington and had two kids. Those early post-Cyprus years of little kids in Vermont [meant that] making paintings of Cypriot archaeology really started to lose its relevance. I had to find another way to work and make art. I was making observational comics about my kids and their lives and bringing these to comics festivals, like SPX outside of D.C. and MoCCAfest in New York.
I wanted to make longer comics. John suggested I make comics of the Homeric hymns, short stories recorded around the time of Homer. And I thought—what if I do this as like training for how to make longer-form comics? Before I had always drawn single-panel comics. I drew comics for the Homeric Hymns to Demeter, Aphrodite, and Dionysos using Greg Nagy’s translations.
John was pitching his book to Rob Tempio at Princeton University Press—John ultimately published it at the Center for Hellenic Studies through Harvard. But Rob was interested in the book. I came along to the meeting with Rob and brought some of my comics. I just wanted to get to know him and say, Would you want to publish these? And he said, Yes.
It hasn’t happened yet; I’ve put that project aside for now. But Rob knew who I was, and I kept doing my own work. And when 1177 B.C., Eric’s original book, became such a success, Rob told me, Hey, you should do a graphic version of this book. Then I read [Eric’s book]. And I realized I could do this, because it’s so full of stories. And there are definitely some abstract elements—especially the second half when the book is describing theories of collapse. But most of the book—the first three chapters about the 15th, 14th, 13th centuries BC—are very much constructed stories, vignettes about people’s lives—like the returned Minoan shoes or Seknenre’s hippos. I wrote to Rob and Eric and said yes, let’s do this book. And Eric said, Great, I’ll write the proposal. And I said, I’ll do some sample pages.
Which I did. But once I started working on the book, I realized I couldn’t use the pages I’d drawn for the book proposal. They were attempting to go word-for-word through the book. Like, here’s an Eric sentence, here’s a picture. And that would make for a thousand-page book. I had to rethink my working method by cutting 80 percent of the text, which involved a lot of rewriting—I had to figure out how to show Eric’s points through images, maps, and art.
TU: The book uses two narrators as depicted by Eric Cline and yourself. And you also have two fictional narrators—Pel, of the Sea Peoples, and Shesha, the Egyptian scribe. How did these different narrators play into your structural choices when crafting the book?
GF: Two years ago, I had finished the prologue and Chapter One in color and without any narrators. And I was like, I’m on my way. I showed them to Eric, and he said, This is great. Let’s talk about it. We had a Zoom meeting. And he said, What if we have some kind of narrator?
I was resistant to a narrator because I didn’t want this book to look like a TED Talk or a documentary film, with Eric strolling around saying this and that—because it would mean drawing Eric over and over again. That’s fine, but because this is a visual medium, the book would become about Eric as a character. In the original 1177 B.C., Eric’s voice carries the story, but it’s not about him, it’s about the cultures of the Late Bronze Age.
Comics are such a different medium than prose. I wanted to take advantage of the possibilities of visual storytelling and to make the ancient characters speak as much as possible. I had thought text boxes could connect one story after another. But when Eric said, what if we had a narrator? And what if they don’t have to be me? They could be someone from antiquity. And then I thought, Aha, yes, they could. And what if there’s a kid from the Sea Peoples, but he wouldn’t know anything? He’s asking these questions, but an Egyptian would know because the Egyptians are the ones that inscribed everything on the Temple of Medinet Habu. And an Egyptian scribe would be able to read all the ancient languages. How cool is that? Despite that a girl scribe would be unlikely, I wanted to dispel any hint of mansplaining!
The narrators also unlocked the book in a way that turned it from “an illustration job” into a much more creative project, because suddenly the narrators have a backstory, and they’re magical—because they can go through time and seem to be everywhere, at all the key moments.
But then Eric said, Yes, but they couldn’t know about 19th century and 20th century archaeological discoveries. So we did need Eric [as a narrator]. So I thought, Okay, if that’s his very specially-defined role, that’s great. He appears in very specific places when we need to understand contemporary archaeology.
I spent two months retrofitting the characters into the first 50 pages—I redrew and added the characters into the page compositions.
TU: In this book, there are all these illustrations of cuneiform, and hieroglyphics, Minoan frescoes, and some undeciphered ancient languages. How did you make sure all these representations were accurate?
GF: I found some on Google Images, some are from books. I drew from these inscriptions by eye. The maps I drew by hand—I wouldn’t use these for navigation. But the Linear B tablet is accurate. That’s real. The cuneiform is much less accurate.
Any hieroglyphics are probably accurate because as a kid I was really interested in hieroglyphics. I really wanted those to “check out.”
TU: What was your favorite panel to draw?
GF: I loved drawing Cypriots talking about the fate of their island. I was thinking of [my time in Cyprus] when I occasionally had long lunches with friends, especially I Lina Kassianidou, and I would hear her say something like, Where have you been so long, have you solved the Cyprus problem? I was thinking of people hanging out and talking about the state of the island and what’s going on.
I also liked drawing the ending scene, where Pel, having gone on a quest, returns to the fireside with the elixir of knowledge. Only we’re left with so many questions! Or the page where my character has gone and bought ice cream for Pel and Shesha—which would blow the minds of ancient people—I drew myself digging into the ice cream cooler of a periptero.1
TU: What do you hope readers get out of the book?
GF: A curiosity for the ancient world that—I don’t know why—a lot of people don’t have. Some people glaze over when I say, Oh, I’ve just made this book about the Bronze Age. I wanted to give people a more vivid picture of what the Bronze Age might have been like.
But the book is so relevant in terms of what’s happening now. Supply chain issues were very much part of the experience of the end of the Bronze Age. Losing connections in society caused or led to collapse.
Finally, I wanted to add to the form of storytelling through comics. There’s a growing number of nonfiction comics being published. I hope this book will continue the conversation.
Glynnis Fawkes is the author/illustrator of Charlotte Bronte Before Jane Eyre, Persephone’s Garden, and the minicomics Allé Egó and Greek Diary, both of which won medals at the Society of Illustrators’ MoCCA fest. She was the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship to Cyprus where she published Archaeology Lives in Cyprus and Cartoons of Cyprus and has worked as an illustrator on archaeological projects in Greece, Cyprus, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey. Her comics have appeared on The New Yorker.com, The Comics Journal, Popula.com, and MuthaMagazine.com (for which she was nominated for an Ignatz Award). She lives in Vermont and teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies.
A periptero is a type of kiosk found in Greece and Cyprus.