1640 BC

When you get into bed with me, I put the moves on you. I was excited to start drawing SH's script set in ancient Crete, featuring minotaurs/bulls, satyrs and nymphs. I got right on it. But as I got about 2/3 through the inking I had grown dissatisfied. The results were okay, but just sort of okay.

It looked like this.




The problem is, that what I had in my mind was more like this.



Picasso. Hey, aim high, right? And Picasso's minotaurs so often have an anguish that seemed just right for this brief tale of a "man" whose anger triggers an impulsive and fatal act in which he must traduce the dead to hide his own guilt.

I thought that it might be cool to do a single illustration that would contain all of the required elements to tell the story, and then cut them up and collage them into place. I couldn't get it down to one drawing, but I did mange four. See?









And I used this reference pic SH sent me, setting the scene indoors rather then outside, because the visuals of the composition seemed to work better for me.



And what I came up with was this.



There is sometimes in Picasso's work a kind of frozen quality that I thought would work perfectly for this story. This is a highly compacted tale, a moment, and coming back to that moment over and over again by reusing the same art made sense to me.

The overall effect feels like one of Picasso's fractured compositions, wherein a single scene is viewed from differing perspectives. And it feels very much like cartoons to me.

So I didn't give SH quite what he was expecting, but then it wasn't what I was expecting when I started. But I like it.