Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Third panel done, half way there!

Inappropriate soundtrack

I've recently been watching some German TV to brush up my German. Today I saw a documentary about Wetzlar cathedral, but it was really weird because every time they showed a reconstruction of the cathedral they played the theme from classic 80s show Street Hawk.

Who the hell thought that Wetzlar cathedral's unique combination of romanesque, gothic and baroque architectural tradition would be best illuminated by the theme song from a 1980s American kid's show about an ex-cop who solves crimes by riding around on a top-secret superbike? Was there some 80s manboy on the production team who ground down the will of every other person?

I wonder if this is a common problem at the production company, maybe it comes up with every TV documentary they make. They should fire this guy, but he's probably the son of the company director or something.

Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Second panel from my Constantine strip. I based Constantine's face loosely on his surviving sculptures.

The comic does get funnier, I promise.

Constantine: Hearts and Minds

Since I don't have an Xbox or a PC to waste my time on at the moment, I spent today pencil-sketching a short comic strip about Emperor Constantine. I'd almost forgotten how much fun drawing is. The best thing about it is that a day spent drawing cartoons actually feels like a day well spent, whereas the same can't be said for a day spent pwning noobs on Call of Duty 3.

I'll try to draw the strip up properly over the next few days. I can't colour it yet cos I won't have a graphics tablet for the next couple of months. I also don't have my scanner so I'm having to improvise with a digital camera.

Here's the first panel. Starting with a bird's-eye perspective shot seemed like a cool idea, until I realised that drawing a crowd of people takes bloody forever.

In hoc signo amabis

This is a cartoon for late Romanists. Constantine was the first Christian emperor. In AD 312 he won the Battle of Milvian Bridge, attributing his success to the favour of the Christian god. Soon afterwards he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire, and the rest is history.

On the eve of the battle Constantine was supposedly visited by Christ in a dream and commanded to create a new standard for his army using the Christian symbol of the chi-rho.

But what if Constantine had been visited not by Christ, but by a time-travelling hippy from the future? That's the question I often ask myself.

Rome/Empire review part 1

Something awful happened a few weeks ago: I finally reached the last episode of the last season of The Wire. This was bad because it meant I would have nothing to do in the evenings, except maybe try to get a social life, which of course would be absurd.

Gratuitous picture of Hadrian's Wall

Happily Mithraea came up to visit around this time, and we took a long-overdue trip to Hadrian’s Wall. Later we were in HMV when I noticed a Rome-themed drama I’d never heard of – Rome: Blood and Sand. I bought it on the strength of the box art, and because the blurb on the back said:

ROME boasts “powerful acting,” says the Wall Street Journal, with a hot young cast that includes [a bunch of people you’ve never heard of] and Emily Blunt. Filmed entirely in scenic Italy, ROME tells the thrilling story of a hero’s rise amidst the greed, blood, and lust of anctient [sic] Rome.

Emily Blunt struggling to cope with so much powerful acting

So I paid my eight pounds Sterling and walked home, clutching the DVD excitedly.

I was already intrigued by the name of the mini-series, because there’s another show called Rome, and also a show called Spartacus: Blood and Sand. What could this be? A bizarre mish-mash of the two? A cheap attempt to cash in?

Actually, both. It was hard to find on IMDB, because the show, broadcast in 2005, was originally called Empire, not Rome. In fact the DVD menu screen still has the title Empire. So changing the title on the front of the box to Rome and ripping off the subtitle Blood and Sand is a pretty transparent attempt to trick idiots (like me) into buying it.

Now I am confused

We’ll put aside for the moment the fact that the blurb also claims that the first emperor Octavius was Julius Caesar’s nephew, rather than his great-nephew. The box art is unintentionally hilarious for another reason: the tagline.

Really? Because I assume that this is referring to the hero of the mini-series, Octavius. And unless Wikipedia has been lying to me all these years, didn’t he found the Roman empire? Maybe ‘one man’s fight to found an entire empire!’ just doesn’t sound as good.

So even before we pressed the play button, the signs were promising. And it would only get better. This show, which on the surface looks like a tacky TV mini-series, turned out to be a radical re-interpretation of Roman history. It has changed everything I thought I knew about the founding of the empire. For instance, I never knew that the young Octavius fled from Rome, was taken into slavery, and was then sent to the ‘Combat Dungeons of Arkham’. My education was about to begin...