Chapter Three Lettering, and The Parthenon Marbles

Lettering for Chapter Three of PRACTICAL DEFENCE is underway, which is exciting: it's the first time the comic really comes together to look like a comic, I think.

First, though, this video popped up for me on Youtube the other day, offering a decent introduction to the controversy over the Parthenon Marbles and Lord Elgin, the man who brought them to England.

If you are wondering why this might be Relevant To Your Interests, it is simply this: the history of the Parthenon Marbles helped make Delilah Dirk and the Turkish Lieutenant what it is.

The Marbles are, for better or worse, not little colourful glass spheres but rather (to put it inelegantly) a bunch of marble sculptures that used to populate the Parthenon, the former temple on top of the Acropolis in Athens. They are now in the British Museum and sometimes called "The Elgin Marbles," after the overreaching rich man who hauled them out of Greece.

It's been a while, but my recollection of the story is this: in the late 1700s, a German writer makes Ancient Greek history—and especially its accompanying aesthetic—extremely fashionable. Western Europeans go nuts for the stuff, they're making their snooty clothes look Greek (see: Regency fashion), they're making their banks and courthouses look Greek, presumably all in the belief that this will imbue them with history’s highest ideals. A British guy called Lord Elgin travels to Greece with—as I read it—the original intention of getting an artist to make a bunch of nice drawings of picturesque Greek ruins. When he gets there, though, he figures, "hey, I bet I could rescue these sculptures from these heathens [people who did not look like him and who no doubt did not appreciate the Ancient Greek sculptures as fully as he] and the British government would pay me a bunch of dollarbucks to stick 'em in a museum." He went through the process of getting permission from the Ottomans (who were ruling the area at the time) to remove the marbles from the Parthenon, but this part of the story is iffy—maybe he had permission, maybe he didn't. Regardless, he did remove them. And since the Ottomans were using the Acropolis as a storehouse for gunpowder and ammunition, there is an argument thrown around that Elgin could be seen as protecting the marbles from potential destruction (the Parthenon was partially ruined by a previous explosion). It costs Elgin a whole bunch of money to bring the marbles back to England, where the government very much is not willing to buy them. They moulder in a storehouse for years, Elgin ends up miserable and ill and I think dies before the government changes their mind, buys the marbles at a real steep discount, and does indeed stick 'em in a museum, where they've been thematically connecting Britain and its archaeological institutions with the legacy of Ancient Greece ever since.

Back in the early 2000s, I visited the Elgin Marbles in person. All I knew is that they were a thing you were supposed to see. To their credit, the British Museum did, in fact, present visitors with the question: should these be returned to Athens?

A few years later, I remembered that when I was thinking about writing a story that would "fill the Indiana-Jones-shaped hole in my heart." One of my initial ideas for Delilah Dirk was that she could be a counterpoint to an Elgin-type (the opposite of "it belongs in a museum"), and the book could be a vehicle for some genuine art history. So I started researching the history of the Parthenon Marbles.

Somewhere, among all my notes and saved paper scraps, I have the title of the book that so completely pulled me into 19th-century Greece and Turkey that I ended up spinning off in a completely different direction, diving towards Istanbul and away from the Parthenon Marbles. I will have to do my own archaeology to discover that title, though.

But I can absolutely recommend Susan Nagel's book Mistress of the Elgin Marbles. Mary Nisbet, Elgin's wife (for a while) is a legitimately fascinating person. She was present for (and perhaps instrumental in) all the Marbles nonsense, helped bring a smallpox vaccine to the Middle East, and apparently wheeled and dealed with Napoleon.

I'll keep looking through my stuff to see if I can find the other book I loved. (Update: I was not able to find the notes I was looking for in the most likely place, but I have another idea where they might be.)

Meanwhile, go find out more about the Parthenon Marbles…

• "How the Parthenon Marbles Ended Up in the British Museum" by The Nerdwriter.
• Stephen Fry, among others, debating in favour of returning The Marbles.
• Read about 'em on the British Museum site.
• Walk around inside the British Museum via Google Street View.
• Google Arts & Culture introduction to the Parthenon.

(In case it needs to be said, I am in favour of returning the marbles to Athens.)

- - - - - -

Meanwhile back in the here and now, I'm putting words and balloons and panel borders onto Chapter Three, and what were once simply drawings now look like comics, hooray!

Here are two of the pages that I thumbnailed back in this video…

^ That layout sure feels like a gamble, legibility-wise, but I think it works?

And here are the two pages I'm planning to inject near the start of Chapter Two…

Very excited to see how these look in colour.

Next time you hear from me, lettering will be done and I might already have some rough colour script images to show! And in the process of looking for my old notes, I found a lot of early DD material. It's been so long it feels like someone else made it all. If that's the sort of thing you might be interested in seeing, let me know. A lot of it comes together to tell the story, "try a bunch of different things until you find what works."

Thank you all for your continued support of this project. I'm so happy to be sharing it with you.

TC!