In addition to this site I also collaborate with my wife on her James Joyce / Ulysses blog & podcast ‘Blooms & Barnacles’. Kelly does the hard work, reading and writing about ‘Ulysses’, famed as one of the most challenging books in the English language. I draw the purdy pitchers that accompany each article.
You can see the gallery of images here.
It’s often a tricky process, as the source material can be esoteric at times. I also give myself a strict 1 to 2-hour time limit. Of course I could continue to add details, but it keeps me from getting overly-picky.
A very dark passage as two midwives walk toward the sea to deposit something in the water:
This is about a horror story by W.B. Yeats (very Lovecraftian) that Joyce admired. One thing about Joyce that I only realised as we began to collaborate on the blog was that Joyce was a master of horror. For fans of horror fiction, had he written in that genre he’d have been in a class of his own:
Joyce tremendously admired the Renaissance magician Giordano Bruno. Bruno had a plan to rename the ‘uncouth stars’ of Greco-Roman mythology in order to create a more virtuous form of Astral Magic. (Read ‘Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition’ by Frances Yates for more on this misunderstood man):
One of the figures who is mentioned in passing in ‘Ulysses’ is the great French prankster Leo Taxil, the originator of many modern memes about the Freemasons – myths that are with us still:
This is a panel from my comic ‘Continuum’, which I may or may not finish. I’ve been working on it for 8 years already, and the end is nowhere in sight. Anyway, happily I was able to re-purpose this panel to illustrate one of many moments where Joyce meditates on Aristotelian ideas:
‘Ulysses’ is famous for the stream of consciousness. This is another panel from my book ‘Continuum’, which also deals heavily with language. A slight modification (changing the text to a passage from ‘Ulysses‘) allowed me to use it as yet another Joycean image:
