The Making of 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Glynnis Fawkes)

November 5@ 6:30 PM, PAB 320

How does a cartoonist go about adapting a work of history, specifically Eric H. Cline’s 1177 BC The Year Civilization Collapsed? In this talk I will describe the process of interpreting Eric’s text in comics, an exercise where I repeatedly asked myself: how might I tell this story visually? Through page compositions and dramatizations where historical figures (such as Ramses III) speak, I imagined characters for whom we have no record offering commentary and opinions. To guide the narrative, I introduced two new young characters, Pel (of the Sea Peoples) and Shesha, (an Egyptian scribe) who ask the central question of the book: Why after three prosperous centuries did the civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean Bronze Age suddenly come to an end?

Glynnis Fawkes is the co-author with Eric H Cline and illustrator of 1177 BC: A Graphic History of the Year Civilization Collapsed (Princeton University Press). She is also the author-illustrator of Charlotte Brontë before Jane Eyre (Little, Brown) and Persephone’s Garden (Secret Acres), among other books, and her comics have appeared on the website of The New Yorker. She has worked as an archaeological illustrator around the Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean, and teaches at the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont.