Rachel Reads & Reviews

I think it’s a kind of kismet that my 100th post was a review of Dionysos: The New God. Now my 200th post was a lovely interview with The Olympians creator himself, George O’Connor!

Here he dives deep into his thoughts on mythology, and his other works including the historical Journey Into Mohawk Country, nonfiction book, Unrig, collaboraation with Adam Rapp and his upcoming series, The Asgardians.

1. Let’s start simple, when did you first get into graphic novels and comics?

I grew up in a house where both my parents read comics, but thy weren’t super religious about it. They were a lot of comics in the house and we were also very into newspaper comics. I became somone who was collecting comics on a regular basis, and followed different titles each month some time around sixth or seventh grade.

Some of the early comics were-my mom bought early Superman comics, my dad bought a lot of Marvel, I was into a lot of Conan and Indiana Jones. In sixth or seventh grade I got into superhero comics, especially The Mighty Thor. It’s a big reason why I tell mythology in comics because it struck me as a really great way to tell mythology with these visual images.

2. What drew you to this medium instead of straight fiction or other?

I was basically telling stories with my pictures before I knew how to write. The nice thing about comics as a medium to tell stories is that you have more than twice as many ways to tell a story. The standard way of telling a story is that you just write the words and that’s all you have.

But with comics or sequential art, you can tell part of the story with words, part of the story with drawings and you can combine them to tell even more of the story just by the two of them playing off each other.

It’s always been the most natural way of telling a story to me. If there’s an idea I can get across better through by writing I can do that, if I can do it by drawing it I can do that as well.

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