Broken Frontier

ATHENA is one of those projects that come into your life and kind of give you a chance to use things you absorbed years and years ago—things you believed were worthless that have suddenly became very valuable.

I didn’t create ATHENA, the concept was proposed to me by the people at DYNAMITE.  We discussed it at some length while we were all together at the Baltimore Comic-Con (free plug).  At first, I was afraid it would become something like THOR or HERCULES done in a non-Marvel manner, but once we hit upon the idea that Athena not knowing that she was a Goddess, everything started to fall into place!

PAGES 5-6

I quickly realized that to make the book work, I would have to (for want of a better term) educate the reader a bit in Greek Mythology (something I took an interest in during my undergraduate days in college).  It was decided that four pages of each issue would be devoted to that subject, which gave me a chance to give my main character (Athena) more depth and, at the same time, relate her story in modern times to something that happened before—in Mythological times.

In Greek Mythology, Zeus, father of the Gods, is kind of a screwed-up guy.  His brothers and sisters have been eaten by their father, Cronos, because he is afraid that his offspring will take his place.  That turns out to be a self-fulfilling prophecy as his very actions become the thing that turns Zeus against him and leads to his downfall.

It also puts that seed of doubt in Zeus’ mind to the extent that he is very concerned about his own children—something that is key to our story.

In the comic, I had planned to use an elaborate series of segues going into and out of the flashback sequences.  Some of these were easy to do, some were kind of convoluted.  It soon became obvious that the artist wasn’t too comfortable with the idea so, rather than have Athena staring at wall friezes in the last panel of Page 5 that morph into the image of Zeus on page 6, we eventually went with a cleaner, easier to read approach—one that I am, on the whole, happy with aesthetically.

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As I got involved in writing ATHENA, I decided that I wanted to do a sort of two-layered story—the basic layer, in modern day, would involve Athena and her partner Ully working to bring a criminal family to trial.  The back story, set in mythological times, would be Homer’s ILLIAD, the story of Paris and Helen and the fall of Troy.

I wanted to introduce my Paris, Helen, and Aries counterparts in a big set-piece early in the first issue and decided that, as Paris had first encountered Helen in a beauty contest, I would have the same thing happen in the comic.

I wanted a sort of old/new site for that contest, and decided to invent one.  The White Star Terminal—the wharf where TITANIC would have docked had she made it to New York--is still standing.  I decided that it would make a great nightclub—and wrote the sequence to take place in that site.

That led to a bit of a communication problem. 

One of the wonders of modern comics is the fact that pretty much all of the work moves around the world via e-mail and the internet.  In the old days, if I wanted to send an artist reference for something, I would have to package and mail it to him.  Now, I just add an internet link in the appropriate spot in the script and he can look at whatever I have in mind.

In this case, he called up my images of the White Star pier but didn’t really understand the significance (something that was certainly my fault—just because I was thinking of the significance of the site in those terms, does not mean that he was—and I never bothered to tell him, assuming he’d figure it out.  Stupid on my part!) 

Rather than do the close-up of the front of the terminal I had wanted, he did a very atmospheric long shot that showed a bit of the harbour lit by moonlight.  It’s a great image, and one that works really well to advance the mood of the comic—probably more so than my original concept.  It’s one of those ‘shrug the shoulders’ moments where you just go with the image as it is rather than try to change it. 

I’ve always thought of comics as a collaborative medium—in this case, the artist had a different ‘take’ on the scene than I did—maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not—but I know it’s not worth the time, expense, and damage to anyone’s ego to try and change it.

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If ATHENA was going to work in today’s market, she was going to have to be more than a simple investigator with a past.  That meant that at some point she was going to have to appear as the  Goddess she used to be. 

I decided to do this kind of gradually.  We know that she’s been turned into a human by some higher power.  We know that the higher power is keeping an eye on her through the owl that is her constant companion, and that he acts to save her when she is threatened early in the book.   We can tell by her chosen profession and her activities in the club that she will continue to be endangered—and so does the higher power. 

I used page 21 to indicate a conversation between that higher power and the owl who is watching over Athena—all this happening as a backdrop to a planned assassination.  The conversation leads to the transformation of the human Athena into the Goddess—who has that nifty costume!

The main problem here is just setting it up so it’s clear that this is the first time this has happened—and that the modern Athena still doesn’t know who she is.  The rather prosaic look of the hospital, and the matter-of-fact attitude of the killer works very well against the fantastic thing that’s about to happen.

Overall, the main problem with writing ATHENA has been to compress everything I’d like to say into 22 (actually 18) page bits.  By the time the four-issue series is done, I will (I hope) have told the story of the ILLIAD in 16 pages (4 per issue) while keeping the modern-day parallel story interesting and exciting. 

And that is what makes doing this sort of thing so much fun!