I’d been dawdling on posting about Myth about Myths for a while because I wasn’t sure how I wanted to handle it. I even started this post a couple years ago and only just came back to it. Now that I’m re-uploading all the characters and text and everything to this website and putting in the work to make it visible to the public one more time.

We’re JUST past its 10 year anniversary. This project started off as a fun character design challenge for me back in 2014 while I was still developing my style as an artist back in University. The big almost-300-page-tome is already 7 years old now (what the fuck). So I figured it was time to give it a home online again.

Maybe once I’ve posted all of the art and text for the book-edition of the project, I’ll post the original versions I was posting of the series back on TAPAS and Tumblr. I had a website for it, too but I’m sunsetting it now that I’m reconfiguring a lot of things in my life. I definitely understand the appeal of having things out there for posterity and because some folks just really enjoy a deep-dive. So if you’re one of those, here you go. I hope you enjoy this post it’ll cover a bit of the journey this project went through. If you’ve been around since the beginning, wow. Thanks for sticking around. I definitely appreciate your support.

While this project is being posted online in it’s entirety. You CAN also purchase the PDF of the tome for $5 on our shop if you want to show it a little love and support the creatives putting all our efforts into this work. I’d like to bring the project back some day. Maybe it’ll look a little bit different, though. I’m still deciding.

The original zines and tome for this version of the project are out of print and I know I’ve been flighty about re-printing it. But I think its safe to say that if the project comes back it will look… Much Much Different than this one did.

Anyway. Lets Deep Dive This Thing.

So how did all of this start, anyway?

Waaaaay back in 2014 I was in university taking elective classes alongside my animation degree and several of those classes wound up being varying shades of Classics courses that went over both Greek Mythology and Myths of the Mediterranean. The teacher for the latter class was the one who made me fall head over heels right back into the myth I grew up with… to a point I became pretty obsessed with them. You could say I was inspired and while I was pretty good at memorizing all of these names (Greek Myth alone has a solid like dozen that start with A in the MAIN PANTHEONS) I could also tell that a lot of my classmates were struggling to commit them to memory.

So I figured, hey, I can draw… and I have a LOT of fun designing characters based off themes and motifs, plus I can be a… pretty funny guy. I’m sure I could put in a sizable amount of research and give folks a ‘sparknotes’ (does anyone still use sparknotes anymore?? is that a thing?) version of the mythos. Something short and sweet with a visual aid. A Visual Dictionary of Mythological Figures, if you will. Originally I decided to start with the pantheon I grew up with, my home turf, the Greek Pantheon. This beast started as a series of zines. Hang on I think I still have a couple of the stapled versions to take photos of… yeah I’m a fool. I didn’t actually keep a copy of each of these for myself back when I was printing them. The only reason I have these two are because my mom saved them (thanks mom!!)

(As you can see, Greek Heroes printed very well–sarcasm–and the cover was exactly the turquoise colour intended…. yay! Also dang that font is Huge in these things!!)

I distinctly remember… printing the Greek Gods zine at Rubiks (folks from Montreal will Get Me– I hear that particular print shop near the Concordia H building’s moved since), and immediately going to class with this fresh new box of zines and feeling absolutely wild with excitement, the fresh ink and paper smell opening that box;;;; wow. What a feeling.

I also just remember showing my buddies and–much to my absolute FEAR–the teacher at the time (Creative Process teacher, sweet guy, honestly) got extremely excited that one of his students was printing some of their creative work at the time and made me present it to the class. As a socially anxious 20-something, I was pretty much primed to self-implode on the sheer embarrassment alone.

In the long run it was honestly really sweet and something I might have done to a student too if I was currently a teacher and found out they were making ZINES. I get it, my guy. I see you. I remember your hype and I am THERE. Took me 10 more years to de-program that panic part of my brain but we got there.

ANYWAY. I printed those zines because I was also attending my first ever EXPOZINE that year (this wasn’t my first convention ever, the year before I did three and made maybe like 50 bucks across all 3). But I nearly sold out of the whole batch of Greek Myth zines that I brought that weekend to EXPOZINE and was absolutely humbled by the experience!! This project started with a single zine and quickly grew to be a 4 zine project.*

*Actually fun little side-note! I also set up two big guessing game posters I brought to conventions so that I could have people guess which god was who. I had a poster for the Olympians and a poster for Primordial Gods and each person (or team of friends) could have 3 hints if they got stuck (especially on the Primoridals). Those who guessed them all right got a prize. If they guessed the Olympians only, folks got to pick an enamel pin or small trinket on the table, if they got the Olympians and the Primordials they got to pick up a zine for free! It uhh isn’t a huge moneymaker… especially when you’re someone who just likes to see people win (a LOT of folks… were given consolation prizes for getting like Most of the Olympians right because I just couldn’t help myself LOL).

But then I hit a stumbling block. If I wanted to draw ALL the Titans from Greek Mythology, I’d have to find a printer that could manage perfect-bound printing. There were something like 30+ Titans (double that for page-count purposes because the text was on the opposite pages and we’re suddenly looking at something a lot beefier than a measly little 12 Olympians).

I didn’t really have anyone to kind of point me in the direction of particular printers that could feasibly do this for me and Rubiks at the time wasn’t equipped for that sort of thing. I wound up luckily finding out through a concept artist who was generous enough to mark their printer in their perfect-bound book I picked up at EXPOZINE and found out that they were printed at Le Caïus du Livres* RIGHT here in MONTREAL??? Wowee!

*This started my long-running relationship with this amazing team. I love those guys. If you’re in the area and looking for a job. Absolutely say hi for me. When we have short runs of anything to print we’re always eager to toss it their way. They’re fast and really sweet! For the record… this is also the reason I’ve made it a habit to mark down which press we’re printing all of our books with even through Windy & Wallflower. If some young up and coming artist or writer needs a lift and happens to have our books around, I want to make sure they have that kind of access I did. It also doubles as giving more business to presses who do a fantastic job and deserve the credit too!

**Tiny side-edit for this, Caïus has merged with another printer so their quality’s gotten a bit hit or miss since I originally wrote this post. They’re pretty-mid-range but definitely worth noting now.

Once I had this printer lined up I decided that, actually, I err, needed to reformat the first four zines to match the new titans. Like hell I was gonna have a disjointed series like this! Blasphemy! (Avoids direct eye-contact with Prism Knights… shh its just a price you pay supporting small indies early on before they even know what they’re doing–). So I beefed out the earlier zines and set to work printing them all. I phased this all in over the course of a few months. I’m insane but I’m not entirely out of my mind.

The new zines wound up taking shape into a nice little series. I honestly still kind of love these a lot.

The size these guys were at eventually became MYTH RETOLD’s size later on because I liked the hand-feel of something so compact but big enough to hold nicely in your hands.

I’ll be honest. This is probably my favourite method they were printed in. The dense and compact size was just superb and holding the whole series once it was laid out was just a good fantastic feeling. I only finished Beasts & Monsters during the big omnibus Kickstarter because I was such a stickler for having a Complete Set of minis for those collecting (I’ll be honest it was mostly for me). Special shout-out to Tas who did a lot of the heavy lifting on the sketches for these beasts and monsters!

I remember this being online…

It sure was! While the series started as a physical zine because I just love printing and couldn’t help myself. This project was also cross-posted online to build up my audience and give people a laugh or two. You might remember it over on Tumblr or Tapas before I built an actual physical website for the thing. It got quite a bit of traction, honestly. Those posts were shared around a Lot and I was a personal and consistent victim of the, ‘well actually’ crowd who tried to undermine the project many many times… even though I intentionally started EVERY entry with, ‘in some version of the myth’ to avoid it. I put a lot of folks in their place but even that, while fun for a while, got exhausting and after going through most of the popular guys… I wound up just giving up on online posting the project at all. At its height I had about 4,000 followers on Tumblr and a couple thousand on Tapas too (though I don’t have any real numbers to show for it). I took down the Tapas page and my whole account after they were playing fast and loose with copyright on their website and botching the whole coin earning system. A post for another time, maybe.

The website is technically still around but I’ll be sunsetting it sometime this year. The upkeep is a bit too much to keep up with (heh), now that I’m working on a bunch of new projects BUT–I’ve posted ALL of the old image posts I made for the project. At least whatever I can find in my old files. By 2014 I was getting better about maintaining my artwork and keeping files of everything vs just tossing it out when I was embarrassed by it.

Crazy fact is that, just before we converted theMAM Tumblr page to the W&W page, I was still getting slammed for my Hot Takes on Apollo (people really don’t like when you shine a bad light on that guy). Lets just say I’m glad I stepped out of those trenches.

But for those reading this: Apollo is a fucking dick. Get your fandom pagan ass out of my culture. This is such a fucking sore spot with me sorry–MOVING ON.

---

Wasn’t this a book, though?

THEN came the actual book. The big honking beast of a thing I had funded on Kickstarter back in 2018! This one would compile all of the zines into one big and very professional 280 page book! This book was edited pretty much solo with a bit of help from Tas and my family at the time.

Here’s what she looked like:

That project was an absolute mess. I completely undersold the price it would take to print something this big and I was honestly extremely lucky I was working a part-time job at the time to offset shipping costs. Plus some guy tried to scam me out of an extra copy of the book, lamenting at the time that I didn’t end up making it hardcover–honestly… thank god I DIDN’T. I don’t even know how I could have feasibly managed it.

There’s a lot of irk that’s kind of attached to the final look of this project. A lot of it didn’t quite turn out the way I had hoped (the cover was a bit too floppy and some of the text on it is not as crisp as I’d like– aside from several typos that still escaped my tired eyeballs from looking it over too many times) but I definitely learned a lot from the experience. Since selling out of the book (thank god it was a sharp seller at conventions) people have asked me time and time again if I’m ever thinking of reprinting it. I think the art and style of the whole thing is from just a very different version of me. I don’t think I ever really want to go back to. I spent a lot of time figuring myself out and becoming the person I am today*. I think I’m finally ready to retake the plunge into a new version of this book but I’m definitely going at it from the ground up. This time…. without colour.

*Most especially my relationship to queerness. When I started the project, as far as I was convinced, I was cis & straight, it’d take me a couple years to finally come out as bi and a few more years to figure out I was actually transmasc. Go figure. I’ve also just done a lot of work on my art style to be able to illustrate bodies in a way that doesn’t make every single one hairless twigs. Basically the new version so far goes a lot harder in the way the first one should have.

Not having full colour illustrations means I can also get it printed a little nicer at a muuuch cheaper cost (especially now with paper prices going up and up).

The long and the short of it? This project was a lot of fun and really taught me a lot about what I could feasibly create. It also tested limitations on that front and I came to the very strong realisation that it’s really not worth rushing a project to its completion. Sometimes its okay to miss a deadline.

This doesn’t mean I’m not proud of this book in its final completion. Looking at my own copy on its shelf with a lot of the other work I’ve made, it still reigns supreme as one of the most involved projects I’ve been a part of, (with Prism Knights only just surpassing it now–it was involved in a very different way, I’d say). Admittedly being able to look back at the strife and struggle with a project like this certainly makes me appreciate what I did learn from it and what it taught me about myself.

I learned I can make a honkin’ hell of a book with my own bare hands and that’s pretty fucking cool.

Now lets do that properly and with real intention next time.