To celebrate the book that actually got me reading again this past fortnight - Natalie Haynes' brilliant Theban novel The Children of Jocasta - here is a classical adaptation of my own from 1987. Consider it an accompaniment to the similarly unfinished super hero comic and bivalve samurai epic from the same year, the year I met my mate Tom in fact. He didn't finish his comic of the Odyssey either. I went for Heracles, the original Greek name of Hercules, and a subject I'd visited before, back when I was eight. Thinking about it, it's surprising I didn't visit him more often; he was big, dumb, super-strong and fought monsters, the perfect subject for a comic book. His newly nobbly nose is proof I was by now healthily into Sergio Aragonés' Groo the Wanderer, a pre-Homer-Simpson comedy barbarian, and I can also spot the influence of airbrush fantasist Rodney Matthews in the thorniness of my monsters.
In keeping with my previous treatment of this material (particularly here) I have not shied away from the more tragic elements of Heracles' story, although I do now take the piss. And profuse apologies for my depiction of Tiresias; my only reference material for gender studies at the time was Mad Magazine.
