Its time.
Bloomsday is coming on fast and we’re working feverishly to get everything together with a re-tooled iPad app and website. But since some of you have been waiting so long and have supported the project is so many ways, we figured it was time for taste of Mr Bloom.
Here you go: 14 pages from the upcoming “Calypso” chapter. We’ve given it to you here as a thumbnail gallery/slideshow instead of as our usual comic pages while we re-tool that portion of the site. You can click on each individual thumbnail to view its corresponding page it at full size, or use the forward and back arrow icons underneath the full size-page image to read the entire set continuously.
The pages will start running on the regular comic reader beginning May 16th, just one month ahead of BloomsDay, and will be accompanied by our regular Readers’ Guide feature (written this year by the fabulous Janine Utell). But we thought you folks deserved a little taste!
Hope you enjoy it as much as I love drawing it.
Thanks,
-Rob
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Oh, how I missed you, and Leopold, and everybody else. The work is wonderful.
Waiting for June, your fan, Ofrah
Thanks, Ofrah! Glad you enjoyed it. We can’t wait to unveil the entire episode. We’re pretty excited about this one…
I love the way you represent Bloom’s thoughts as gradually occupying his entire conscious world for several panels, before returning to a view of him as both thinking and seeing, as he walks along to Dlugacz’s shop. I know that your work will bring the enormous pleasures of this novel to many who up until now have been afraid to move beyond the first page! The blog is splendid too, as is the chance for readers to respond to you both and to each other. Bravo!
Ofrah, thanks sooo much! We’re back on Monday, one month before Bloomsday, with weekly installments of the “Calypso” chapter. But I’m keeping the first glimpses of Molly secret right up to the wire.
Sandy, thank you!
(Sandy is presenting at the Joyce Conference in Pasadena next month, and we’re very happy to see her comments here on the blog and in the readers’ guide.)
The joy for me as a cartoonist comes across in the Bloom chapter; Bloom is the sensualist and he makes Stephen’s mental wanderings seem, well, sophisticated certainly, but a bit dour and stilted by language, disenfranchisement and grief. Bloom gives us all those sentiments and more, but they’re not so much a prop as a launching pad. With Stephen’s mind I have to think about Stephen’s mind. With Bloom’s I get to think of the larger world Joyce lived in.
I hope that the readers’ guide will offer us a great opportunity to examine this world a bit. Look for chances to talk about Georgia O’Keefe, Paris, the kitsch of Orientalism, modern painting and dance, Jewish diaspora and European nationalism, Irish county goodfellas in the big city and women’s roles in post-Victorian culture all in this next chapter.
Oh, and there’s plenty of disgusting stuff about eating a pork kidney for breakfast as well.
The Bloom pages start up on Monday and run right up to BloomsDay. They’re nearly done and Josh and I are very proud of what we’ve got to show you and very pleased for all the patience attention fans have given us so far. {lenity of good insights to arguments coming soon.
-Rob
Very good artistic rendition of Mr Bloom and his environment, interior as well as exterior. Definitely no quibbles there. However, I notice some lines missing of Bloom’s interior monolog and of the narration: “She turned over sleepily that time. He pulled the halldoor to after him very quietly, more, till the footleaf dropped gently over the threshold, a limp lid.” (Gabler lines 74-76) and “He crossed to the bright side, avoiding the loose cellarflap of number seventyfive. The sun was nearing the steeple of George’s church.” (lines 77-78) and “His eyelids sank quietly often as he walked in happy warmth.” (line 81)
I regret _any_ omission of Joyce’s text. (“Every word is so deep, Leopold.” — Chapter 5, line 206) As you may find, you can’t cut out any of the text without mutilating the book and risking a hemorrhage later on. Perhaps you could use more text boxes to enclose what you may at this point consider to be superfluous text so that it doesn’t need to be rendered visually. But please don’t omit it.