Herman Melville’s Moby Dick is one of my absolute favorite novels and I’m definitely not the only cartoonist with an affinity for it. Most famously among us “indie” types is probably Jeff Smith’s homage to Moby Dick in his series Bone. In it, Moby Dick is the favorite book of one of the characters, Fone Bone, and there’s a running gag in which every time Fone begins reading from it all the other characters instantly fall asleep. There’s even a scene in which Fone imagines himself as Captain Ahab.
It’s a different Moby Dick character, though, that I’ve been thinking about comics-wise of late: Queequeg, the heavily-tattooed South Pacific Islander who’s the chief harpooner aboard the Pequod. Much to my delight, there’s been an explosion of nautical-themed graphic novels of late, and it seems like it’s now almost required that if you’re going to do an 1800s nautical book, that you’ve got to have a character who’s a Queequeg homage. Here, for example, is a Pacific Islander character from the great all-ages nautical adventure The Unsinkable Walker Bean:
And of course, there’s my own personal homage to Queequeg, Tevia from my Oyster War webcomic:
I only recently learned, though, that the character Queequeg himself was a bit of an homage–to a real person.
I just finished reading Nathaniel Philbrick’s Sea of Glory, a really great history of the U.S. Exploring Expedition. The Ex. Ex. (as it was called) was a truly spectacular globe-spanning surveying and exploring expedition that took place from 1838 to 1842. The Ex. Ex., though, was mired in controversy almost from the moment planning stages began and it has since been largely lost to history despite its many remarkable accomplishments, among them the exploration and mapping of nearly three hundred Pacific islands, mapping over eight hundred miles of the Oregon coast, the recovery of over 60,000 bird and plant specimens, and the eventual founding of the Smithsonian Institution.
Interestingly, though, Herman Melville was apparently very influenced by Charles Wilkes’s (the Expedition’s leader) written account of the expedition, Narrative, written in 1845. While Sea of Glory points out a number of things from the expedition that appear directly or indirectly in Moby Dick (and apparently this is common knowledge among Melville folks–hence the “not so” in this post’s title) as a cartoonist I was particularly interested to hear how influential one of Narrative‘s illustrations was–that of an islander encountered by the expedition that was apparently the origin of Melville’s character Queequeg. Thanks to the magic of Google Books, here it is:
I found this really fascinating partially because it makes a sort of “full circle” with a drawing influencing a prose novel which then influences (cartoonists’) drawings. Also, though, it’s an interesting example of image as inspiration. Conveniently forgetting that the near-total separation of words and pictures in literature is a relatively recent phenomenon, many people tend to make a hierarchical division between them with words being the inspiration and pictures being illustrations of those words. But here’s a great example where one of my favorite characters in one of my favorite prose books has his origin squarely in my “home turf”: drawings.
These are obviously much nicer paints and you can really see the difference in the level of pigment here in the first animal I did with them, the flying fox:
The one thing I don’t like about this pen, though, is that you can’t use your own ink in it and the ink that comes in the cartridges it takes isn’t waterproof–so you can’t do any sort of wash or water-based anything on top of it.
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