You know, the more things change, the more they stay the same. For thousands of years, I imagine there has been a rich heritage of lay people doing blue collar jobs and occasionally screwing things up only to try some ridiculous solution so they get off easy. I’m looking at you, people who built my mom’s sorry excuse for a foundation to her house!
This is the first Egyptian Mythology comic! Everyone celebrate! Okay, now stop celebrating. Continue reading.
Egyptian Mythology is pretty complicated and not something I feel as well-versed with as say…Norse myths, but they were my introduction into the world of folklore and ancient religions so they hold a special place in my heart. I remember reading about the pharaohs, pyramids, and burial rites of Ancient Egypt (to say nothing of the slavery that drove it all) and feeling pretty bewildered by the strange half-animal deities that peopled their rich mythos. One of the lesser known deities is Khepri, a scarab that rolls the sun across the sky each day, heating the earth (or in our case rolls poor baby Horus across the sky).
Many scarab beetles are also dung beetles (but not all!) and the ancient Egyptians supposedly observed these small creatures’ habits with great interest. Seeing tiny beetles born from dead materials was fascinating to them and they quickly became a widely recognized symbol of rebirth. Khepri was an early deity, worshiped simply as a beetle for a great deal of time though there are some later depictions of him as a man with the head of an entire scarab. It’s kind of weird looking.
Anyway, I posted on the facebook page to let everyone know shirts will probably be ordered tomorrow. They are going to cost 19 dollars which includes free shipping if you’re in the US. They will be on American Apparel t-shirt stock and professionally printed (not that shoddy cafe-press junk!). Orders outside the US, I believe will cost an extra dollar to ship. I’m also working on getting some buttons printed to help cover the cost of our trip to the Small Press Expo this year in September!
That’s right, William and I are going to SPX! Wooo! How exciting!
Oh that’s cool about SPX. If I lived on your continent, I’d go and see you guys.
So we’re rolling astronomical bodies…and it’s not a Katamari Damacy reference? Wow.
I had to exercise a lot of restraint to not go for the Katamari reference!
HAHA! Brilliant!
Ha ha ha. I love this guy. I demand he be a recurring figure.
Actually, I jsut want a shirt with him in a snarky pose saying, “Hey oh!”
I am bothered by the fact that no matter how long I look at this, I cannot figure out what that large white shape on the baby’s head is. D:
haha I figured that might be confusing but I couldn’t figure out a better way to show it. It’s baby-Horus, the falcon headed god, but I didn’t want him to have a full falcon head so he just has a beak. Maybe I should fix that this weekend…
Is that a sort of pot slang reference at the end, except the beetle was speaking literally..?
Augh, you beat me to it Yu. That’s exactly what I was thinking.
YAY
A historical reference that I understand without wikipedia-ing it first
I demand more Egyptian history!
haha You got it, Gareth! I’m actually going to be reading some more books on Egyptian Mythology soon, I’m sure I will have loads of ideas for strips!
OH I SEE THE BEAK NOW.
I had been looking at it really two-dimensionally and didn’t tell that it wasn’t. It looked more like a really big open mouth in a really weird position on his face but now that you say that it’s a beak I SO SEE IT OMG.
Creepy, i understood this joke completely because it was mentioned in class.
Cute giant baby.
This is so unimportant, but I may as well say it for future beak drawings: Beaks have nostrils too.
I’m the exact same way about Egyptian mythology. Poor Egyptian mythology, always losing business to the glamorous worlds of Norse and Greek.
Though, to be fair, I wouldn’t want my eight -year-old reading most of the things the Egyptian pantheon gets up to. I didn’t read Ovid as a kid either.
Hmm. K had better explain to Khepri that babies don’t burn nearly as well as balls of dung.
So that’s where Miéville got his characters’ species name…
By the way, I’ve always been a fan of egyptian mythology. It may be confusing and everything, but animal headed deities are definitely the best.
Wait a second…scarabs lay eggs in the dung-balls they push, right?
So Khepri is a god who rolls the Sun like those dung-balls…
Oh God, we’re going to be invaded by Sun beetles D:
Actually, the pyramids were not built with slave labor, but the peasants of the area. During the wet season they tended their land, but had no work during the dry season. Subsequently, they were put to work building the pyramids when they were out of work.
Actually, that theory is as incorrect as the one about slaves. There was plenty to do for farmers during the wet AND dry seasons. Pyramids were built by a workforce especially for building monuments – kind of like our construction workers nowadays.
i love his accent
He has a cigarette in the first panel and not in the last one. o.o;