A comic about N. Kavvadias
The Death of William George Allum is a work that was inspired by the poems of the greek poet Nikos Kavvadias, and especially the two poems called “William George Allum” and “Marabu”. Unfortunately i haven’t found any english translations of these two poems (you can find some other translations in this link). I will try and give a short description of the two poems:
William George Allum: The poem starts with our narrator saying that he had met a very strange English stoker. Everybody was telling him that this stoker had a very painful story. He had tattoos on all over his body, and especially on top of his heart a very beautiful and wild woman.
She was the love of his life but she betrayed him with another sailor and so he tried to forget everything about her. But on his chest remained the painting of her. Many sailors had seen him during the night rubbing his chest so as to erase her tattoo -but none of his efforts was met with success -and the tattoo remained…
Some night near Bay of Biskay, they found him dead with a knife in his heart. The captain said he tried to erase his stigma (the tattoo of the woman he loved so much) and ordered to bury him in the sea.
Marabu: In this poem the narrator tells us that there are rumors and sotries about him, that he is a lousy punk, that he never sleeps with women, that he takes drugs and has tattoos on all over his body.
However he tells us that his true story is different: in one of his trips, when he was young, he had met a girl, the daughter of a wealthy Egyptian, who had killed himself. She traveled around the world to forget her sorrow.
Our narrator and this girl became friends and loved each other deeply. When they had to leave each other they exchanged presents (he gave her a small cross, and she gave him a large wallet) and he was the most depressed man on earth. He never forgot her and he had kept her photo as his guardian angel.
One night on a foreign port he got very drunk and followed a prostitute to her place. Next morning when he took off his wallet to pay her she screamed staring at him. He saw the cross on her neck. It was her (the girl so loved and cared about so much). She left her place like a madman and never got over it.
The death of William George Allum -how was it made
As for my own interpretation of the two poems, I have tried to combine them by identifying the woman and the stoker from the William George Allum poem with the girl and the narator from the Marabu poem. I also added an ending of my own feeling that it was an open possibility from the orginal works.
On the technical side, all drawings of the comic have been done by hand, while I added the texts and some corrections to the black (or added the black background to some of the pages) digitally. The front and rear covers were also painted digitally.
The comic is published (in greek) by the publishing company Kapsimi (ΚΨΜ) and in case you are interested in it you could order it here.
The same publication company published my other comic Windy Nights (A collection of illustrated poems with actions that take place in a windy night -poems by Gertrude Stein, Federico Garcia Lorca, Nazim Hikmet).
The Death of William George Allum
