I have a character page for Aphrodite pretty much ready,
but I wanted to just get this comic up instead of
delaying it while I tinkered around with my
badly-written HTML. So with luck, it'll be up at the end
of the week instead.
The two goddesses we see here - Artemis and Aphrodite -
were amongst my earliest ideas for the comic. I'll talk
more about their personalities next time, but right now
I'll say a bit about their designs. We have a lot more
famous illustrations of Aphrodite/Venus than we do of
Artemis/Diana... so I had preconceived ideas of what
Aphrodite was supposed to look like, whereas Artemis was
more or less a blank slate. Indeed, the Aphrodite in
this comic is pretty blatantly based on Botticelli's
Birth of Venus, while Artemis sprung entirely from
my own head. Aphrodite only gave me problems insofar as
that she's supposed to be very beautiful, and beauty is
a ridiculously subjective concept that no two people
could ever agree on. I could have tried portraying her
as
my ideal of beauty, but then we'd have two
Melanippes running around the comic and it would get
confusing. So I went with Botticelli's famous imagining
of her. This did have the effect of making her look
markedly
less otherworldly than Artemis (they
both have the glowing eyes and watercolour-y effect on
their robes, but I think Artemis' colouration, her hair
in particular, makes her look less 'human'). So on a
strange whim today I decided to change the colour of
Aphrodite's text. I'm not sure how on Earth this would
apply to an actual conversation... Her voice is pink
somehow? Maybe she induces
synaesthesia in everyone she talks to.
So, next time I'll hopefully have Aphrodite's character
page up, and maybe I'll have added something useful to
Artemis' page. Incidentally, I've been thinking for a
while now of having a section on the site which is
basically a repository for all the non-
Amazoness!
bits and pieces I've produced over the years. It
might be interesting, if only because it'll give people
the chance to see the same few basic ideas repeated
again and again in everything I've ever done! Wooo!
