Styles...

I find it a little bit annoying that I haven't been able to settle on a style yet for this project. I haven't found one for Mademoiselle de Maupin either. It's not as if I haven't got anything more basic to do and learn than develop a style for these stories - I mean, writing a scenario would be a nice start ;-). But for some reason I like to know about the visual element too; it goes hand in hand with the story and atmosphere for me, and I am used to developing both at once. For my previous project things actually started with the style and developed from there. So I'm feeling a bit blah about my inability to settle on a particular visual approach. I did a few try-outs, but none of them feels right so far.

The first thing I tried was inking with Faber-Castell PITT pens (see image above). Compared to my earlier inking style, it is rather loose (I used a brush pen as well as a more ordinary one), with an attempt at slightly more realistic shadowing. I don't really know what to think of the result. I guess that for me it is not neat enough, but on the other hand I am not sure whether my usual preference for a more polished style is all that suitable to a story about a brutal war...

Despite my love of black and white illustration, I rarely use quill pen and ink, and have never ever attempted to ink with a brush. I can't control them very well, and only started to ink my drawings when I discovered Staedtler pens - teensy felt tip pens that don't run, don't stain, dry very quickly and produce really neat lines. With them I have about as much control over the linework as I am ever likely to get. The drawback is that they don't allow much variation in the lines in the way that quill pens or brushes do when you apply pressure or swirl them. Drawings done with Staedtler pens arguably lack in spontaneity, too - they are perhaps more static than pictures done with a quill or brush, or at least they are when I am drawing.

In this drawing of Catuvolcos and Ambiorix I thought I would give classic inking a try. It is done with quill, brush and waterproof Chinese ink. I suppose the result could have been worse, but I am not entirely happy with it. Once more it is not quite neat enough to my liking, though that may be because I am just not adept enough at using these tools. Also, I am wondering whether my lack of insight into realistic shadowing does not make this type of drawing look merely clumsy.

Another thing I tried was to combine graphite pencil linework with colour pencil. I am not yet comfortable using colour in a comic; up until now I have always worked in black and white. But the Celts were a colourful people, so much so that the Greeks and Romans felt obliged to report on the many and bright colours of their clothing. Not to use colour means not to counteract the drab costuming in so many films...

One problem I already have to face is that the scanner, for one, does not like my pencil colouring very much. Quite apart from my merits in using pencils, the subtleties just don't register in the scan :/. I am garantueed to have trouble if I should try to get art like this printed from scans. It just won't look the way it should, and it's not a mere matter of enhancing contrast in Photoshop - I tried that.

Apart from that, I don't suppose it is very practical to use only pencils and no inks. I need to try a combination of colour and inks and see where it takes me. I have no idea whether inks and colour pencils combine well... So far I have only ever tried inks with watercolour, but that requires special paper, which is not very practical either.

If I manage to sort my colouring problems out, I should very much like to adopt clear colour schemes for each main character. It would make them more recognisable, and say something about the character at the same time. For Ambiorix I want blue and gold, and royal purple for Vercingetorix. Rigantona, as a priestess, I would dress in vivid greens. Green is the colour of the supernatural and of nature; I should like to give my druids green clothes too, in order to avoid the cliché image of the white-clad bearded man who is in remarkably little evidence outside of Roman sources.

I'm not sure about Comm's colours yet. My very first plans involved lots of black for him, but I wonder whether that wouldn't be a little too unusual. I'm still considering it. Maybe a black cloak and a red tunic? Volca will probably end up in browns and reds - warm colours, but not too striking. She isn't supposed to be someone who likes to draw attention to herself, unlike Ambiorix, who is a bit of a showoff.

Anything watercolour-related takes a bit more preparation than anything you see in this post - I can't just try it out in my sketchbook, because for sketching I like a very smooth sort of paper, and watercolour simply doesn't catch on that. I will be posting painted colours for comparison, hopefully soon, and comments and advice are very welcome :-).

Costume - a few sketches

In a previous post I mentioned the problem of having to convey lots of information without taking too much recourse to text. One specific element I will be dealing with in War in Gaul is that the Gauls were divided into many different peoples; in fact we are not even sure that they called themselves Gauls or even Celts.

According to Caesar, the Belgae differed from the other continental Celts by their descent from Germanic peoples. There is quite some debate among historians as to whether the Belgae spoke a Celtic or a Germanic language. Unfortunately these discussions are often frought with politics. Those people who argue vigorously that the Belgae spoke a Germanic dialect are sometimes prone to using their theory in order to emphasise, say, the difference between the Flemish and the Walloons in Belgium; consequently I find it difficult to know whether I am reading propaganda or honest historical research. Moreover, in wishing to distinguish between 'Celtic' and 'Germanic', historians are pulling a Caesar: they force some kind of order and distinction on a culture that does not actually seem to have cared much about this kind of deliniations. The Celts did, however, make distinctions among themselves: they seem to have been forever picking fights with their equally Celtic neighbours. That appears to have been one problem the Romans solved...

I would like to keep 'my' Celts' ethnic identity fluid. It might be nice to go with the Germanic thing to some extent. For one thing, it would make my Eburones and other Belgae extra annoying in Caesar's eyes because they are impossible to categorise. As a bonus, it would give me the opportunity to throw in a few Germanic names, which are easier to come by than Celtic ones :P.

In terms of costumes, I was thinking that I might show the sliding differences between northern and southern peoples by the men's trousers. Apparently it is a typically Germanic thing to strap leather laces around the leg up to the knee; the Celts usually strapped their trousers at the ankles. So I'm going to play with straps, and with the width of the trouser legs - narrow in the south, wide in the north. Now Catuvolcos and Ambiorix look as if they are wearing a kind of ancient plus-fours :D...

Here is old Catuvolcos, leaning on his spear. I didn't give him a shirt; I wonder whether I should change that. As I said in a previous entry, I imagine him as an old-fashioned warrior king, so he has to look sort of hardy, even if he is getting on in age. Shirts are for sissies like Ambiorix ;-).

For some reason I like to picture Catuvolcos in a cloak with a fur collar - does that give him a heroic, royal air, or is it just me?

The armlets are ... Well, armlets are archeologically attested, but not exactly in high numbers. They are more of a pictorial tradition than anything else, but I like them, so my kings wear armlets. Let's say we haven't found many because Caesar confiscated them and melted them all into sestertii, all right? ;-)

Here is Ambiorix, in full regalia, or almost. I need to sort a few things out, like for example the way the cloak is worn; I am having a bit of trouble drawing cloaks properly, and I need to copy a few fibulae for inspiration too.

The basic clothing consists of trousers, a shirt, a tunic with belt, and a cloak. I am wondering whether I can make my Celts wear shirts that are open at the front - kind of like the modern versions but without the buttons. I have read a description from which I understand that they may have had such shirts, but I am not sure whether I interpreted the passage the right way :/.

Ambiorix wears his sword on his right, not because he is left-handed, but because the Celts just happened to wear their swords that way. Seeing how they loved to show off, I bet they did it because when you draw a long Celtic sword from your right with your right hand, you have to make a long, sweeping movement - quite impressive-looking, that *g*.

Here is Commios. He lives a bit more to the south, on the border between what Caesar calls Gallia Belgica and Gallia Celtica, so I gave him different trousers, shorter straps, and a tunic but no long-sleeved shirt. I guess the main reason why I am inclined to give him short sleeves is because I picture him as rather muscular and so I want to show his arms. Only, well, at the moment I am still learning about muscles, and so far his arms merely look beefy :P. To Be Fixed.

I am still playing around with costume ideas; as you can see this drawing is on the whole less well-defined than the previous two. My Eburones are taking shape more quickly than the rest, and I still draw a complete blank on the Romans. It's not really a problem; I will get there in time. As a character, Comm is shaping up nicely. He has a daughter now, and a lovely little plot that will take him to Ambiorix. I was rather relieved when that idea popped into my head, even though it means I have a new cast member... Her name is Dannumara, by the way - Mara for short.

I am still trying out for Volca - her face isn't quite stable yet, but at least I had a lot of fun with my graphite pencils :-). One important job is to invent nice hairdos for my Celtic ladies; the one with all the braids was a first try, and I think it could have looked worse. I need some more training though, and I am looking for reference material too, but so far I have not found a lot of useful photos.

I need to think the ladies' wardrobes through, too. It is not immediately obvious to me how I am going to bring variation to it in the way that I did with the men and their trousers. Sleeves? Girdles? Stoles? Necklines? I have to try a few things out. I also need to look into making peplos-like dresses more elegant. Maybe I should watch a few peplos films for inspiration?

War in Gaul: the cast (1)

You’d think that after having started and abandoned several megalomaniac comics projects, I’d have learned to keep things manageable by downsizing the scope and number of characters of the stories I start, but no. I’m incorrigible. Whether War in Gaul has a greater chance of ever going somewhere than my previous enterprises, I don’t know, but once again I’m starting big. If I want to present my story’s main characters to you, I have to tell you about no less than five people. …Yes, I know. But I may still change my mind ;P.

1. Ambiorix, king of the Eburones


I showed the cute blondie to my best friend last Friday and made her gasp – not because she thought he was pretty, but because I told her he is my version of Ambiorix. She had been expecting someone more along the lines of the Tongeren statue, I suppose. That is the image of the king of the Eburones as Belgians know it, having seen it on labels and boxes of the most expensive Belgian brand of shoes, or on beer bottles, or on signs of pubs, dry cleaning, car washes and goodness knows what else. Most people don’t question the funny hat, the fact that Ambiorix is standing on a very pre-Celtic dolmen, or the man’s dress code – would he be bare-chested in a pre-Inconvenient Truth climate? But this is the way in which he got fixed in the Belgian subconscious.

Caesar does not tell us anything specific about Ambiorix, such as how old he was or what he looked like. We are free to imagine him any way we like. When in 1866, Jules Bertin was commissioned to sculpt a statue of the Belgic chieftain for Tongeren, he chose a local blacksmith as a model; a hero should have some muscle, right? The Frenchmen Rocca and Mitton in their series Vae Victis make Ambiorix a grey-haired kind of patriarch. Neither of those visions is interesting to me.

The information that Caesar does give us about Ambiorix makes him an unconventional kind of king, at least for a Celt. Celtic kings tended to be men who had made a name on the battlefield. Like the Greeks who went for Troy, they were greatly interested in honour and glory. This was one of their weaknesses when they faced Caesar’s legions: they would insist on encountering the Romans in open battles, chasing glory by running headfirst into a shield wall, but they were invariably flattened by the order and tactic of a professional army. Ambiorix for his part does not seem to have cared about honour at all. What he wanted was to destroy the soldiers camping on his land, and he knew that could never be done in a ‘fair’ battle. He decided to cheat instead. With lies he coaxed one and a half legions into a trap and had some eight thousand men massacred. Dio Cassius says that he did not even join the fight himself – he just watched, and (this is something Caesar says too) made one of the Roman generals disarm with a promise of parley, only to have him killed in cold blood. Later, when Caesar exacts vengeance on Ambiorix’s people, the king himself goes on the run. He is hunted down by the Romans but never caught.

To me, Ambiorix doesn’t sound much like a classic hero or someone his fellow kings would have spontaneously looked up to. In order to pull off his deception, he would probably have had charm, a way with words, and the ability to lie well. (My main reason for making him so cute is that looking nice and a touch feminine would have helped him to convince the Romans of his innocence and trustworthiness.) For some time he was of service to Caesar and during that period figured out how to tackle the Romans. He must definitely have been perceptive, clever, and an agitator – while on the run for Caesar’s men, he toured the Belgic kingdoms spreading revolt – but too sneaky and self-preserving to be considered heroic and brave. Of course that is exactly how I like my characters, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Ambiorix wrestled his way to the fore of my story…

I find that for some reason, I always try to make my main character as young as possible, so that they face a crisis early in life and have to spend the rest of it dealing with the consequences of their choices. Ambiorix is no different – he got younger at every turn, and is at this moment in his late teens when Caesar invades Gallia Belgica (meaning he is about twenty when he tricks the Romans). That will make the Gallic War the thing that shapes him; I find that more interesting than looking at the effects on a mature adult, though I do have a mature main character as well. Another reason why I need Ambiorix to be young is the better to contrast him with his fellow king, Catuvolcos.



Caesar reports that Catuvolcos was ‘elderly’. What I should take this to mean in an age when the average man did not get older than forty, I am not entirely sure. I have opted for a Catuvolcos who is old but not ancient – a sixty-year-old already qualifies as a senex in Roman terms.

We know very little about the Gallic language as the Gauls did not have a written culture. Translation of names is therefore tricky, and I have found many different etymologies. “Ambiorix” has been explained as “rich king”, “king of the surroundings” and “king of the enclosure”. Whichever (if any) of these is right, they have one thing in common: Ambiorix doesn’t have a particularly martial name, unlike Vercingetorix (“great king of the warriors”), Cassivellaunos (“commander in battle”) or indeed Catuvolcos (“battle-falcon”, also interpreted as “hero”). Funny enough, the names do tie in nicely with my purpose, and they support the complimentary nature of the two Eburone kings. They give extra weight to my choice of presenting Catuvolcos as an old school warrior-king and Ambiorix as a young man whose prestige derives from his wealth and (family) ties – Caesar mentions him as having allies among the Menapians and peoples on the other side of the Rhine.

I guess ‘wealth’ is relative, and frustratingly, I don’t know just how relative. The Eburones lived too far to the north to enjoy close contacts with the Mediterranean, and in the days of Ambiorix, they did not have any trade centres on their domain. In those days, trade (in metal, salt, pottery…) was the main source of wealth; agriculture only yielded enough to provide for the tribe’s own needs. If Ambiorix was rich, I guess he must have possessed a lot of cattle – cows and horses. My historical atlas shows that horses were an important ‘product’ in that part of the country at the time. Moreover, the Eburones had a problem with raiders from across the Rhine who conducted cattle raids.

(The Celts did not have an economy based on money; instead they determined a person’s wealth by the number of cattle they possessed. To the Romans, however, that did not mean much, as the Celts’ horses, cows and pigs were significantly smaller than their own.)

When I say that I have difficulty figuring out the meaning of wealth, the reason is the following:
Caesar names as one of the reasons for the success of Ambiorix’s ruse the fact that the Romans found it hard to believe that a relatively powerless people like the Eburones would rise against them. He mentions the Eburones being clients of the Atuatukes, then of the Treveri – this means that they were not powerful enough to maintain their independence. Yet, based on archeological findings, they seem to have occupied a pretty large territory – and to have possessed a lot of gold. Several gold treasures have been found on Eburone territory, the most recent discovery being the Treasure of Heers. This depot consisted of a quantity of coins, seventy-four of which were minted by the Eburones around the time of their revolt against the legions. Gold staters were used to hire mercenaries, as they were much too valuable for daily use; they were only ever minted by kings or very high dignitaries out of their personal fortune. Archaeologists estimate that there must have been more than a million in all.

The television news at the time made this out to be Ambiorix’s fortune, but to me it seems a lot for a king from an ‘insignificant’ tribe. At the time of his revolt, Ambiorix was taking orders from the Treveres; it appears to my ignorant self that if he had a million gold coins, he would have been able to buy the Treveres :P. But maybe they had even more gold. If that was the case, it becomes easier to understand why Julius ‘I’m Oh So Deeply in Debt’ Caesar really, really couldn’t resist visiting Gaul, and how it was possible that he brought such a quantity of gold back from his conquest that the prices in Rome fell so spectacularly as to make gold temporarily cheaper than silver… Another possibility is that the journalist misunderstood – that the Eburones made more than a million coins in total between 75 BC and 50 BC, not that they were all minted by dear Ambiorix. It’s not quite clear though. A literal translation from an article in Het Belang van Limburg mentioning the same amount goes: ‘Experts suspect that once, more than a million Eburon staters were minted, of which – as far as we know – 160 have been found’. Still, even then it appears to me that for a ‘poor’ tribe, they had a lot of precious metal…


An Eburon gold stater.

Another thing that fascinates me is the fact that the Eburones had two kings. I haven’t heard of any other Celtic people with the same; this peculiarity is why some scholars suggest that maybe Ambiorix and Catuvolcos were magistrates rather than kings, just like the Romans had two consuls to avoid any one person becoming too powerful. But this seems rather unlikely to me as the Eburones lived in the north of Belgica and were more conservative than southern peoples; the Belgic tribes all had kings, unlike peoples like the Arvernians and the Haeduans who had a republic with magistrates chosen by a kind of parliament, their political system influenced by their Roman neighbours’. Caesar says that Ambiorix and Catuvolcos ruled one half of the Eburones each, but they seem to have acted and decided as one, and the situation still remains a bit puzzling. I am still working out how to deal with the matter, but I sort of like the idea of Catuvolcos having a say in Ambiorix’s appointment – he could ask for a co-king because he is getting old and ill, or because he feels that society is changing (which it was) and that he needs a different (more mercantile? More diplomatic?) approach to kingship than the old warrior ideal. Also, if Ambiorix is as young as I am casting him, Catuvolcos might feel he can easily influence and teach him. Maybe he does not get along with his own son, and prefers to train another young man for kingship…