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1/11/09

T.H. White wrote that his characters were the same characters as appear in the Morte, admitting only that he'd invented two elements: a love affair for Pellinore, and "Malory did not say that Lancelot was ugly". Keith Baines in writing a modern-idiom "rendition" of the Morte "[undertook] to have ... added no material of my own invention". Yet Baines, in the passage when Pellinore introduces the Questing Beast to us, has Pellinore name Palomedes as his heir when discussing who can capture the Questing Beast, whereas in any other edition of the Morte I know Palomedes' name does not appear. Why Palomedes is portrayed chasing the Questing Beast in later passages of the Morte when Pellinore says only a Pellinore can catch her is problematic to Arthurian scholars, but Baines couldn't resist putting in a repair. Actually White invented an explanation too, a comedy of errors I won't try to summarize here except to note that it involves Freud and a pantomime Questing Beast. John Steinbeck's unfinished The Acts of King Arthur and his Noble Knights was meant to be an unembellished retelling of the Morte, but by the quest of the three maidens the embellishments were coming hard and fast. As readers of this space know, I want the fairy tale "arc" of AKOTAS to be a baseline by which readers can judge which bits of the other arcs are inventions of mine, and therefore I labor not, within the bounds of the need for a punchline every day, to invent anything in it. Yet even I have strayed from the path. I've given Elaine of Carbonek a new personality out of a webcomic left field. I also took responsibility for the May Day baby massacre away from Arthur and laid it squarely in the hands of a character I never cared about. In the same vein as that last, in AKOTAS Gawaine resists taking family vengeange on Pellinore for killing Gawaine's father Lot in battle during Lot's rebellion against Arthur. Perhaps it robs the characters of some dimension, but I can't bring myself to allow Arthur infanticide or Gawaine cold-blooded (or, actually, hot-blooded) murder, and still present them as heroes. I guess you can't just transcribe. Better men than I have tried, and failed.

Webcomics I read mornings: Kevin & Kell, For Better Or For Worse, Tux & Bunny, Sluggy Freelance, Irregular Comic

Webcomics I read M-W-F mornings: General Protection Fault, Nukees, Newshounds, Girl Genius, Ctrl+Alt+Del

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa mornings: El Goonish Shive, AppleGeeks, Achewood, Striptease, Punch an' Pie, My Name is Might Have Been, Digger

Webcomics I read middays: Calvin & Hobbes, Least I Could Do, User Friendly, LuAnn, Pearls Before Swine, American Elf, Devil's Panties, Narbonic, Schlock Mercenary

Webcomics I read weekday evenings: Questionable Content, Starslip Crisis, Count Your Sheep, Goats, Dandy & Company, Pibgorn, Dinosaur Comics, Girls With Slingshots, Shortpacked, Wapsi Square, Help Desk, Real Life, PvP

Webcomics I read M-W-F evenings: Fans, Two Lumps, Order of the Stick, College Roommates from Hell!!!, Sketchies, Penny Arcade

Webcomics I read Tu-Th-Sa evenings: The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Get Out of My Head, Darths & Droids, Megatokyo, Buck Godot Zap Gun For Hire

Webcomics I read bedtimes: B.C., Something Positive, Station V3, Sinfest, Little Dee, Skin Horse, Sheldon, Peanuts

Webcomics I read Sundays: Breakfast of the Gods, Something Happens, Three Panel Soul, Butternut Squash, No Room for Magic, Li'l Mell, Zortic, The Non-Adventures of Wonderella, xkcd

Webcomics I hope will start updating again: Boxjam's Doodle, The Angriest Rice Cooker In The World, 13 Seconds, Anywhere But Here, Crap I Drew On My Lunch Break, Kismetropolis, The Magnificent Adventures of Hieronymus Bosch, esquire, The Green Avenger, I Draw Comics, Reasoned Cognition, Perry Bible Fellowship, The Whovian Observer, Gossamer Commons

See also The Daily Grind Iron Man Challenge, Talk About Comics, The Living Comic, Online Comics Day, The Belfry Comics Index, The Webcomic List, Mister Bloo, Nth Degree, 100% Originality Theatre, Brian Roney's Webcomic Reviews, Girls Read Comics (And They're Pissed), Fleen, Mr. Myth, Comixtalk and Websnark.

Arthuriana sources I use or recommend:
Arthurian Legend
Arthuriana - the Journal of Arthurian Studies; the website of the quarterly journal of the North American Branch of the International Arthurian Society.
The Camelot Project at the University of Rochester.
Camelot In Four Colors: A Survey of the Arthurian Legend in Comics
Mystical-WWW - The Arthurian A2Z knowledge Bank which has encyclopedically-arranged entries on the characters of the Arthurian legends.
Early British Kingdoms - Arthurian Bios
. Le Morte Darthur: Sir Thomas Malory's Book of King Arthur and of his Noble Knights of the Round Table, Volume 1 and Volume 2.