The exact origins “Beowulf” are a matter of much academic debate. The origins of the epic poem are often placed sometime in the first century, likely having been passed down by way of oral tradition, and follows the great hero who comes to the aid of King Hrothgar of the Danes. But while the story has been told and retold for countless generations, in virtually every medium that stories can be told through, the great mead hall of Heorot isn’t usually a treehouse. “Bea Wolf” from First Second reimagines the great hero of the Geats as a small child defending the neighborhood kids from the fearsome Mr. Grendel next door.
But while the setting is updated, much of the language and cadence of the original poem is maintained. That is thanks to writer Zach Weinersmith. Weinersmith, arguably best known for his “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal” webcomic, crafts a six hundred-line epic for middle grade readers, along with artist Gilles “Boulet” Roussel. We spoke with him about adapting the text, his academic sources, and whether or not he worked with a literal wizard. We would like to thank him for his time.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity
I guess the first question…Why Beowulf?
ZW: Kind of by coincidence. I didn’t do a sort of, like, “I should adapt an epic” or whatever-thing. I had the idea at a Christmas trip to my in-laws. I was just hanging out and had a funny idea. Like “Ha ha ha can you do this for kids?” As one does. And I thought about it. It sounded kind of funny to me. But I kind of put it down. And what ended up happening was, true story, my daughter was in preschool. She was four at the time, I think. I would drive her to school everyday. It was a twenty minute drive. And she’s just very…like most preschoolers, but maybe mine to an extra degree…she just would not pay attention to me. She would ask me a question. I would start to answer and she would tune out. It was that much. And kind of as I joke I started doing a kids’ Beowulf at her. It was the first time, and maybe the only time she’s ever really paid attention to me. And just paying attention. She was incredibly engaged. Day after day she would be like “What happened next? What happened next?” I never had that with her.
You mentioned Tolkien in the afterword, especially in regard to “Beowulf.” Isn’t that basically how The Hobbit started too?
ZW: I wonder if a lot of kids’ stories are founded in trying to keep children amused. I think Alice in Wonderland started this way. I’m clearly not in this league. But it would not have been unusual for a kids book to start that way I suspect.
You say you’re not in that league! I know you studied English. You talk a lot about Old English. How well versed are you? You mentioned a Dr. Jennifer Neville who helped with the book and helped with a lot of the research.
ZW: I actually did the research. She basically checked me and caught a bunch of stupid stuff I said. My other hat is a researcher in science. But it’s kind of the same toolkit. I wish I spoke or wrote Old English. I know like two or three words. I have a sense of how the grammar works. But I don’t speak it or anything like that. But I have a collection of translated Beowulfs. Harvard University Press puts out a medieval series called the Dumbarton Oaks Collection where they’re going through all these Old English documents. And I have a decent number of them just for like background reading. There’s also these classic volumes in Beowulf studies. It’s now called Klaeber’s Beowulf. There’s this guy, Klaeber. He’s the guy who did the work. The annotations are far longer than the poem itself. He died, I think in the 50s. But he was so influential, there’s a book called Klaeber’s Beowulf that’s edited by other people, but it was always called that. So now we have it. That formed the spine of that introduction, because they have a hundred and fifty pages of notes on all this stuff.
Continued belowDr. Neville I met just because she– there’s this relatively small corpus of documents in Old English. And most of them are fairly boring. But there’s some really interesting and goofy stuff. There’s like these sad poems. And there’s this book called The Exeter Book, which has some of these poems, but also riddles. A lot of them were filthy riddles. Not like ultra filthy. It’s so funny. These are so old. They’re over a thousand years old maybe. And there are these jokes that are like… the set up to the riddle is a man walks up to a thing and starts pumping at it until something moist happens. The joke of it is, it turns out it’s a butter churn, And it feels very modern. And she wrote this spectacular essay on it and a collection of essays on Beowulf. So I got in touch with her just to say “Hi, you’re amazing!” That kind of led to me begging her to check my work. She did catch some non-trivial misunderstandings that I had.
It definitely worked out too. Just in the book, the language is amazing. Especially a lot of kennings. Do you actually have a favorite kenning? Because I’m looking through and there’s stuff about “the cream it’s color never dreamt by cow.”
ZW: I can remember the line because I stole it from a funny source. It’s a paraphrase– I went through a prolonged, way too late in life Henry Rider Haggard phase. He’s one of those authors who wrote four classics and…this is mean…but you know there are some directors who make three classics in a row and then everything is worse? That’s Rider Haggard.
I’ve got a list in my head right now.
ZW: I don’t want to be mean. But Rider Haggard is long dead, so I can say it. But I would say four, maybe five great books in the kind of now fairly offensive colonial adventure genre. By the standards of the time quite non-offensive, quite forward thinking. But by modern standards, not so much. But I remember he– Victorians don’t usually say Victorian stuff. That’s a stereotype we have now. But there’s a line he had where he referred to a woman’s ankle as being something like “more beautiful than dreamt by sculptor.” And it was just the most Victorian form of Victorian line I had ever heard.
But in terms of the language, I read a lot of Old English in translation. There’s a guy named Benjamin Bagby who’s a Medieval music scholar. He memorized all of Beowulf. He’s fairly old now. But he still travels and just speaks the poem.
You mentioned him in the back matter of the book.
ZW: And there’s a sound to it. I don’t speak Old English. But I can look up what some of the words mean and hear it. You can’t quite do it in English, because it’s got too much French in it to do Old English. But you can still kind of capture the sound of it. That’s what I was going for.
The thing is, it’s such a weird book. I spend years being like “I’m going to do this book, and everyone is going to be like ‘What’s the matter with you.’” It’s such a weird thing to do. The joke we had was that the publisher would be like “This is a six hundred page unrhymed poem for children.” But someone bought it. So it worked out!
You did this with First-Second. How has it been overall to work with them?
ZW: Oh, First-Second I love! I have nothing but good things to say about them. First-Second I think of as the number one artsy comic house. They do lots of non-artsy, genre stuff. And they do great science stuff for kids. But if you want to find some amazing French literary comic you’ve never heard of in translation? First-Second. And I’ve loved before I ever did anything for them. My last comic was with them. But they have Joann Sfar, who is a cartoonist I like quite a bit. I think most or all of his books in English are through them. And a couple other guys. I just adore them. Because they’re sort of a small comic house, they’re not one of the giganto comic houses, they can take risks. And they can do weird stuff. I love that about them. It’s like being in good company. The sort of dangerous work is at First-Second.
Continued belowAnd then I have wonderful editors. Calista Brill was my editor on the last book. So it was a pleasant surprise to work with her on this one, which is very different. And then she had to go on maternity leave. So I had Alex Lu, who was also wonderful and helpful with a lot of character designs and some other stuff. It was great. I wish I had some drama to report, but it was wonderful [laughs].
Unlike some of the directors you mentioned earlier. I’m not here to start beef! I swear! Also, this is your second time working with Boulet (Gilles Roussel), who you previously worked with on “Augie and the Green Knight.”
ZW: Yeah! And it’s kind of weird. Almost ten years ago now, we worked on this book. It was a very successful Kickerstarter. And again, for a very weird book that I don’t think could have gotten mainstream publication just because it’s too weird [laughs]. But in fact, it’s one of the books that fairly regularly, in a way that most of my other stuff doesn’t, get someone being like “I loved this book” or “My kids loved this book.” We had done it, and I had a conversation with him. I forget why. I was in France or Britain, and I don’t travel that much. We were in a bar, and he said “If you want to work together sometime, I’d be happy to do it.” Oh my god!
Gilles, Boulet, is like…I’m biased because I’m selling a book, so you shouldn’t believe me [laughs] …but really, I think of him as like– there are many other people who you could say are as good, but I don’t know anyone who’s better at comics as a form of art. He’s just extravagantly– makes people think of as looking good look like they’re operating on a lower level. He has this style that’s clearly French, but then there’s twangs of Japan and Korea, Some American stuff too just in terms of his choice of angles and stuff too. It’s just this wonderful blend. Plus he has this classical arts background. So you see in some of these composed pages, but that they’re comics, would be like Renaissance in how they shape the frame. There are very few people who can do what he does. Maybe none. But very few. And I was like “Oh my god! I do want to do this!” But I can’t just come up with something. It has to be special. And so years later, this was something special.
I had this poem and I needed an illustrator. And he was my number one choice. I figured there was a really good chance he would say no, because it is a really weird book. I’m really happy with it. And we’re getting uncomfortably good reviews. But it’s sort of an ask. I should have come with something more sellable. But he really enjoyed it. And more appropriately, to my mind, he understood the idea of it instantly. So we got to work together. And it’s been magic ever since. Working with him, I say it’s like working with Gandalf. He’s funny. You won’t hear from him for like a week or two. And then he’ll be like “Oh yeah, I just finished the eighty-three pages.” You look at them and they’re better than anything you could do in your whole life.
So what you’re saying is he’s literally a wizard?
ZW: It is like working with a wizard! He will freehand and ink stuff that I couldn’t do with infinite time. You know how sometimes you’ll see people and think “If I worked really hard I could do what you do?” Then you’ll see people who are like “I could work the rest of my life to try to be you and I would come back short.” That’s how I feel about him.
Hey! I’ve read the “Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal” cartoons! I know you’ve got skills! Don’t sell yourself too short! What was the working relationship during the book? Was it basically just “Here’s the script. Do your magic?” Or was it a back and forth?
ZW: It’s funny. Most people seem to think that I was like “Put this panel here!” For people who know more about comics, that is fairly typical. A comic script, if you read it, will be like “Panel three. Upper right. Mid shot.” Like the director of a movie. That sort of thing. A lot of people like to be like that. And that’s fine. I would also say that if you’re working with someone who is younger or less experienced, I would have probably been fussy. But my view, very strongly, is that if you’re working with an A+++ player like Gilles is, why would you be like “Do it my way?” So I really basically just gave him a poem like it could have been out of the 6th century, but for the language. Just gave him a stack of words. I had a few notes. But even that much were just along the lines of “This is what’s happening while this person is talking.” It wasn’t like “Make sure to blah.” And there were only a handful like that in literally the whole thing. Maybe like half a dozen. And he was interested, and having fun, and he didn’t say anything.
Continued belowHere’s some words. And then a comic happens.
ZW: Yeah! It was like being with a wizard! The nice thing is, for someone like him, I think that’s good for him too. My feeling is, if you work with an artist, because I’ve been this artist, you can smash them into submission where they’ll do exactly what you say with every stroke. And that’s fine. But they’ll stop doing stuff. A lot of things at the end of the book, I even rewrote some stuff around things that he did. They were just too good to not keep.
Sometime in the future…not to spoil anything or get you set into too many plans here…are you considering doing parts two and three? Are we going to see Mama Grendel?
ZW: That is…fundamentally a business decision [laughs]. You know how all this works. At the bottom of all this is business. Everyone cares about the arts. But if the arts make negative dollars, it’s not sustainable. So far it’s been going, I would say, much better than expected. I don’t know what I expected. Like I said, we’ve gotten weirdly good reviews. Librarians seem to have meltdowns when they see this book for some reason. Which has just been delightful. I was joking with my wife, I felt like I was going to be this outsider with this book. Like nobody would get it. And now all these critics are like “Oh! This is wonderful!” And it’s like, I’ll take it, but it’s ruining the fantasy.
So I can’t say anything now, but it’s looking pretty good… I think I can say that. I don’t know. I would love to. I hope we can find a way to make it work. And I kind of feel like there’s already this six-hundred line unrhymed poem for children. How bad could a two-thousand line one be?
“Bea Wolf” hits shelves on March 21. It is available for preorder on Macmillan’s website.
