The comic drawn by the German graphic artist, Andre Breinbauer, who tells the well-known myth in a radically different way
Was Medusa a monster and Perseus a hero? Not according to the comic drawn by the German graphic artist, Andre Breinbauer, which tells the familiar myth in a radically different way: Medusa is not the monster who turns people to stone out of malice. Abused by a god and punished by a goddess, she is herself the double victim of the gods. Perseus, on the other hand, is a prodigal child of the powerful.
Breinbauer, born in Passau, Bavaria in 1973, studied graphic design at the Nuremberg Art Academy and has been living in Vienna since 2005. He was fascinated by ancient Greek myths since he was a child and invested three whole years for this subversive comic, in which he narrates the -new, his own – Medusa’s point of view – the victim and the classic. The change of perspective is already indicated by the reversal of the order of the names in the title, “Medusa and Perseus” rather than the other way around. “Try to see things from my point of view,” the protagonist implores her petrified interlocutor. Perseus, although a demigod thanks to Zeus, has become in the comic an inexperienced, naive youth, a ball of the gods.
The fact that the reader reads both versions is the peculiarity of this comic, since the traditional mythological stories about Medusa and Perseus and his own feminist view of the myth, influenced by the #MeToo movement, meet in the middle. which differs fundamentally from other interpretations of Medusa. Thus, the reader can read the fable first as a light-hearted, charming heroic journey of a young man and then as a dark, unjust story of a woman who is brutally victimized and stereotyped as a monster. Andre Breinbauer, who was a finalist for the Comic Prize 2021 of the Bertold Leibinger Foundation for Culture and Science, with his comic “Medusa and Perseus” deconstructs the ancient myth and tries to answer one of his favorite questions: Who is really the hero and which monster?
The hideous image of Perseus with the severed serpent head of Medusa in his outstretched hand, punished through him by Athena for desecrating her temple, is etched in our collective memory. But why since Hesiod in the Theogony speaks of a monstrous mermaid, the only mortal of three sister mermaids, with whom Poseidon simply consorted “in soft meadows with spring flowers”? Because just eight centuries later Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes the courtship of Athena’s beautiful priestess Medusa as a “disgrace”. Hunted by Poseidon, she was locked in the temple of the goddess, where he raped her, according to the Roman author. Enraged by the desecration, Athena, unable to punish another god, turned her curse on Medusa whom she transformed into a hideous monster with snakes for hair, with the deadly ability to petrify anyone who looked her in the face.
This is the version that has survived for millennia and has shaped our opinion of Medusa: a female punisher, who is at the same time the victim of a wretched powerful god, and of Athena’s punishment. But this very fact will be silenced for centuries, according to the publishing house. In both versions, however, the Greek and the Roman, Perseus kills her, delivers her head to Athena who puts it on her shield, the famous Gorgonium, as protection, since her ability to turn anyone who saw her to stone had been preserved . The word Medusa itself also comes from the verb “medo”, which means to protect, i.e. Medusa as a noun means the protector, the guardian, meaning which it had even before her meeting with Poseidon, so it was not a defenseless beautiful priestess raped by god.
The dominant dark story of Medusa which the graphic artist describes in one part of the comic is in part so raw that it leaves you speechless, it is violent, dark and depressing. Brainbauer’s new version is a colorful, playful, cheerful, light-hearted adventure comic, full of clever anachronisms. Thus, it captures the duality – and injustice – of ancient myths. In addition, it connects stories over two thousand years old with current questions about truth, victims, perpetrators. It also connects them to thoughts about the #MeToo movement and the dominant narrative that defines even the perception of violence against women.
But what led him to deal with the myth of Medusa seen in the light of this movement? Visiting the Historical Museum of Vienna one day he saw Peter Paul Rubens’ painting “The Head of Medusa”, which fascinated him. He knew the myth but wanted to discover its dynamics. “While researching, I came across the Roman version of Ovid and decided to dig deeper. But it was important for me to tell the story of both characters of the myth on an equal footing. I worked both alternately. At first, I just wanted to tell Medusa’s story from her point of view. But that wouldn’t be fair to Perseus. The #metoo issue came up at the right time in the media at the time. I watched a lot of related interviews and documentaries and they definitely influenced my attitude towards Medusa. Even though I wasn’t that familiar with the feminist interpretation of the character at first, I felt validated in my new interpretation of the myth. Of course, the difficult thing is to adjust the male look that you automatically have. I consulted good friends with whom I discussed the matter and thought about it again and again. It was a continuous intensive cognitive process for me and consequently I completely revised the comic several times”, he has said in an interview. Thus, he arrived at the dual narrative, the culturally established one that has been artistically depicted and the new, his own, unconventional interpretation of Medusa’s character and actions “so that the contrast is even better».
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