Back in (yikes) 2011, a friend and I concocted a plan: we were going to co-run a webcomic made up entirely of mythology jokes. We brainstormed a bunch of jokes off the bat, ALL BRILLIANT. Sadly, our schedules never really lined up and the project withered away, though I made a moderate effort at getting it going on my own. I made this crummy Paint logo:

I even made a handful of comic strips. The trouble? I can’t draw for shit! My intended partner was the artist in the mix. I am merely a forger of jokes.

So how to get around this obstacle? I set my sights on statues, classical paintings, and stock art. If Ryan North could make thousands of comic strips using the same stock dinosaurs in the same configuration every day, then surely I could find enough mythological figures to fuel a few recurring jokes.

Of course, in retrospect, that couldn’t have worked either because, y’know, copyright law, but it was still wild days on the internet and it didn’t seem unreasonable to pluck a ton of content off a Google image search without bothering to find out where it came from.

Whoops.

I cobbled together a few horrendously bad captioned artworks, which I won’t even share. The only thing remotely funny I managed to make from my limited stolen resources was a series called “Zeus and Hera at Home,” in which Hera confronts Zeus about one of his silly affairs, he denies it, she concocts an unnecessarily elaborate revenge, and he reacts with pained horror. Basically I just loved the expression on this one statue’s face and wanted to use it repeatedly.

My utter lack of drawing ability is a damn shame, because I still have a big file of ideas based on Odin being a dick, Beowulf’s increasingly elaborate bragging, Osiris’s missing penis, and even a dramatization of that one Sumerian story in which a guy has sex with a rock 42 times.

Here you go, the only ones worth posting! If you want to know just how bad the alternative would have been (i.e., me drawing things instead), well… that is a post for another time, cuz yes indeedy I have some comics I made in college and those ones are all literary theory jokes.

Zeus and Hera at Home!