The Antigone graphic novel is part of the international project Classics in The Graphic Novel: A pilot model of new high school culture education through graphic novels, coordinated by the Slovenian Theatre Institute with partners from Poland (Zbigniew Raszewski Theatre Institute, Warsaw) and Slovakia (Theatre Institute, Bratislava) in the period 2019-2023. The project is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and the Ministry of Culture Slovenia. Drama-graphic novel is available in Slovene, Polish and Slovak language.
Making the graphic novel Antigone
When re-reading Sophocles’ play for the purpose of adapting it into comic form, I decided that the readers should have the full text in front of them, without abridgements. I am aware that in the case of an abridged version, many readers would stick to that and would no longer go for the book version. How many of us run to the library immediately after seeing a film to get the book on which it was based?
So I printed out the entire text, cut it up, arranged it on the pages and imagined the drawings that could supplement it. When I came up with an interesting design solution, I sketched it and pasted it next to the text.
I sketched the characters and the space at the same time. The idea of a particular character, their appearance, personality and manner of speaking helped me to work with the text.
(Daniel Chmielewski)
About the author of the graphic novel
Daniel Chmielewski (1983) is a Polish author of comics and children’s books. He has written and illustrated I, Nina – an adaptation of Nobel prize winner Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Anna In in the Catacombs, published in Poland in 2018 and set to be published in the USA by Uncivilized Books in 2021. He is the author of the album Voyeurs, illustrated by Marcin Podolec and published in Poland and France, illustrator of the short piece The last novel of James Joyce by Peter Milligan, and co-author, together with psychiatrist Katarzyna Szaulińska, of Murky waves – a comic showing how to cope with depression, given out to teenagers in Poland during special workshops in schools. He teaches comic narration in three culture centres in Warsaw, makes storyboards for television and illustrations for sport psychologists to aid them in their work.
