CSotD: An Epic Humpday
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I haven’t decided whether to go see the Odyssey, but I did decide to go ahead and review the spoilers by reading a Guardian piece about what they changed. The point is, if you’ve read the Big Three — the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid — you know the story and the “spoilers” become the ways in which the saga itself was spoiled.
Some of them matter, but the fact that the wooden horse is only in the Aeneid doesn’t much, in part because the Aeneid is a Roman version and the least of the three, but mostly because everyone knows about the horse. And, by the way, Sipress is right in that they were idiots to bring it into the city, but I guess Odysseus knew that when he came up with the plan.
What the author of that Guardian article said is true: You couldn’t expect even a three-hour movie to include everything in the massive original, and some of the changes are things I’d miss, but I tried to watch Sergey Bondarchuk’s eight-hour version of War and Peace and it was so true to the original that it was like having someone read the book to you, which, since I’ve read it several times myself, was boring.
And I’ve read the Odyssey a couple of times, so I didn’t need that.
The change everyone had been talking about was casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen, which gave Jones an opening to mock Hegseth for his attitude towards woman and minorities in the military but doesn’t bother me.
I objected to Disney’s Little Mermaid not being portrayed as a Dane, because the story is so strongly identified with that nation, but aside from a brief description of Helen’s arms, there’s little to prevent her from being Black.
When I did a serialized children’s version of the Legend of Perseus, I discovered that Andromeda was from Ethiopia, but that Ethiopia then was not quite today’s nation. Still, she wasn’t Greek and if she was from northeast Africa, she’d have likely been Black. Chris Baldwin, who was doing the illustrations, agreed with me that she was not a blonde, and that we ought not to show her chained to the rock naked as most artists have.
I’ll bet we’ve have had more complaints about nudity than we did about race, because nobody objected to her race, though we had a few negative comments about Perseus’s mother, because Chris drew her with Greek features and some readers thought she should look less like Irene Papas and more like Hayley Mills.
Elon Musk now plans to have his AI, Grok, “make a full-length movie of The Odyssey that is historically accurate and true to the art of Homer,” to which I say “Pick one, you illiterate blockhead.”
You can’t have both, but the war everyone thought was a myth was proven very likely real by Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered the (apparent) site of Troy in the 1870s. If Elon does make a historically accurate version, however, I don’t know what he’ll make Helen look like, and since her father was Zeus and her mother was a swan, I don’t think digging into history is going to help much.
Oh well. She’ll always have Paris.
Or she would have, if they’d listened to Cassandra.
While we’re on the topic of literature, Grand Avenue offers a chance for me to repost my annual link to a column about ill-conceived reading lists, which not only contains my sneers at people who recommend books they haven’t read, but links to Kate Messner’s less sarcastic, more insightful comments on summer reading lists.
I knew Kate when she was, first, a local TV reporter and then one of the two or three best teachers I encountered in a quarter century of visiting classrooms. She’s now an award-winning, best-selling author, and, oddly enough, has teamed up with Dylan Meconis, who as a starving artist illustrated some of my afore-mentioned children’s serialized stories.
It’s a small world but full of interesting people.
Kate’s right about summer reading lists, and I’m right about people who praise books they haven’t read.
A favorite example of mine of willfully misunderstanding literature. At some point, some knucklehead artist drew Jack & Jill headed up the hill to a well, which is obvious nonsense. As pointed out by everyone since, you wouldn’t dig a well on a hilltop.
But for several years, when I lived in a place with stinky sulfur in the tap water, I drove up regularly to fetch jerry cans of water from a hillside spring. No pump. Just a pipe sticking out of the rock.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I often point out lucky timing by comic strip artists who have to get their strips drawn and submitted well before they run. This isn’t one of those times.
One of the nice things about the 2026 World Cup was that they’ve cracked down on flopping, and were actually handing out yellow cards to players who feigned injury, which made it rare.
Granted, players who are tripped sometimes stay on the ground awhile, but given that they are in constant motion and wear no padding, I’m not going to contend that taking a sudden header onto hard ground at full speed doesn’t hurt. I’d suggest you try it a few times yourself and see. No fair knowing when you’re about to fall so you can brace yourself.
The other good change was banning whistles, air horns and vuvuzelas, and I didn’t hear much drumming. People seemed to be watching the game.
As for the hydration breaks, a good idea that should have been one minute, not three. Grab a drink, splash some over your head, get back in the game. The three-minute break was for advertisers, not players, and certainly not for fans.
Can’t wait for the Women’s Cup.
Final literary reference: We talked about epiphanies constantly in class, when we weren’t picking out Christ figures.
I suspect this was a head-scratcher to a lot of readers, but a nostalgic chuckle for the demographic Whamond was addressing.
The message? Cute girls like comics! (Do not bend, fold or mutilate.)
Mike Peterson has posted his "Comic Strip of the Day" column every day since 2010. His opinions are his own, but we welcome comments either agreeing or in opposition.
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