Sphinx

Not just at the moment, while my brain persistently refuses to sustain joined-up thought, but as a career-long habit, I come up regularly with ideas that I’m entirely incapable of realising; not only because of lack of time or energy but also because of lack of skill and talent. That’s my entire musical career, obviously – perhaps I should have tried to become a Malcolm McLaren-style impresario instead, finding other people (and other people’s money) to realise my plans – but also plenty of passing whims that swim into view around 4 am, hang around for a few days and then drift off again…

I’ve noted before that the Athenians in the Melian Dialogue talk rather like comic-book villains – “the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must”; “if we don’t destroy you, other people will think that we’re weak”; “hope? Ha ha ha! A fine comfort in danger” and so forth – in a manner that really ought to embarrass those who seriously claim this as a statement of Realist political doctrine to a much greater extent than it actually does. But it occurs to me that many, if not most, of these lines could equally well be put into the mouths of superheroes, at least since the 1980s when they became increasingly willing to question their roles, their relationship with ‘normal’ people, their attitude to their own power etc. Indeed, the confrontation of the different philosophies of the Athenians and Melians (if not their relative strength) could quite neatly transpose into one of the debates between Batman and Superman about power, responsibility and methods.

And that leads to the thought that the rest of Thucydides could likewise be repurposed in this way: not the Thucydides graphic novel (could be cool, but risk of dull worthiness), but Thucydides remixed as comic book. Pericles and Nicias supply dialogue for mayors, police chiefs and other honest but helpless civilian authority figures; Archidamas and Pericles offer lines for the inevitable training sequence in the origin story (“the best are those trained in the hardest school…”); Cleon is already a comic-book villain so not much work needed there. Obviously, before the DC lawyers turn up waving writs, we’ll need new characters (Demos v The Spartan, or is that too crass and obvious?) and a new setting (I rather like the idea of a fictionalised Bristol, hyper-modern city full of statues of slavers-turned-philanthropists), rather than being able to draw on the accumulated symbolism of existing figures, but that’s not the end of the world.

And Thucydides can also supply the structure of the plot: the inevitable ‘rising power arouses fear in the establishment’ thing leading to confrontation, but also the interaction of individual actions and larger processes (what difference can one person make, however heavily armoured?) and the vagaries of democracy (but this is not going to go all Frank Miller…). A city devastated by plague, by war, and by stasis; a city that tries to ignore the truth about the past in favour of its self-serving myths…

The problem? I can’t draw for toffee…