The Odyssey
The Odyssey
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Gareth Hinds on The Odyssey
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why he wrote it
A lifelong pull and a real-world needHinds trained as an illustrator, not a writer, and that gap sent him toward the classics before he had any project in mind. The honest arithmetic of his early career: great stories he could not originate himself, combined with public-domain texts whose quality was already proven.
When I first began making graphic novels I was more confident of my abilities as an illustrator than as an author. I knew I wanted to work with really great stories, and classic works in the public domain presented me with that opportunity — the chance to collaborate with amazing authors from the past, on stories that I knew had staying power.
Homer in particular had been with him since high school, and when he finally named what drew him to this poem over every other project he could have chosen, the answer split evenly between the visual and the human.
The Odyssey is a book I’ve always wanted to adapt, in part because there is so much to work with visually — fantastic monsters, gods, battles, shipwrecks — but also because it tells a remarkable story that continues to resonate after 2,000 years.
The decision to start with The Odyssey rather than The Iliad, Homer’s other epic, was partly strategic and partly a matter of affection. He was clear that The Iliad would follow only if the first book earned it.
I chose to do The Odyssey first because it was my favorite of the two and it wasn’t quite as challenging.
The commitment to making graphic-novel adaptations of the classics hardened into something more than personal preference after he brought Beowulf, his first major adaptation, to an English teachers’ conference and found himself overwhelmed by demand. That experience reframed what he was doing and for whom.
Knowing that there was a real need for these books, and that I could help give students (and even adults) who struggle with these works a more positive experience — maybe even help them love these stories the way I do — was a huge inspiration for me to continue to adapt the classics.
How he wrote it
Four translations, then throw them outBecause Homer wrote in ancient Greek, Hinds’s first task was to find an English text he could work from. He read four translations: Fitzgerald, Fagles, Lattimore, and E.V. Rieu. Then he made a counterintuitive move that solved the translation problem by sidestepping it entirely.
After looking at that for a while, I decided that I needed to re-write everything in order to get it short enough, and that let me more or less dodge the translation issue.
The compression required to fit an ancient epic into a single graphic novel was severe, and Hinds has been open about how radical the cuts had to be. In a Politics and Prose video conversation, he described what that process actually demanded, and named it as the part of the work he found most satisfying.
It was so long that I had to abridge it pretty radically, which actually basically involved rewriting the whole thing. [paraphrased from audio]
For the visual layer, Hinds worked in pencil and watercolor on cold-press watercolor paper, with digital tools handling panel borders and rough layouts. Color was not decorative; it was emotional. He described his system for calibrating it scene by scene, using two moments in the book that share the same light source but land entirely differently.
The jumping-off point is whatever I think is realistic for the scene — firelight, sunrise, bright noonday sun, and so on. Then I will adjust it based on the mood I’m looking for. So the Cyclops’ firelit cave becomes an angry bright orange, while Odysseus’ firelit palace at night, when he’s in disguise talking to Penelope, is more subdued and mysterious. Also the watercolor has its own ideas sometimes!
Not every scene yielded to the process. Certain passages resisted him in proportion to how much they mattered, and the most personal example was the one he also names as his favorite moment in the original poem: the old dog Argos recognizing his returning master after twenty years away.
Some scenes that especially gave me trouble: the recognition scenes with Argos and Eurycleia, the Land of the Dead, Odysseus and Penelope’s night together after their reunion, and the very end (which is quite abrupt in the original).
The whole project took 20 months, and one lesson he took from the production scale was logistical: for a book that long and complex, he noted in a 2026 interview, you have to leave a lot of editing time at the end, because otherwise you run out of time to fix things.
What he wants us to sit with
The journey felt, not summarizedThe book runs nearly 250 pages, large by graphic novel standards, and that length was a deliberate argument against compression for its own sake. Hinds resisted the idea that an adaptation should function as a shortcut.
I think part of the point of the Odyssey is that it’s an epic journey. If I just said ‘Odysseus went from A to B to C,’ that’s not very interesting and you don’t feel like you went on that journey with him. I wanted the reader to experience that journey.
The immediate goal for a reader who struggles with the original Greek or with any demanding ancient text is access. In a Candlewick Press video, Hinds described what the graphic novel format can unlock that a conventional text cannot, especially for younger readers working through the poem in school.
Reading it in that graphic novel form makes it accessible to them in a way that allows them to dig deeper into the text and to go after themes and imagery and symbolism and all that good stuff that you want them to be able to pull out that sometimes they can’t because they’re struggling with the language. [paraphrased from audio]
He called The Odyssey his magnum opus, a word that carries weight coming from someone who has adapted Beowulf, King Lear, Macbeth, and both Homeric epics. The parenthetical he added softened nothing.
The Odyssey is my magnum opus. (At least so far.)
comicsdc.blogspot.com, “ComicsDC: With Macbeth behind him, Gareth Hinds eyes an “impossibly long list of classic adaptations””By 2026, the reach of the adaptation had produced something Hinds had not anticipated when he began: readers who came to the book as children and followed that thread into their adult lives and professional choices.
I’ve also had a few people reach out to me to say that they became classics majors as adults because they fell in love with my adaptations as kids — what could be cooler than that?