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Ophelia

Ophelia

2022 - 48 pages - digital / risographed comic - Available on itch.io
Theo King has been with the theater company since the beginning and dreams of revolution and martyrdom. Cara Solis joined recently and mostly wants to be liked. During their never-ending production of Hamlet, Theo and Cara crash together, and if they're lucky, they may even find a way out.

I challenged myself when I made Ophelia to not overthink. I wrote it originally in the back half of 2021 and didn't end up finishing it until late 2022. I had made thumbnails in 2021 but ended up abandoning them for the most part and revised as I went, which actually worked really well for me. There's a lot of little visual cues I'm very proud of. I even built a 3-D paper model of the theater set, which was cobbled together from several different performances of Hamlet I looked up online. I wanted it to feel like a grand operatic theater, very fancy and also possibly outside the earth.

Ophelia smashes together several key things, but my primary inspirations were being in grad school and the internet phenomenon Blaseball. I went back and forth between Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet as the central play for a little while, but ultimately picked Hamlet because I liked the idea of a character who could switch between a male/female lead. It's also a nod to Asta Nielson's Hamlet, where she is playing a Hamlet who was born a girl but raised as/lives as a boy. Hamlet has some fascinating queer resonances in general.
I wrote Ophelia right after I decided to finish my PhD long distance, and it's very much about burnout and feeling trapped in an inescapable capitalist system. Does Theo handle themself well? No not really, but that's kind of the point too.

Below are some concept art for Theo's Hamlet and Ophelia costumes. I looked at a lot of actual costume designs for stage productions of Hamlet, but ended up being mostly inspired by Kenneth Brannaugh's especially for Horatio and Hamlet. I like the slightly more modern approach. On Theo, the Horatio costume is oversized and baggy - it's not a great fit. I'm not 100% sure anymore how I arrived at the Ophelia dress... it's definitely a blend of a lot of different styles and not particularly Dutch.
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