"I write him as a villain," O'Connor says. Instead, he flies a black flag and Aegeus throws himself from the palace walls in anguish. According to the myth, he was instructed to hoist a white sail as he returned to Athens, to let his father King Aegeus know his struggle against Crete had been successful and he had survived. O'Connor depicts the death of the Minotaur as a bloody encounter, driving home the violence of the act, and during Theseus' final embrace with Ariadne, he depicts the hero gazing away from her, eyes already on the next conquest.īut Theseus has one last move of selfishness up his sleeve. Once more, it's hard to get behind a hero whose most famous adversary can be interpreted as a prisoner who doesn't even fight back. He asks, 'Can you believe it, Ariadne? The Minotaur barely defended himself.'" There's a great line in the story from Theseus that I quote in the book. It takes you a while to figure it out and then Theseus comes in and kills him. "You don't realize that it's the Minotaur at first. To unwrap why, of course, we really have to dig into the myth itself. While the "Olympians" series rarely features blood, O'Connor says that he made an exception when it came to the telling of classic tale Theseus and the Minotaur. So, in my adaptations, I have very much decided just to put the stuff out there in a very matter of fact way, without much judgment, but also without being explicit." You might as well not be doing Greek mythology. "But I also feel like you can't remove the teeth from Greek mythology. "Greek mythology deals with a lot of subject matter that we would traditionally not consider very cool for kids," O'Connor says. While the series allowed him to translate his lifelong passion for myth into dynamic and relatable form, it didn't come without its challenges.
O'Connor is a New York-based author, illustrator and cartoonist, best known for his 12-volume " Olympians" series, which takes classic renditions of various Greek myths and retells them for readers of all ages.
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