Gripping Yarns

NZ Listener feature By Philip Matthews

Maui battles big themes - and some very bad weather - to resurface in the short attention era.

Forty-eight pages of birth, death, violence, mythology, creation, destruction and some very, very unpleasant weather: artist Chris Slane and poet Robert Sullivan have dragged a legend kicking and screaming into the short-attention-span century. Maui: Legends of the Outcast, published this month by Godwit, is a graphic novel of the creation stories of Maui.

Of course, some might say that calling a comic a graphic novel is like raising the tone of rock music by handing it to a symphony orchestra (Jaz Coleman alert). "Well, it depends on how seriously you treat it," says Slane, who is an acknowledged fan of the father of all graphic novels, Art Speigelman's Holocaust saga Maus. "It has been a misused term.''

But, if the themes are big enough and the weather's bad enough, call it Shakespeare. "I think we have a right to call it a novel," Sullivan says. "Because it gives it that status. It comes from a greater story -the creation story and how we view the world. His saga is part of the greater saga. It's not just a fairy story for Maori people. It is actually quite serious. There are lessons to be drawn from Maui's actions."

And the actions in Legends of the Outcast are the familiar stories crammed into a tidy chronological timeline. From Maui's abandonment as a baby - tossed to the depths of the sea, left to the elements - to robbing his grandmother of her jawbone (while she lives), which he uses to haul in the famous land-fish. Changing his shape, stealing fire, regulating the movement of the sun, creating mortality -it is visceral material at the best of times, and pumped up to another level by vivid, sometimes horrifying images (the grandmother is huge and zombie-like, the beach in the opening pages is a windswept hell), with Slane's style owing more to European art comics than superhero pulp.

Quite nasty stuff, all in all. "Yeah, gripping yarns," says Slane with a laugh. He came to the project five years ago, reasonably cold. Sullivan, who came on board a little later, is Maori and more familiar with Maui - "I felt quite close to the character, because he's part of my childhood." Over the five years they scraped together the time to keep the graphic novel alive. Slane had commercial illustration work to do, Sullivan moved to Wellington to study librarianship and both had more children. They kept in touch through fax and, over the past year, with Sullivan back in Auckland, they burnt the midnight oil to meet the deadline. While Si111ivan melted the story down to its base elements, which is where a background in poetry helps - "I like the intensity of the language in this format. We have to use as few words as possible" - Slane came up with storyboards and thumb-nail sketches, until his final version of the artwork was handed to digital artist Bill Paynter, who scanned it all in and gave it back to them on a CD. "Not only do we get a book," jokes Slane, "but we get a record as well."

Paynter turned Slane's handwriting into a typeface called "Slane Wobbly" and added the type on screen. "Most American comics are done that way now," Slane says. "They look handwritten, but they're not actually handwritten."

The publishers optimistically predict, given the huge popularity of the Hercules and Xena TV series, that Illustrations from the strips: Maui "destroys the old way of doing things, but invents a new one". Maui's time may have finally come. 'Hercules is a different kind of hero," Slane says. "He's the tough guy using his strength."

"Maui's more like Odysseus," Sullivan says, "using his intelligence and his cunning, whereas Hercules is a bit of an ox."

But the story certainly has the mythic element that has worked in everything from Moses to The Lion King: the abandoned hero returns with a magical link to the great beyond. "The further out he's thrown." Slane says, "the more strength it gives him when he comes back.

'He's a real anarchist in a way. I think that was part of the appeal. There are moral messages that I didn't realise when I came to it. I came with a satirical view and I realised that there was humour, a mischievous humour, but a moral element as well. He destroys the old way of things, but invents a new one."

"He helped define the world for Maori people," Sullivan says. "He's part of that cycle of myths where you have the creation of the world. the separation of land and water, and he helps define things like how long the day is by slowing down the sun.

"Most Maori can, in some way, relate themselves back to the gods, the ones who are in touch with their roots. So, when we talk about their families, we've got to get it right."

Still, liberties can be taken. "The stories are in the public domain. We've drawn on lots of versions. It really is public property. But, even today, there's always going to be an oral version out there we could never try to take."

The huge project is wrapped up, but all this thinking about mythology has set Sullivan off - to his next volume, which may be called Star Waka. "Now that the Maul timeline is off the fridge, I can think about being a poet again."

23/11/1996