PROTAGONIST: Abby SETTING: Pottery Workshop ERA: Early Bronze Age (E.B.A.) DEMOGRAPHIC: All Ages
LOGLINE When apprentice potter Abby receives a rush order for a special jug, she hops to it! Accompanied and sometimes thwarted by her playful goat, Abby races through the steps to create the jug and delivers the order with a twist.
BYLINE Written and illustrated by Kristin Donner INSPIRATION “Mix, Mold, Fire!” features the misadventures of apprentice potter, Abby, in four acts. She is a charming, if imperfect, protagonist, who is still learning the ropes of her craft. Abby participates in a sequence of activities in a pottery workshop which are driven, and sometimes thwarted, by her interactions with a fickle client and her sidekick, a playful goat. The artistic choices are grounded in references to Golden Age American four-panel comics. Stylistic elements draw inspiration from Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes in homage to the illustrator’s early influences. In Abby’s pottery stand, we glimpse Lucy’s psychiatric booth and in Abby’s playful goat, we see Calvin’s precocious tiger familiar, Hobbes.Japanese and Japanese-inspired anime and manga, such as Voltronand Transformers,provided technical inspiration for the climax of the narrative, where individual clay elements come together to form a greater, compound clay vessel.
FORMAT The events in the comic center around telling the story of Bronze Age pottery manufacturing with humor and relatable characters utilizing Abby’s family and allies, her opponent, and the object of desire: a specially ordered jug. Abby’s introduction and journey commence in four-panel, horizontal rows. As the story builds toward climax, a splash balloon punctuates the fourth row, and then the format deviates. A burst-filled panel explodes with color and dominates an entire row. Three panels defined by angled borders propel the action forward, followed by two-panels, descending in proportion, which bring the sequence to a close. Abby’s journey resolves, with a twist, in the familiar four-panel format.
REPRESENTATION Abby’s comic world and the characters which populate it were designed with intentional minimalism.Clear character silhouettes and expressions effectively communicate both motion and mood. Thought balloons and dialogue balloons communicate the characters’ internal thoughts and spoken words, respectively.Abby’s journey through the pottery workshop is neatly divided into horizontal rows; each row represents a “department” in the pottery manufacturing chaîne opératoire at Seyitömer Höyük, and it is labelled accordingly.While Abby’s ‘POTS-2-GO’ service window takes artistic license, it also provides a relatable background to communicate the artisan-client trade relationship and the demand for pottery, which established Seyitömer as a production and export hub.
Image: Double-spouted jug (top, center) flanked by anthropomorphic rhytons; photographed in-situ at Seyitömer. Credit: Seyitömer Höyük Rescue Excavation Project.
The choice to design Abby’s sidekick as a playful goat was informed by the zoomorphic pottery, beads, and faunal remains discovered at Seyitömer, as well as the ongoing pastoral tradition in the region.The expressive, specially ordered jug was inspired by an actual double-spouted jug found in-situ alongside anthropomorphic rhytons in Seyitömer's Megaron Complex.Abby’s pottery workshop is gender- and age-inclusive, in homage to the varied human remains and live/work spaces found on site.The concept of a female apprentice was inspired by discussions between illustrator Kristin Donner, archaeologist Laura Harrison, and excavation director Dr. A. Nejat Bilgen about gender equality attested at Seyitömer; this choice was further encouraged by the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative, which calls for the international community to ensure education and gender equality for girls.
Images: 1) Figurines discovered at Seyitömer. Materials: stone, clay. Credit: Seyitömer Höyük Rescue Excavation Project. 2) Original rough character lineup. Materials: paper, pen, Photoshop. Credit: copyright 2015 Kristin Donner.
DESIGN CHOICES The minimalist shapes, curved forms, and simple, incised linework of figurines discovered at Seyitömer offered inspiration for character designs in the comic.Costuming choices were informed by separate Anatolian and Aegean references (largely preserved through depictions on cylinder seals and frescoes), as well as rare, surviving examples of Bronze Age textiles.Abby’s costume was partially inspired by the well-preserved remains of the Nordic “Egtved Girl” (1370 B.C.E.), whose short skirt length challenges the prior notion that young women wore exclusively long skirts, and continues to inform new theories on female fashion, societal roles, and self- possession in the Bronze Age.Her pink, corded skirt and woolen top with mid-arm length sleeves may have been tinted with madder, henna, or safflower.Abby’s headscarf serves as a practical solution to keep her hair neat at work and reflects a fashion of the Bronze Age Aegean,as well as current Turkish cultural practices. The client’s robes of blue were inspired by Bronze Age textiles tinted with Indigo or dyer’s woad, while the supporting cast is clad in neutral, saffron-tinted earth tones so that attention is focused on the more colorful main characters.
POTTERY TECHNIQUES As a nod to the economical style of early print comics, halftone patterns were used to delineate background elements and direct focus to the unsung hero of the comic: the clay. The pink halftone palette was inspired by actual clay globs found in Seyitömer’s Pottery Workshop Complex, along with the semi-spherical hump moulds which were used to model standardized clay forms on site.Closed lenticular vessels, such as the jug featured in the comic, were formed by joining two moulded clay halves, as illustrated in the story’s climax.The discovery of tools on site, such as brushes and burnishing stones, further informed a faithful artistic portrayal of Early Bronze Age pottery techniques.
COMIC ART PROCESS The earliest character designs and thumbnail drawings for a potter’s tale were created by Donner in 2015, with pen and pencil on paper, for a summer artist residency in Kütahya. These drawings were presented to and discussed with Harrison, Bilgen, and faculty members of the Archaeology Department at Dumlupnar University. As the concept evolved into comic form in 2018, Donner consulted with storyboard artist Kyle Neswald. The creative process assumed a cadence of sketch, pitch, revise, repeat, with roughly drawn panels taped up onto a wall in the illustrator’s studio. Once the storyline was finalized, the process became entirely digital. To maintain a hand-drawn look, inking and painting were completed by Donner with Adobe Photoshop software on a Wacom Cintiq with stylus.