Alumni Spotlight
Alexis E. Fajardo '98
Beowulf Back to the Drawing Board
“What I love most about Earlham is the embracing, accepting environment—if there’s something you’re good at, you can find your niche.”
Alexis Fajardo ’98 has never encountered the problem of conflicting interests. His liberal arts education taught him how to merge his love for two seemingly disparate passions: cartooning and the Classics.
His latest work combining the classic and the comic is Kid Beowulf. The comic is based on the epic poem, Beowulf, with numerous twists. In Fajardo’s version, instead of adversaries, Beowulf and Grendel are actually 12-year-old twin brothers. The author intends to place a fresh spin on Beowulf while still maintaining the integrity of the plot: ““It’s a very basic story, but very elastic—so you can kind of play with it.” Fajardo plans a series of twelve books, which will chronicle a year in the life of these twin brothers.
Since childhood, Fajardo has gravitated towards mythology: “I read everything from cover to cover. I pored over anything I could get my hands on. I absolutely loved all of those old stories.” Upon graduating high school, Fajardo came to Indiana, which he fondly describes as “a haven in the cornfields,” with hopes of designing his own mythology major at Earlham. However, after taking Homeric Banquet, a course in which students work through the texts of The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid led by professor Steve Heiny, he was set on the Classics.
The most stimulating aspect of Fajardo’s college career was the freshness Earlham professors brought to ancient material: “That enthusiasm really transfers over to the students.” As a graphic novelist, he aspires to transfer that same enthusiasm to his readers: “That’s what I want to do with my work. That someone who picks up the comic might want to see the source of the material. To foster the same curiosity in them that was fostered in me through all of my English and Classics classes.”
“What I love most about Earlham is the embracing, accepting environment—if there’s something you’re good at, you can find your niche. Where else would I be encouraged to take something as quirky as a platypus and Plato and merge them?” The Earlham Word is where Fajardo found the first audience for his comic, Plato’s Republic. The Plato’s Republic panel strip follows the political and pop-culture adventures of Plato the platypus and his idiosyncratic company. This comic strip evolved into his main focus after Earlham, where Plato’s Republic appeared in Boston’s Editorial Humor, as an online daily comic-strip, and as full-color Sunday style weeklies. Plato’s Republic is currently on hiatus while Fajardo works on the Kid Beowulf series.
“I want to be true to the material, the epic. As these guys travel, they will learn what it is to be a hero, what their destinies are. In the end, Beowulf will kill Grendel.” Along the way, Beowulf and Grendel will meet other epic heroes, such as Joan of Arc and Odysseus. “I’m especially looking forward to book five, where Kid Beowulf meets Odysseus. Aside from Beowulf, The Odyssey is probably my favorite epic, and I’ve always loved Odysseus as a lover, fighter, and thinker.”
Tiring of the bureaucratic, lengthy publishing process, Fajardo created his own printing company, Lexpress. “You just get tired of waiting, and want to do it yourself. I learned that through self-publishing you can do it just as well if not better than what’s on the shelf,” he says. The Comics Journal has referred to Alexis’ cartooning style as “Bill Amend of Foxtrot doing Bloom County.” A handsome, perfect-bound graphic novel of a full 167 pages, Kid Beowulf reminds the reader of the extensive researching, writing and wrist cramping which goes into an epic-comic hybrid—especially considering that one page takes approximately five hours to create.
Although he hopes this comic will be a learning tool for others, he insists that creating this comic is also a learning process for himself: “All of these epics are like big propaganda pieces. Pretty much every country has an epic poem. I want my characters to go there. A lot of it is my own journey of learning myself, figuring out where these guys can go.”
Fajardo also hopes to reach a wider audience by way of the growing popularity of the graphic novel. “Many times, people just moan remembering their first encounter with Beowulf and Old English. Maybe if you didn’t enjoy it then, you can still realize there’s a great story there. Comics are great for that, they’re so accessible. They’re not tied up with iambic pentameter and genealogy.”
In addition to his current cartooning projects Alexis teaches classes at Artsake, an art shop in San Francisco. His classes begin with the history of comics, building up to students creating their own. He intends to do one Kid Beowulf novel per year until the twelve books are completed. The second book Kid Beowulf: Song of Roland, based on the French epic, will be on the shelf in December of 2006.
— Jess Waggoner '08
(Posted April 26, 2006)
To learn more about Kid Beowulf, visit www.kidbeowulf.com.
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Page updated: April 26 ,2006