Welcome back to the Atlas, friends.
Usually, we map our territories with words, tracing the lines of history and philosophy through text. But today, we are charting a new kind of landscape: the visual. I have been working on an illustrated story, a ‘graphic fable’ exploring a theme that obsesses me: Deep Time. We often think of the past as dead and buried, but what if the connection goes both ways? What if a creature facing the end of its world could find comfort in the beginning of ours?
This is the beginning of Taona, the story of a Triceratops, a rainy morning 66 million years ago, and a vision that bridges the gap between the Cretaceous and the concrete of London City.
The thunder had finally stopped shaking the ground beneath his belly. Taona had never been much of a sleeper, but that night the forest had held a different kind of silence. The heavy, held-breath kind of silence, taught and strung up.
The creatures of the jungle say the rain washes the world clean, but listening to the cascading water pounding off leaves from the canopy above and filling up streams with hissing explosions, it didn’t feel like a regular cleaning. It felt more like the world was slowly being washed away.
Taona had a love-hate relationship with the mud outside his cave on monsoon days like this. Most days, it was just a nuisance that chilled his toes. Sometimes it would act as a primitive warning system against unwanted visitors, announcing them with a squelch squelch as they stomped on by.
But in subdued moments like that morning, it stopped being just dirt and water.
Taona’s grandmother used to say the water on the ground holds up the sky. Usually he could only see chaos in the puddles: ripples in the water colliding, mud swirling up with each drop. He would suppose that all creatures looked for patterns in the mess, staring at the chaos until they found a logic they could understand.
But during the monsoon, that feeling of confusion was changed.
Taona would sit and watch the puddle that formed outside his cave from sunrise till noon and feel something different…
This story is a labor of love, combining my passion for art with my obsession for the the themes that connect us across time. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this new format.
Do you have a favorite small phenomena that can give you a sudden, vertigo-inducing feeling of connection to the world around you?
I’m fascinated to hear about your own encounters with deep time in the comments.
Bonus content
Where does an image like the ones above start? Well, normally with a very rough sketch. Here is a sketch of one of my next panels that I worked on a while back to give you a sense of the distance between a first thought, and a finished coloured piece.
I do find it amazing how colours can change a scene. What is your fave part when making art (of any kind). The messy part, or the bit when it all comes together and is refined?
Coming up: A vision of a future forest made of glass and steel, and a meeting with a man named Dr. Browne...
Oh gosh this is so cute! You’re so talented! 🦖🦕
Lovely. Am going to pass on reading any more, because Him Indoors does a lot of reading around palaeontology and I know what happens, thank you, and it will make me cry.