I just got Sanjay Patel’s lovely adaptation of the Ramayana. Lengthy narrative in a super-designey flat color mode? That’s my happy place. Right there.

Looking at it and thinking about adaptations, plus thinking about the Monument Valley trip I’m planning, plus having just decided I want to memorize ‘Ozymandias’, combined into “I will do a test of my templates for Drowning City to do an adaptation of Ozymandias, starring George Herriman as the nameless traveller who tells Shelley about this evocative remnant.”

I need to think a bit more about what exactly is going on in the passage about how well the head’s “sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, /The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;” before I commit to the panels I sketched around it. Whose hand and heart, exactly? Ozymandias’? Someone else? I threw Kalinda into those panels as some kind of fabulous monster Ozymandias’ forgotten deeds involved him slaying, it might be fun to have her in some sort of weird relationship with Ozymandias in the rest of them. (Also that is intended to be a humanish version of her in the last panel, telling Shelly to stop bogarting the opium. I definitely feel this could wind through the whole story…)