Goulwen R. (he/him) is an old school developer by day, wannabe comic artist by night!
CREATOR LINKS:
- Mastodon: @art_of_goulwenr
- Deviantart: deviantart.com/nautilebleu/
- Ko-fi ko-fi.com/nautilebleu
- Instagram: @nautilebleu
Read Sample:
Amazon: mybook.to/EstherNErieChapter01
Book Elevator Pitch for Readers/Book Clubs:
Since her return from the overseas colonies, Esther, a well-to-do society lady, suffers from a terrible illness that threatens her sanity. Unable to cure her, her physician asks for help from a team including the controversial Doctors Jekyll and Moreau, but her salvation may come from the frail Leonine maid who returned with her.
Your comic, Esther & Érié, is available in English and French, and is a tribute to Victorian horror. Which horror stories and characters from that era influenced you most in this project, and are there many references for readers to pick up on?
The classics: Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, The Island of Dr. Moreau, Dracula, Carmilla. Also, even if it’s not a book from the Victorian era, I would cite Drood by Dan Simmons. For now, there’s only Drs Moreau and Jekyll (Hyde still has to appear). More will be introduced as the story goes. The TV show Penny Dreadful is also an inspiration, being also a tribute to Victorian horror stories.
How would you describe your art style, and how long have you been drawing Victoriana/Victorian horror aesthetics?
I try to recreate the aesthetic of illustrations that accompanied books at that time, thus the book is B&W and I paid lots of attention to crosshatching. I’ve started working on this project in 2019; before that, I wasn’t into Victoriana. I spent 3 years looking for an aesthetic that matches with the atmosphere I wanted. Finally I found it by serendipity trying some brushes in Procreate (I work nearly exclusively digitally — but no AI)
Which character was the most fun to develop and draw, and who is/was the most challenging? Can you tell us why, and a little bit about who they are?
The funniest? Probably Lady d’Arcy, the villainess; villains can be more exaggerated than main characters, because readers won’t have to recognise in them. I created her mixing Lana Parilla as The Evil Queen in the TV show Once Upon a Time, and Bianca Beauchamp, a fetish model. Lady d’Arcy is someone who refuses to live in the shadows of men. She quickly understands that if she wants to take the most of life, she’ll have to break rules and conventions, and she discovers that she enjoyed doing so.
The most challenging? I would say Érié, the leonine maid Esther comes with: I’ve rewritten her backstory three times, not including that her design mostly preexisted from a previous project. In the first version of the story, she was a sort of witch warrior disguised as a maid to watch Lady d’Arcy and her husband Sir James. Now, she is just a female leonine teenager trying to escape the miserable life on a reservation that was promised to her; but she has very few trump cards and the choices available to her often mean choosing between Scylla and Charybdis. But she never gives up.
Esther is a Black woman dealing with trauma, while Érié is a Leonin; tell us more about the statuses of these characters in your world, especially who the Leonins are, and how your worldbuilding developed.
The world of Esther and Erie looks a lot like our Victorian era. A small geographical difference in the Bering strait prevented humanity to colonise Americas during Ice Age, thus allowing a local species, the Leonines, to occupy the same ecological niche.
Leonines are more distinct from humans than Native Americans, so they resisted better to diseases brought by Europeans. And they never developed agriculture and civilisations like Mayas and Incas, so there wasn’t much to loot. All this leads to a much less powerful America, USA — or UPA in this universe, standing for United Provinces of America— became independent only a few decades ago and they just started to expand beyond the Appalachs in 1895.
But one thing that is similar is the way the Natives — the Leonines — are treated: they are forced to abandon their lands and cultures and confined in reservations. Esther is a young lady from the upper class but it doesn’t mean her life has been easy: her father, a self made man obsessed by social recognition, put lots of pressure on his children, and in her case, it meant that she would have to do a good marriage. But things didn’t happen as expected…
What are the core themes of the comic, and where do they come from – why are these important to you?
I want to write now are stories of women trying to find their place in a world that doesn’t make things easy for them, and who do so without becoming toxic alpha males in disguise themselves (like Lady d’Arcy). I guess that’s why I rewrote Érié’s backstory multiple times until I ended up with her current one.
How do you find the translation aspect, and working in two languages (French and English)? Are there lines that don’t always translate well from one language to the other, and how do you work around this?
Since most characters are from the upper class, they are supposed to speak a very classical language— “Oxford English” as a commercial would say —, which helps me. There’s two exceptions: First is Érié: she isn’t a native English speaker. To emphasise her foreignness, her texts are in pale green as she speaks softly and quietly.
I also replace some letters by variants (A by Å, I by Ì, C by Ç). I tried to keep it readable, that’s why I didn’t replace E by variants since we use many in French (É, È, Ê, Ë). She sometimes does grammar or syntax errors. I wish I knew non IndoEuropean languages to understand better what is it to speak a very different language and how it can impact the way one sees the world.
The other is Inspector O’Brien: In English he’s supposed to speak with a Cockney accent, but I’m not fluent enough to write it correctly. So I write his text in French with a Parisian titi accent and ask to an American friend who speaks French to do the translation for me.
What’s next for your comic, and when can readers get the next installment?
I’m about to publish the Chapter Three. Then before working on Chapter Four, I would like to publish a second artbook with the illustrations I’ve done since the first one. It will also have a section about the world building of the Leonines’ land and several stories written by Naramoore (sakurajima.moe/@NaraMoore) about Lady d’Arcy’s backstory.
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