Recommendation: The Labours of Heracles: Legends for Growth and Healing

Sometime, in the early part of this year, I was interested to see beautifully drawn pictures of Hercules, performing his various mythological labours, appearing on my timeline.  These were by the superb artist David Hitchcock.  David's work first came on my radar when I met him at ICE Birmingham in 2018 and I purchased a copy of his excellent adaptation of Charles Dickens' The Signalman. It turned out that David was drawing the pictures of Hercules for a project by Professor Laurence Alison on the life, labours and death of Heracles. Turns out Heracles is the original Greek name for the hero and the Romans changed it to Hercules - every day is a school day eh!

This project really caught my imagination because I was listening to the audiobook of Stephen Fry's Mythos.  Like many of my generation, my first and lasting memory of Herc was from his character in 1963s Jason and the Argonauts, played by Nigel Green. I have so many memories of watching this classic during school holidays. However, apart from this, I never really knew a massive amount about Heracles or his labours apart from the odd one like killing the Nemean Lion. Needless to say when the opportunity came to support the Kickstarter campaign to get this project off the ground I backed it. 

I chose the option of an A5 sized Novella, written  by Laurence Alison and illustrated throughout by the incredible artwork of David Hitchcock. As the Kickstarter reached its stretch goals I also received some A5 prints of a selection of the artwork.  Sadly I couldn't back the tiers that would have allowed me to get some of the sketches created especially for Kickstarter. 

I could have devoured the book, but I rationed each chapter which covers part of Heracles life or one of his labours.  This allowed me time to reflect, particularly on each labour and look for the meaning in Heracles'  actions or relate it to my own experiences working frontline at an  NHS specialist hospital. This was something recommended by the author, as each of the 12 epic labors has a lot to teach us about endurance, revenge, mental illness, violence, punishment, trauma, bereavement, friendship, love, and masculinity.

Amazingly, illustrating each labour has never been done in a book before.  The detail and nuances of each illustration reminded me of reading Bernie Wrightsons Frankenstein. There is so much to see in each piece, it is obvious that the artist was having a great time with this project.  

There are resources available to go along with the book too.  Here's a link https://www.ground-truth.co.uk/heracles

If you want to get hold of a copy for yourself you can drop a message to Andrew Richmond here: https://andrewrichmondart.com/contact/