Last autumn, year eight Latin students at the Iris Classics Centre at Cheney School created Primordial Soup, a graphic novel full of stories about the embittered, overthrown older gods, living out their lives in modern-day Oxford. This autumn, a new group of year eights have taken on the challenge of a sequel.
This time, though, the tables are turned, and the Olympians have been trapped in the underworld, and are facing a range of unexpected and unappealing situations! Hermes is running a gift shop in Tartarus, Athena is stuck in hell with a room full of idiots, and Dionysus can't find anything but pomegranates for his party. Twelve different new comic stories can be found in Pick 'n' Styx, named after the famous underworld river. Read their stories here.
The students were very lucky to once again have been joined again in this project by local artist Lydia Hall. Lydia worked with the students on the artwork for the story, and turned their artwork and ideas into a cohesive graphic novel.
This Iris Project initiative was generously supported by a grant from TORCH (The Oxford Centre for the Humanities). Pages of these stories were displayed at the Ashmolean Dante Late Night Opening on 26 November 2021.
There will be a launch event for both Primordial Soup and Pick 'n' Styx graphic novels on Friday 1 April 2022 at Cheney School, with a range of underworld-themed activities and refreshments.
Cheney School is a large comprehensive secondary school, in a very diverse area of east Oxford, where over 30 percent of the students have English as an additional language, and over 30 percent of students are on free school meals.
The Iris Classics Centre and Rumble Museum at Cheney are part of a unique partnership between an educational charity and a school. The Iris Project, a charity which promotes learning about the ancient world, is working with Cheney School to grow a community classics centre and museum within a school. We are the first school museum to be awarded full museum accreditation by the Arts Council Museum Accreditation Scheme.
