With Inanna’s Tears, written by Rob Vollmar and drawn by mpMann, reaching its apocalyptic end, so I took the opportunity to talk to Vollmar about his ambitious graphic novel. Innana’s Tears will take print form this August as a bimonthly comic from Archaia Studio Press, home of Mouse Guard and Artesia.

Shaenon Garrity: Tell us a little about the setting and time period for Inanna’s Tears. What made you choose that setting for a story?

Rob Vollmar: My interest in the setting really ended up dictating the story to me, rather than the other way around. Two writers in particular really got me thinking about the birth of civilization and history and the role that the early Sumerian culture, in particular, played in those deliveries; Leonard Shlain The Alphabet vs. The Goddess, which deals more specifically with literacy as a cultural phenomenon, and Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael for his focus on totalitarian agriculture as the underpinning of nearly all civilizations.

The readings I did on Sumer just kept clicking with the vague preconceptions of a story I had come into it with and, after a short time, the actual story started writing itself. It was some more attractive, I’ll admit, also to set it in a period just beyond history’s authoritative thwacking-stick so my deep fear of offendingthe detail oriented with historical inaccuracies could be put to rest for at least one book.

SG: Did The Alphabet Vs. the Goddess influence the conflict over written language in the story?

RV: Alphabet suggested a link between the development of written language and the transition from what came before to where we are now that I’d never considered and Inanna’s Tears is born out of that awareness. Ultimately, Anarin, the scribe, and Belipotash, the warrior, become like flipsides of the same idea, history rising from beneath the waves of tradition to change everything utterly and forever. One is perceived as benevolent and the other, hostile but, in the end, the result is exactly the same.

SG: What kind of research did you have to do for this story? Where did mpMann get visual reference?

RV: I tried to get a survey of the writing out there on Sumer. I wouldn’t call my efforts groundbreaking but I enjoyed the process of sorting through the various ideological schools of Sumerologists. I also reserved the right to disagree with them and, in some cases, make up an answer when I didn’t feel it had been adequately addressed. For this reason, Inanna’s Tears is better seen as a parable than as historical fiction.

I couldn’t speak to the totality of Herr Mann’s research but I know that we had a number of conversations about textiles, architecture, social mores, a holy host of other material concerns early on that convinced me instantly that he was the right guy for the job.

SG: Can you think of a specific example of something you invented for the story?

RV: If you look to the later writing on Inanna and her followers, there’s a clear relationship established between the Temple and the practice of prostitution. In my research, I really tangled with whether or not this was an aspect inherited from antiquity or a trait that developed as the culture shifted ever further in favor of masculine values through the denigration of feminine ones. The more I considered the timbre of this earlier culture where women held a higher status, developed sexually without the expectation of virginity at marriage, and worshipped a feminine deity associated with the fertility of the harvest, the more I became convinced that if prostitution existed, it probably didn’t need the vigorous regulation that a dedicated Temple guild would suggest. There was no way to resolve that particular question from the evidence so I went with my gut.

SG: How did you and Mann find each other?

RV: In what will be, no doubt, the comicsexiest answer I’ll give here, Marvin and I met through Warren Ellis’ THE ENGINE community after I posted to a thread for writers looking for artists with which to collaborate on specific projects. I was already familiar with Marvin’s excellent work from Lone and Level Sands, which he did with writer A. David Lewis, and so the possibility of working with him on this project was better than ideal.

SG: What’s your process for collaborating with Mann? Did you just send him a script, or did you trade ideas at all?

RV: For me, it was very fluid and enjoyable. We started by creating a structure of five “acts” and apportioned the events of the story accordingly in broad strokes, as a collaborative storytelling process. Then, one section at a time, we would talk through a given act until we understood the structure of the individual segment. Then I would either full-script or do page breakdowns as the scene warranted. We shared a lot of duties in regards to blocking the individual scenes.

SG: Was there a particular visual style you and Mann tried to establish? His inking and colors are striking.

RV: I was pretty hands off in the design department for this book. My impression of Marvin’s work from Lone and Level Sands was that he was a very confident storyteller, and I endeavored to give him the leeway to tell the story the way that he saw fit.

My own critical assessment of the work that he has done here is that he shows a lot of sensitivity to the human form that allows him to draw in a manner that is more evocative than representational. The colors also do more to reinforce the emotional timbre of the scene than merely inviting the reader to ponder the texture of a chair from the 30th century BCE. Those two factors in tandem are a constant reminder, in a way, that what we are seeing is speculation as it is otherwise unknowable by the historical mind.

SG: Where did you get the prayer and ritual in the opening scene? It’s very evocative.

RV: I wrote both the invocation and the ritual though Marvin made a few improvements in the process of visually expressing it in the comics form. I’m really fascinated by that kind of liturgical writing, whatever tradition it emanates from, and had played with some of the same ideas in Bluesman. Here though, the burden was to create a functional system of worship in a culture that revolved around it, where the measurement of time was developed to ensure that the gods were fed on schedule. Some of it was reverse-engineered from a variety of ritual practices from around the world and, of course, some of it is just pure conjecture.

Given the difficulty of the task presented to us, I feel like if we were able to approximate even a hint of what actually took place, we’ve accomplished something meaningful.

SG: One of the ongoing conflicts in the story is between tradition–the way things have always been in this society–and change, whether from technological and social advancements or simply changing needs. Entika clearly wants to fix some of the problems in her country, but she also rejects challenges to tradition; for example, she forbids the scribe from developing phonetic writing. Should we side with her, or see her as hidebound?

RV: Her inflexibility does prove to be something of tragic flaw, but the same could be said of the culture that she represents. Despiteour attempt here to frame the debate between two fictionalized character sets, the reality is that a paradigm shift was already underway two generations before these players arrived to take the stage. In that sense, both Entika and Belipotash represent the focal point of their respective cultures as they tectonically crash against one another.

SG: Another conflict is, of course, sex-based. The society in Inanna’s Tears worships a goddess, but its power structure is patriarchal, with only men allowed to serve as priests and conduits for the goddess’s wishes. What do you hope to illustrate about the contrast between the abstract female deity and an ordinary woman with political power?

RV: It was my intention that the Temple arrangement as it stood at the beginning of the story might represent an idealized balance of maleand female power in a culture. While it is true that the visible positions of power were held by men, the mystery being worshipped was starkly female. The fact that their patron is a goddess was never in question, only whether the Temple was interpreting and enacting her will adequately. This is not a question that requiredphilosophers to resolve either. If you had food, the canals were properly tended, the crops distributed etc, then the Goddess must be pleased because she provides all of that for her children when she is. She is the teacher. We are the student. We can know that this arrangement was successful for both parties because it was perpetuated in this culture, essentially unimpeded, for a thousand years prior to the story’s opening.

Notice also that at the beginning of the story, Entika is serving as Ishib, which is the de facto head of the religious arm of the Temple. While the Sanga may have more visible power as head of the administrators, she would wield considerable influence over the people as the Temple’s public face. In this respect, it was not without reason that Ardru (the previous En) might appoint her to this role. It was also probably not without precedent as women occasionally ascended to an analogous position in subsequent generations when the social status of women, as a group, had eroded dramatically in comparison.

The contrast, then, can be seen not so much between Entika and Inanna, both of whom reign by the authority vested in them by the people of the city, but between the kind of goddess worship practiced by this culture in balance and that which would develop in the state of imbalance that came after. In balance, the goddess was represented by an idol, a willing fiction if you will, impervious to the whims of human frailty. No one confused the goddess for the statue. After the rise of Kingship, the goddess was incarnated into the form of a human woman (usually the high priestess) on a yearly basis and expected to re-authorize the authority for one man to directly rule over the others through her act of publicly engaging in ritualized sexual congress with him. Though ostensibly still engaging in Goddess worship, this shift represents the beginning of the end for not only the Goddess (whatever name she might take) but for the open celebration of feminine values in the many variations on Sumerian culture that followed.

SG: I’m also interested in the scene in which the invaders try to rewrite the Inanna myth to make her the equal or subordinate of a foreign god. Did you base this on any specific historical examples?

RV: Pretty much all of them! It wasn’t restrained as a tool for indoctrination for goddess cultures who suddenly found themselves under patriarchal rule. At its heart, all religion is about storytelling and its much easier to alter a story than it is to convince people to forget that they ever heard it in the first place. Usually this process takes place over the course of decades or even centuries, but, given Inanna’s Tears’ definite and abrupt ending, it was necessary to compress it into a much shorter time frame. This is a bit disingenuous, I suppose, but, ultimately I’m telling a story, not writing an historical treatise on Sumer. At whatever speed it was accomplished, Inanna’s transformation from benevolent goddess to beastly she-demon was complete in a thousand years and served as the framework for the persecution of feminine values in a handful of still extant religions birthed in the region.

SG: Only in the final scene is there a suggestion of divine interference–divine judgment–in the story. Should the flood (and Entika’s belief that Inanna has finally spoken to her) be read as the work of Inanna?

RV: It’s probably overly coy by half for me to suggest that, like most matters of faith, it’s open to interpretation. It’s more plausible that environmental factors identified obliquely in the story may have caused the flood but then, environmental factors will always be more plausible than “the gods did it.” Within the worldview of the people of Sumer, it was unmistakably an act of divine retribution and there probably aren’t enough CGI recreations showing physically how and why it happened to convince the most dull-witted among them otherwise.

SG: I did notice that there seems to be an inevitability to events. Is there any point at which the tragedy of the story could have been avoided?

RV: That’s a tough question because, like several points in the story, it’s open to interpretation. If Entika had gone through with the ritual in Act 5, I don’t think the ending of the story would have been so apocalyptic. But, it would also have meant that the old Temple system would be totally subverted to the Lugals’ purpose which is a disaster of its own. Things turn out the way they do because people make choices about what they believe.

Read Inanna’s Tears now!

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