Hi. My name is Rob Vollmar and I’m the writer and co-creator of INANNA’S TEARS, one of the many fine features available at Modern Tales.com. My collaborator, mpMann, and I have chosen to serialize our new graphic novel online, and more specifically, at Modern Tales, because we are excited about the possibility of reaching out to a diverse and sophisticated audience of hungry comics/manga readers that may not otherwise regularly visit a comics shop. The print edition of INANNA’S TEARS will appear later this year from Archaia Studio Press, home of ARTESIA and MOUSE GUARD.

The following is a short essay I wrote in celebration of INANNA’S TEARS launch on New Year’s Day 2007. I hope it might serve as a small enticement for you to come check out what we’ve got going on at the Inanna’s Tears website. Thanks for your time and consideration and we hope to meet you soon…5,000 years in the past.

January 1, 2007

INANNA’S TEARS is not historical fiction.

History is often equated with the PAST; the things which occurred that led to this place in time where we are now. History, one might reasonably suggest, is an examination of this past that results in a narrative explaining essentially how we got here from there.

As long as the “we” in question is confined to very specific groups of human beings in the last 4500 years or so, history does a pretty able job of accomplishing this task and the closer you get to THIS PRESENT MOMENT, the more able it becomes. As a species, we are mass-communicating on a unprecedented scale and, as a result, we are producing more INSTANT HISTORY than ever before. To the people with the right technology and a vision of what they are looking for, the human life is utterly transparent in the Information Age and, for historians, has finally presented itself as the ideal subject for archiving, collating, and classifying.

But as we wander away from the 21st century and back across the millenia towards the dawn of human civilization, the journey has scarcely begun (a mere five thousand years!) before history simply runs out of fuel. Handing off the baton to a variety of other disciplines like archaeology and anthropology, history falls silent for the remaining 245,000 years of homo sapiens’ existence on Planet Earth, to say nothing of the 3,699,975,500 years that life is widely thought to have existed without us, or the 1.5 billion years preceding that our planet somehow got by without any life on it at all.

It would, of course, be patently false to claim that that nothing can be known about the world with any certainty further back than 5,000 years or so. Thanks to some of those fields mentioned above and a holy host of others, we know more about life on Earth before the dawn of human civilization than ever before. But don’t thank history, because if you ask history, it will tell you something like this:

Humans wandered around lost in the wilderness for 250,000 years. Then, about 5,000 years ago, one group of them called the Sumerians got their act together and invented everything that makes modern culture work; specifically, agriculture, economics, math, writing, government, and law. Everyone, everywhere eventually followed suit, resulting in the perfect world, filled with history that we enjoy today.

Maybe I’m being unnecessarily harsh but, my own recollection of my WORLD THOUGHT AND CULTURE textbook back at the old alma mater matches that description to a T. At best, it had a chapter covering “What Came Before” (a span of nearly a quarter of a million years), followed by 1500 pages of “What Came After” (the 5,000 that followed).

Before what? After what?

Writing, of course.

History starts with Sumer because, like all historical societies that followed in their example, they had the decency to write it all down in a way that could not be easily eradicated by the passage of time. Unlike the Egyptians, who entrusted the bulk of their cultural context to fragile papyrii, the Sumerians captured their own narrative in wedge shaped marks etched on to a clay tablet that was dried and sometimes fired in a kiln to ensure its near eternal influence. The body of extant Sumerian writing is very large and, at present, mostly untranslated but that which has been made comprehensible to the modern is remarkably rich in comparison to other cultures from the period, like the Egyptians, that despite the obvious influence of writing on their culture, didn’t transmit that communication to the future effectively. Whether by virtue of dumb luck or extreme foresight, Sumer’s importance in the historical community has gone in roughly 150 years from non-existence to primal importance, eclipsing even Egypt who, with her showy monuments and compelling funereal art, so dominated the birth of human interest in antiquity, and all thanks to the power of the written word.

INANNA’S TEARS, though, isn’t about any of that. It’s about what came before.

More specifically, it’s about what came right before; a culture one is tempted to think of as transitional, sandwiched between the nomadic hunter-gatherers that populated the space between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers for 30,000 years and the everything else that follows. It hardly does them justice. It was a thousand years of unparalleled human ingenuity in action. They were the first true masters of agriculture, understanding perfectly its lessons of producing more than is needed and creating magic from the surplus. They developed fundamental concepts of mathematics that shape the way that every person alive today thinks about counting and time. And, from their rigorous accounting, they eventually developed the oldest known form of writing.

As a result, history is able look just beyond its own borders to rightly suggest to us that the achievements of these pre-literate Sumerians changed the very essence of humanity and how we exist in relation to the natural environment of which once we were but an inseparable component.

INANNA’S TEARS is a thought-picture of that seam joining “What Came Before” with “What Came After.” As history was, uniquely in this case, both written and invented by the victor, it serves here as only a counterbalance to the ambitious goal of re-animating the spirit of this otherwise unknowable age. Though not our primary focus, we have endeavored not to trample the meager flowers of history that have sprouted in this ancient and dusty soil. Given the right tools and a willingness to search, one will undoubtedly discover such footprints anyway. With another ten years to prepare, we might have been able to create something more complete, more accurate, more whatever you like.

Having been among these people and their world, however distorted from the one in which the actual Sumerians may have lived, we’ve come to believe that their story is important one for us to tell. For us all to start telling; right here and right now and however we’re able. While its beginning may stretch just beyond what is permissable to be known, its conclusion has yet to be reached, though like INANNA’S TEARS, it has all the landmarks of a tragedy in progress. We only hope that you are able to hear the urgency in their voices as clearly as they emerge from 5,000 years of silence.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 23rd, 2007 at 1:59 pm and is filed under General, Modern Tales News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.