Creating The Title

The main reason behind the title is straightforward: it describes all you need to know about the story. But there’s a sentimental reason attached to it as well.

When the idea for the Alexander Romance first came to me, it was in the form of an image: of Alexander on horseback alongside the Servant, wandering the desert in search of the Water of Life. This is usually a good sign because all of my “serious” work (that is, serious enough to move past development) tend to emerge as strong visual ideas. My first webcomic, The World in Deeper Inspection, began as a daydream during a bus ride home from school, and since then I’ve relied on this method for choosing which stories to work on.

The desert image stayed inside my head for a long time, almost a year, until I considered it serious enough. (This is the second step of the method: if the image is still compelling to me more than a few months later, then it’s something worth pursuing). The title came packaged with the image I guess, as it never changed from the early days.

Designing the Title

Caption: Four sketchy variations of the title.

The title art went through several iterations. For the first one in early 2019 I had three rules in mind:

1. I wanted the text to be arranged in a slight diamond shape
2. The lettering is brush-like, partly to exude a historical vibe without resorting to Ancient Greek font tropes, as the Alexander Romance is a diverse, international work not confined to a specific culture and time period.
3. A wabi-sabi feel. Wabi-sabi is a Japanese concept that cherishes human imperfection in handmade art. One way to get that across is through calligraphy.

The second and final iteration was in early 2020. This time, with a better understanding of the source material, I wanted an updated title art that reflects the Alexander Romance’s origins.

Alexander legends were extant during his lifetime, but the earliest Alexander Romance as a written, not-lost work came from Alexandria, Egypt, by an anonymous author known to us as “Pseudo-Callisthenes”, sometime in the 3rd century CE. This Pseudo-Callisthenes work became the origin point for the many variants and iterations of future Romances in the next thousand years (including mine!).

There is a particular style of handwriting that was common during the time: Roman Cursive. A scribe back then would have likely written a copy of the Romance in this cursive.

I wanted to use that style of cursive while bringing my own modern take to it. So I played with the shape of the letters, the brush textures, etc. You can see the almost-final title art at the bottom centre of the above sketch.

 
And voila! This was really close to final. After a while I became unsure of the ampersand, and changed it to be more typical looking.

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