One Snowy Night IV

Today's Strip

A few thoughts on Yuki-Onna. One of the recurring themes I enjoy experimenting on in my illustrations is translating traditional folklore and mythology into a modern setting. Now there is more to this then just dressing the mythical figure in the current fashions and placing it into a modern setting. For this exercise to truly work you have to look at that figure's motif and function and then figure out how that function translates into our modern viewpoint. Which brings us to Yuki-Onna in the original traditions she is a terror to all who have to go out into the mountain forests in the dead of winter, people like wood cutters or mountain climbers. But here is where the translation works well. As scary as she was in the past the Snow Woman would be the ultimate nightmare to those poor desperate ones who have to sleep beneath a doorway in the alleyway of a northern inner city.

Celestial Bureaucracy

One of my favorite concepts in Chinese Mythology is the celestial bureaucracy. What the gist of it is is that Heaven is an even bigger mess of red tape than anything that we have down here. This can best be seen in Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West. To me this was a cosmology that reflected the society of the time (In this case the late Ming Dynasty) and I always wondered why this concept never caught on I mean for all the west's societal progress our view of religion doesn't stray far from the original Hellenic template that the writers of the gospels had been raised with. So anyway I thought it would be fun to look at it again... or at least at one of the smaller departments in the Department of Minor Nuisances a Subdivision of Fate.