Hello and welcome.
My name is Jim Bosomworth, and I think that it is fair to say that I am a literature nerd. I have a Master's in American and British Literature and have taught eighth grade through high school English and high school partnership college composition classes for both Lewis and Clark Community College and Saint Louis University. After 22 years in public education, I retired in 2023 as a District Library Specialist in Jerseyville, Illinois. I have been reading comics and comic strips since the early 1960s and have been a comic collector since the early 1970s, with some of my earliest memories being Charlton horror titles (and E-man), Roy Thomas and Barry Smith's Conan, and Steve Gerber's runs on Man-thing and Adventure into Fear. I don't read many titles regularly these days, but I am always looking for something new and interesting.
This site is part of a larger project that started out as something I thought would take a few months, but has taken on a life of its own and is now an ongoing project that has taken over three years so far, with no end in sight (well, potentially). I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration of Eileen Joy (The Postmodern Beowulf, etc.), who helped me to consider the pop culture connections of the poem and its characters and the patience of my wife, Jody, who has always supported me and my quirky ideas. For those who may be interested, I have done presentations on this subject on a number of occasions, most recently at the 2013 Archon convention, and I am more than willing to present in both classroom and convention settings. Feel free to contact me for further details. I have also started a blog on the contact page, and I encourage visitors to the site to write something. Also, I have created a site providing a copy of the earliest Beowulf comic adaptation, along with an English translation. You can find this site at beowulfleggendacristiana.weebly.com
I have worked diligently to track down and read every title and story described on these pages, and have only created pages for those titles and characters that I have been able to vet. I want to note that there are two very specific books that I list on this site whose existence is provable, and I will point out here that two Marvel Comics characters have tenuous connections, but I have so far not been able to find specific comics to back them up: Ulysses Bloodstone and Gilgamesh. Each of these characters, according to their online comic histories, has either been mistaken for Beowulf, used the name as a previous identity, or may have been the character from whom the story evolved.
More information on Bloodstone can be found here: http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/bloodstoneulysses.htm#Beowulf
More information on Marvel's Gilgamesh can be found here: http://marvel.wikia.com/Gilgamesh_%28Earth-616%29
Finally, for those who find this site to be useful or interesting, please considering supporting Hero Initiative at http://www.heroinitiative.org/
Hero Initiative is an organization dedicated to supporting comic book creators, many of whom spent their entire careers freelance and with no pension or insurance opportunities. In these days where millions of dollars are generated by characters and storylines that first appeared in comics, we often forget that the people responsible for them often get nothing.
My name is Jim Bosomworth, and I think that it is fair to say that I am a literature nerd. I have a Master's in American and British Literature and have taught eighth grade through high school English and high school partnership college composition classes for both Lewis and Clark Community College and Saint Louis University. After 22 years in public education, I retired in 2023 as a District Library Specialist in Jerseyville, Illinois. I have been reading comics and comic strips since the early 1960s and have been a comic collector since the early 1970s, with some of my earliest memories being Charlton horror titles (and E-man), Roy Thomas and Barry Smith's Conan, and Steve Gerber's runs on Man-thing and Adventure into Fear. I don't read many titles regularly these days, but I am always looking for something new and interesting.
This site is part of a larger project that started out as something I thought would take a few months, but has taken on a life of its own and is now an ongoing project that has taken over three years so far, with no end in sight (well, potentially). I gratefully acknowledge the inspiration of Eileen Joy (The Postmodern Beowulf, etc.), who helped me to consider the pop culture connections of the poem and its characters and the patience of my wife, Jody, who has always supported me and my quirky ideas. For those who may be interested, I have done presentations on this subject on a number of occasions, most recently at the 2013 Archon convention, and I am more than willing to present in both classroom and convention settings. Feel free to contact me for further details. I have also started a blog on the contact page, and I encourage visitors to the site to write something. Also, I have created a site providing a copy of the earliest Beowulf comic adaptation, along with an English translation. You can find this site at beowulfleggendacristiana.weebly.com
I have worked diligently to track down and read every title and story described on these pages, and have only created pages for those titles and characters that I have been able to vet. I want to note that there are two very specific books that I list on this site whose existence is provable, and I will point out here that two Marvel Comics characters have tenuous connections, but I have so far not been able to find specific comics to back them up: Ulysses Bloodstone and Gilgamesh. Each of these characters, according to their online comic histories, has either been mistaken for Beowulf, used the name as a previous identity, or may have been the character from whom the story evolved.
More information on Bloodstone can be found here: http://www.marvunapp.com/Appendix/bloodstoneulysses.htm#Beowulf
More information on Marvel's Gilgamesh can be found here: http://marvel.wikia.com/Gilgamesh_%28Earth-616%29
Finally, for those who find this site to be useful or interesting, please considering supporting Hero Initiative at http://www.heroinitiative.org/
Hero Initiative is an organization dedicated to supporting comic book creators, many of whom spent their entire careers freelance and with no pension or insurance opportunities. In these days where millions of dollars are generated by characters and storylines that first appeared in comics, we often forget that the people responsible for them often get nothing.