MOUNTAIN LIFE - Coast Mountains | Winter Spring 2019

WINTER/SPRING 2019 MLCM 41 words :: Feet Banks illustrations :: Lani Imre “This story has never really been told.” Maja Aro pours some tea, scoots her chair closer to the table and examines an illustration of a half naked female warrior carrying a battle axe and severed head. The woman is Otrere, warrior queen of the Amazons. The man, what’s left of him, is Ares, the Greek God of War. And the message is clear, Amazons don’t mess around. “Otrere was Ares' wife,” Aro explains. “But he abandoned her after a battle in Greece and stayed there with all his soldiers and married Aphrodite. The abandoned tribeswomen, led by Otrere, came upon the lost men, alive and well and living their new lives, while out on a hunting mission. Otrere was pissed, so she slayed the whole colony, took Ares captive, seduced him into giving her his seed, stabbed him with a broken spear and then cut off his head. That started her reign as queen.” Murder! Bloodshed! Intrigue! And this is just a single panel in Aro’s 160-page graphic novel, a fictional interpretation of the rise and fall of the Amazons, warrior women of myth, legend—and, as comtemporary archaeologists are discovering, real history. “Until recently there hasn’t been much history on the Amazons,” says Aro, an actress, stunt performer/coordinator and award-winning film director. “Homer’s works touch on them and they’re featured in a ton of classical Greek vase art, but aside from Xena: Warrior Princess and Wonder Woman there hasn’t been much focus on the Amazons. Yet more and more contemporary research is proving they really existed.” Since the turn of the millennium, archeologists have discovered a number of “warrior gravesites” exhumed in central Eurasia containing the remains of women buried alongside their weapons, war spoils and even their horses. ARTIST AMAZONE Maja Aro mines history and legend for new graphic novel