The Rime of the Modern Mariner

How to update Samuel Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner? By embarking on a mostly pictoral interpretation of the text and making it an allegorical treatise on environmental disaster, obviously.

Nick Hayes’ graphic reinvigoration of the poem starts with a lowly office worker discarding the plastic container his lunch sandwich arrived in, almost by his carelessness causing the arrival of a salty sea dog, the mariner, into his life. The mariner tells a tale, one of his experience at the frontline of our environmental laissez-faire attitude, a journey that takes him to the North Pacific Gyre, where he is awash in a sea of plastic-related detritus. The panels are lovingly put-together from the dull, unlistening of the office worker to the wraiths and demi-gods that pepper the mariner’s tale. All is seeped with a sea blue tint, making the artwork soft and beautiful. There isn’t much text but the story moves along so quickly that you hardly notice, so enthralled are you by the pictures and the movement of the panels.

The prophetic ending, one of apathy and delusion, is one that will stay with you and perhaps make you think twice about leaving your store-bought packaging blowing in the wind. Not unless you want to risk an audience with a yarn-spinning sea dog with a moral and tongue tailor-made for storytelling.