Aristotle’s Poetics

Two bands, in the order Aristotle put them.

• Six parts of tragedy, ranked as he ranked them: plot, character, thought, diction, song, spectacle. Spectacle comes last, which is the part students never expect.
• Five elements of plot: complication, reversal, recognition, suffering, catharsis — each with the Greek beneath it, because the Greek is what turns up in every other book they will read.
• The definition of tragedy quoted in full, and the vocabulary that hangs off it: hamartia, hubris, nemesis.

Every panel pairs a drawing with about forty words. That ratio is the whole design: enough text to be correct, little enough to be read standing up.

Drawn in Illustrator. Every figure, icon, border and Greek key is a vector path I drew — no stock, no traced photographs. The palette is three greys, a gold and a white, which is what holds eleven separate illustrations together as one object rather than eleven stickers on a page.

It ships as SVG rather than a flat image on purpose. A JPEG of a poster this dense turns to mush the moment anyone needs to read a panel; an SVG stays sharp at any magnification, which is why the viewer above can take you all the way down to a single word.

Two typefaces do the work: Raleway for the display and labels, Merriweather for reading. Both are subset to only the characters this poster actually uses and embedded in the file, so it renders identically on a machine that has never heard of either font.

I taught Advanced Comics at California College of the Arts. The Poetics is on the reading list because it is the oldest surviving account of how stories are put together, and it is genuinely useful to a comics student — but it is a Greek treatise, and asking a studio class to extract a structure from it cold does not work.

So the structure came first, on one sheet, and the reading came second. Students could see the whole shape before they met the prose, and had somewhere to put each part as they hit it.