My senior year of college I was in an Illustration For Publishing class, where our assignment was to create a nonfiction graphic novel. I had a lot of ideas for a comic, I wanted to do Anne Boleyn, the original Mulan, Freddie Mercury, The Romanov family…
The list was endless! But when I presented my ideas to my professor she suggested something I hadn’t thought of, doing someone unheard of. It’s so easy to choose the most famous figures in history that we forget there’s so many others who had a huge impact.
So I remembered a Russian Language learning video I watched where someone told the story of Olga of Kiev, Ukraine’s first patron saint. So I did a deep dive of her life and what she accomplished, and found she ended an entire army of men with her people and buried them all in a mass grave. The army had killed her husband and was after her and her son, her son was a baby and was too young to rule so Olga took charge.
Her story was so fierce and badass that I just had to illustrate her story.