Caves, Comics and Culture
holy-grail.jpg
Caves. Holders of our fears, monsters of our nights. Odysseus’ cave held Cyclops. The Mines of Moriah held the Cave Troll.But caves also hold our dreams, the treasure of our day’s quest. Aladdin found his Genie. Indiana Jones his Holy Grail. Humans have always tried to make sense of our hopes, dreams and fears through storytelling. We tell each other myths, parables and poems to interpret our lives. We use stories to reveal the order and meaning that we see in only hints and shadows from the corner of our eye. The earliest evidence of our collective myth-making is found on the cave walls of Lascaux and El Castillo. We pursued our quest for meaning through pigment and paint long before we could communicate through words and writing. Whether oral or written, questions that could not, and cannot, be answered by reason alone have been explored through story.
As Joseph Campbell said, “The very cave you are afraid to enter turns out to be the source of what you are looking for … In loving the spiritual, you cannot despise the earthly.”
Several years ago, after getting to know a number of writers and illustrators in the comic and graphic novel world, I started a journey with several friends, now business partners, to create a platform to tell “modern myths.” One of them is John Nee, the founder of Cryptozoic, a game design company deep in the comic subculture. Although John is now the publisher of Marvel Comics, he and his colleagues at Cryptozoic have been, and continue to be, invaluable guides.Cave Pictures Publishing is a new comic book and graphic novel publishing venture - a wall for modern myth-telling. We produce content that is excellently crafted, deeply questioning and spiritually meaningful. J.R.R. Tolkien said, “Legends and myths are largely made of 'truth', and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode … long ago certain truths and modes of this kind were discovered and must always reappear.” Cave believes that well-told stories are necessary guides for the journey of life, that stories must be reimagined and retold.Our projects include wholly original works by acclaimed artists in the comic industry, as well as original adaptations of existing public domain and copyrighted works. We tell stories through different genres like fantasy, supernatural fiction, historical fiction and science fiction. Our titles explore questions like: “Is this the only reality there is?”, “Is virtue shaped by choices made unseen?” and “What does it take for us to care more for others than ourselves?”
The No. Ones, a team of superheroes, blinded by their fame and self-promotion, are forced to reckon with their destructive choices when a twist of fate erases them from both past history and present memory.
Appalachian Apocalypse tells the tale of country boy J.B. and his estranged upper-crust wife Anne - when the ancient staff of Lilith, mother of the damned, reanimates the dead, J.B. and Anne must come together to stop the zombie hordes and save the people of Appalachia.
The Light Princess spins the story of a princess cursed with weightlessness, who finds rescue and redemption in the love and sacrifice of a prince.
Cave’s sci-fi series Man and the Machine is set in a city deep within the earth, where a courageous few struggle to reach the surface…fighting not only against the minds and flesh of men, but against their man-made minders.
Wylde, a mysterious masked lawman partners with a suspicious sheriff to save the sheriff’s frontier town from an invasion of the undead.
Our name is inspired by Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. In Plato’s allegory, a man who initially only sees reality cast in ill-defined shadows on a cave wall is freed from his chains. Following his liberation, he moves upward and onward toward the source of all goodness and truth. We believe this journey is universal and fundamentally spiritual - a perfect illustration that the one who seeks, finds.Cave Pictures is committed to creating stories that help us make sense of our world, reveal what we worship, and draw us toward the source of goodness.
As David Foster Wallace wrote, "Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."