[ID: A digital illustration for Moby Dick, based on the Twelfth Night Anne Hathaway photoshoot. Captain Ahab stands in the center, looking horrified as Starbuck, Fedallah, and Pip all grasp at him from different angles. All characters are tangled in a bright red harpoon line, except for Ahab, who is unharmed. Starbuck’s right hand holds the end of the harpoon line, with a heavy, sharp dart on the end, and the cord wraps around his hand and then throat as he leans in to kiss Ahab with a hand under his chin. Ahab’s eyes and mouth are open, as if he has been caught off guard, and he stares at Starbuck with a devastated concern. A bright red crown sits atop Ahab’s head and bleeds onto his face and collar. A drop of blood rests on Starbuck’s chin. The harpoon line passes in front of Ahab’s chest, and is grabbed by Fedallah, who holds the cord close to his chest, and buries his face in Ahab’s shoulder with an anguished expression. The line is tangled around Fedallah the most; wrapping twice around his neck and tangled all over his chest. With his free hand, Fedallah grasps onto Ahab’s waist. The line finally wraps around Pip, who is clinging to Ahab’s sleeve, and pulling at the line in front of Ahab’s chest. Pip’s mouth is open as if he is calling out, and the harpoon line circles around his shoulders, and finally hangs from his arm. Behind all of the characters looms the massive shape of the whale, Moby-Dick. Moby-Dick’s skin is wrinkled and scarred, and one massive eye stares down at the scene before him.
The next three images are all closeups of the drawing.
Character designs: Ahab is a large Arab man with short, curly, dark, greying hair, a pointed beard, and scars across the bridge of his nose, and over his lip. He wears a long, maroon coat with gold buttons. Starbuck is a thin white man with short red hair, a short mustache, and many freckles. He wears a dark waistcoat over a white shirt. Fedallah is a thin Persian man with a mustache and short beard. He wears a white turban and a dark long shirt. Pip is a teenaged Black boy with short curly hair, and he wears a light colored shirt. End ID.]
the ID for this is long enough already, so I’ll keep this brief, but hi I have spent weeks on this piece and it genuinely feels like a magnum opus or something. this is possibly my favorite thing I’ve drawn all year. designs as always from the delightful @pocketsizedquasar ‘s Moby Dick comic!
anyways I am constantly anguishing about the fact that Ahab thinks of himself as the lone sacrifice in his doomed journey, the one “enough to die”, but in reality, everyone who loves him, who tries to save him, faces his punishment first. Ahab ISN’T alone, despite what he thinks, and that connection directly gets the three closest people in his life killed. how am i ever supposed to recover from that.
reminder to everyone that the normal for ages cabin boys was usually somewhere between 13 and 16, so while it is possible for young boy pip it is equally as likely and canon for angst filled, pimply teenager pip as well
captain ahab is one of the characters of all time.
he’s full of hubris. he’s an amputee. he said he’d punch the sun. he once was in a coma for three days straight. he was prophecized to lose his leg and in response decided to make his own prophecy that he would kill the thing that did it. he would fight god. he’s in love with his first mate who he also threatened at gunpoint. he used the same gun as a cane. he tells his second mate to go fuck himself. he was sent back out to sea immediately after losing his leg without the chance to heal. he chooses to go on whalehunts instead of staying on the ship despite having no reason to as the captain, something that is doubly dangerous for him on account of the whole leg thing. he once was in a deadly swordfight with a spaniard. his method of encouraging his oarsmen is to swear at them profusely, which was censored by ishmael for the good christian audience. he spent one (1) night with his wife after marrying her and then immediately fucked back off to sea. he’s an orphan, and this is the least tragic thing about him. he’s named after an evil biblical king. his best friend is a persian stowaway who tells him how he’s going to die. he hears he’s going to die by rope and immediately assumes it’ll be the gallows, ignoring the fact that he’s on a ship full of ropes, and also being surprisingly chill with the concept of himself being sentenced to capital punishment. like yeah, that sounds like something i’d do. having gay sex with his first mate WOULD fix him AND the entire plot of the story. he adopts the cabin boy for funsies. allowing himself human connection with the cabin boy WOULD fix him and the story, and he acknowledges this out loud while actively avoiding it. he worships fire. he was even gay.
“Drink and pass!” [Ahab] cried, handing the heavily charged flagon to the nearest seaman. “The crew alone now drink. Round with it, round! ....Drink, ye harpooners! drink and swear, ye men that man the deathful whaleboat’s bow -- Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” (MD, Ch 36)
“I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab’s quenchless feud seemed mine.” (MD, Ch 41)
The Terror (2018)// Moby Dick, Chap 93: The Cast Away (1850)
The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths, where strange shapes of the unwarped primal world glided to and fro before his passive eyes; and the miser-merman, Wisdom, revealed his hoarded heaps; and among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man's insanity is heaven's sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God.
what the tags to my posts have taught me is that the wurthering heights stans are eating devouring enjoying while im locked in Moby Dick Jail with the ahab starbuck emotionally draining yuri that lives only in my mind-
hello everyone, I made a series of doodles to put inside of my copy of MobyDick and I would like to share them :3 pls enjoy:
[ID: Two traditional drawings. Ahab shows off his new pegleg with a flourish. Ishmael infodumps about whales to a fond Queequeg. End ID.] [More detailed ID in ALT.]
New Leg Goofin is for chapters 108-9, when Ahab gets fitted with his new leg! it's right before a super devastating chapter so i needed to make myself laugh lmao
Wikipedia Page About Every Whale is for the whole goddamn book, honestly, but I chose to put it at the beginning of ch.32, Cetology, where Ishmael really does try to explain every whale ever
[ID: A comic of Stubb and Flask bursting into Ahab's quarters, thinking the Captain is in danger, only to find Ahab and Fedallah playing a game of cards. End ID.] [More detailed ID in ALT.]
This gem belongs to p.344 where Stubb wonders if Fedallah means to kidnap Ahab, which was such a baffling ridiculous concept that I couldn't help but make fun of it. literally Ahab snuck this man on board bro, what the fuck is fedallah going to do to him. they're playing uno. shut up
[ID: Two drawings, with the first showing Pip after being cast away, haunted and alone on the deck of the Pequod. The other shows Ishmael and Queequeg homoerotically grasping hands while processing whale sperm. End ID.] [More detailed ID in ALT.]
this goes out to chapters 93-95, because the UNREAL whiplash from "a child was just abandoned at sea" to "hey let's be horny about whale sperm" is still the most insane transition of all time. Ish, what the fuck
[ID: A simply doodled meme diagram for how to greet a fellow amputee. The "wrong" answer shows Captains Ahab and Boomer shaking hands, while the "right" answers show Ahab in a handstand and then kicking his leg up high, both times to cross his prosthetic with Boomer's. End ID.] [More detailed ID in ALT.]
this goes out to p. 454. every interaction between these two absolutely delighted me but my mental image for the specific line about them "crossing ivory limbs" got. very silly.
[ID: A small comic of Ahab asking the Harpooners to give him blood to temper his harpoon in. They stare back at him with varying expressions of confused, uncomfortable disbelief. End ID.]
the last one, for p.504. yknow that feel when your boss just walks up and asks you to bleed on his custom made harpoon??? yeah uh. normal workday things
anyways thank you for reading, I had a delightful time making these and am so very fond of them all, so yea :3
credit as always for the designs goes to the darling @pocketsizedquasar , as well as credit for pricelessly annotating my copy of MD and thus getting me to actually read it, love youuuu💙💙
It’s my birthday!!! And also here’s a very long overdue update to the pequod squad lineup that i’ve been meaning to do for ages. happy birthday to me! read my Moby Dick webcomic if you feel so inclined :] link in bio
ok but. the last word of moby dick is “orphan”, and it’s what ishmael calls himself after the shipwreck. he is literally an orphan, he told us earlier he was raised by his stepmother, but he’s all the more an orphan now, alone in the vastness of the sea having lost crew and ship. and it’s the same situation pip was in, the thing that drove him mad, to feel he was an orphan abandoned by everyone and everything in an empty, probably meaningless world... and it brought him closer to ahab, who is another literal orphan! his mother was widowed before he was born and died when he was a few months old! and then there’s starbuck who lost his father to the sea and now both him and ahab have sons they will never see again... the whaling industry makes orphans, the sea makes orphans, the indifferent universe makes orphans, orphans make orphans over and over and