{"id":72158,"date":"2022-12-05T22:35:14","date_gmt":"2022-12-05T22:35:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/explorersweb.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=72158"},"modified":"2022-12-05T22:35:14","modified_gmt":"2022-12-05T22:35:14","slug":"worst-journey-world-graphic-novel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/explorersweb.com\/worst-journey-world-graphic-novel\/","title":{"rendered":"‘The Worst Journey in the World’ Becomes Graphic Novel"},"content":{"rendered":"

Exactly 100 years after its original publication, the greatest adventure story<\/a> ever told gets a 21st-century upgrade.<\/p>\n

The tragic tale of Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s expedition to the South Pole has been immortalized in many ways, but few have remained as powerful as the 1922 memoir from\u00a0Aspley Cherry-Garrard.<\/p>\n

Cherry-Garrard did not accompany Scott to the South Pole. Rather, his mission was to capture emperor penguin eggs. It nearly killed him and his two companions. But Cherry-Garrard lived to tell the tale, and what a tale it was.<\/p>\n

His book, “The Worst Journey in the World”,<\/a> has aged into one of the classics of the adventure genre \u2014 and is now available as a beautifully illustrated graphic novel.<\/p>\n

Sarah Airriess, a veteran animator at Disney, spent more than 10 years researching Cherry-Garrard’s expedition to illustrate a faithful version of the story.<\/p>\n

“The personalities of the men, and the science they undertook, are equally as important to understanding the story as the famous feats of exploration,” the graphic novel’s website<\/a> said.<\/p>\n

Judging by the gorgeous sample pages available online, Airriess has devoted significant time and passion to this project.<\/p>\n

\"worst

Another image from Sarah Airriess’ graphic novel. Image: Sarah Airriess<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

‘No words could express its horror’<\/h2>\n

Cherry-Garrard set off on his bizarre and terrible expedition<\/a> in June 1911. He joined two other members of Scott’s larger group: Henry \u201cBirdie\u201d Bowers and Bill Wilson.<\/p>\n

Their mission sounded simple: to collect emperor penguin eggs. Unfortunately for them, the birds only laid eggs in the middle of the world’s most profound winter. As a result, this side trip from Scott’s South Pole ambitions nearly killed all three of them.<\/p>\n

The men faced a month of blizzards and temperatures that reached -60\u02daC \u2014 all during the pitch-black of Antarctic winter. It was so consistently frigid that they joked that they considered -50\u02da a heat wave. They navigated by the stars, frequently fell into crevasses, and hauled heavy sleds through the sandpaper snow at those temperatures.<\/p>\n

\"worst

From the prologue of Sarah Airriess’ graphic novel. Image: Sarah Airriess<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Somehow, the small team managed to complete their trek from Scott\u2019s base camp on Ross Island to the penguin colony at Cape Crozier. When they returned with three eggs to Scott’s base camp, Cherry-Garrard couldn’t continue with Scott. Wilson and Bowers did and perished, leaving Cherry-Garrard the sole survivor of the ordeal.<\/p>\n

As for the eggs, the Natural History Museum in London soon decided the eggs didn’t provide much scientific value after all. Cherry-Garrard’s memoir expresses profound anguish over the journey and its terrible result.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had been out for four weeks in conditions in which no man had existed previously for more than a few days, if that,” he wrote. “During this time we had seldom slept except from sheer physical exhaustion as men sleep on the rack; and every minute of it we had been fighting for the bed-rock necessaries of bare existence and always in the dark. This journey has beggared our language: no words could express its horror.\u201d<\/p>\n