Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Center for the Humanities

Bobcat Comics bannerUC Merced

Bobcat Comics

This comic series features collaborations with artists funded by the Center for the Humanities or through grants received by UC Merced faculty and graduate students.


Mayahuel’s Mysterious Maguey: The Divine Mesoamerican Mother’s Sacred Story of Transformation

(2023)

Mayahuel’s Mysterious Maguey: The Divine Mesoamerican Mother’s Sacred Story of Transformation explores the narrative of Mayahuel as told in the Histoyre du Mechique, the extant French translation (via a lost Spanish translation) of the lost or destroyed original Nahua sacred narrative. This visual text adapts glyphs and iconography from the Indigenous-authored Codex Yohualli Ehecatl (Borgia), Codex Mictlan (Laud), Codex Tonalpohualli (Vaticanus B), and Codex Mendoza (as well as including Jordan Collver’s original artwork) to bring the story of Mayahuel’s transformation into maguey to contemporary readers. Embedded within this visual narrative are Indigenous, specifically Nahua, Aztec, and Mexica, ideologies related to motherhood, death, interconnectedness, nature, and teotl, a Nahuatl term not easily defined. Inspired by Felicia Rhapsody Lopez’s article, "Case Study for the Development of a Visual Grammar: Mayahuel and Maguey as Teotl in the Directional Tree Pages of the Codex Borgia," published in rEvista: A Multi-media, Multi-genre e-Journal for Social Justice, vol. 5, no. 2, 2017

Cover page of Unruly Women and Failed Patriarchs: Paradoxical Patriarchy in Early Modern England

Unruly Women and Failed Patriarchs: Paradoxical Patriarchy in Early Modern England

(2023)

 A comic based on Susan Amussen's article, "The Contradictions of Patriarchy in Early Modern England," published in Gender and History, vol. 30, no. 2, 2018, pp. 343-353.