Swan Eaters
By Georgia Dunn | 1.1K FollowersAbout Swan Eaters
“Swan Eaters” was created after a fever dream during a bout of the flu. It was a funny, scary nightmare about a little old hag trying to look after a group of children. The kids kept stealing her spell book and summoning bigger and more ridiculous monsters through a portal they'd scratched out on the floor in crayon. Soon the exasperated old crone was catching crawling babies and running children, battling back an ever-increasing gruesome menagerie. A week or two before, a friend told creator Georgia Dunn a story about a town that prized their swans in the park. One year a family came to town and ate them, causing an uproar. The story stuck in Dunn’s head and, by the time she recovered from the flu, the first 10–15 strips of “Swan Eaters” were finished.
The best way to describe “Swan Eaters” is "supernatural adventure soap opera." The true heroes of the comic are an old woman, two little girls, a giant monster, and a lonely teen boy who finds friendship with rats. Some of the characters are unlikable and say awful things. Moments in the comic are downright frightening. Still, readers root for Grandma Hawker, who tries to do the best by her clan and steer them in the right direction. They watch Salem and Clover Hawker practice spells and praise their successes. Everyone hopes Ivan will learn kindness one day (no luck). And most of all, readers want to see Vesper and Wigglesworth finally confess their feelings to each other.
Meet Georgia Dunn
Georgia Dunn wrote “Swan Eaters” between 2011–2013. When her son was born, she put Swan Eaters on what she hoped would be a brief hiatus. The comic paused at one hell of a cliffhanger and readers were impatient to find out the fates of their heroes. Then inspiration struck for “Breaking Cat News” (“BCN”), and within a year, “BCN” was syndicated online, had a newspaper development deal, and debuted on GoComics. “Swan Eaters” got placed on the back burner. Readers mostly understood.
“’Swan Eaters’ taught me a lot about cartooning, story arcs, pacing out a joke—and there are some growing pains here and there. For one thing, sometimes the art is inconsistent,” Dunn said. “I was still playing around with the art style, even up until the hiatus. I had a lot of room to test out new material, and sometimes this was a good thing, a few times it was not."
In the beginning of the comic, the Hawkers were sometimes referred to as gypsies, and later they were called witches. Dunn went back and changed that to make the writing and the plots more consistent and because Dunn learned that the word “gypsy” has a hurtful history. Dunn named “Swan Eaters” for an unfair name some villagers call the Hawkers, without realizing she was throwing around a harmful term herself. “From the cradle to the grave, we make a lot of mistakes, and I believe that amending those mistakes the best we can is part of why we're here. This is one of my amendments,” Dunn said.