Herulus: Three Souls.

Herulus doesn’t survive Round and Round for long.  He’s dead by the end of the first sentence.  But that does mean he’s hypothetically well-placed to be in the prequel.  There’s almost nothing about Herulus in mythology except a small passage from Virgil’s Aeneid in which we learn that Feronia, Herulus’s mother, imbued him with three souls and three sets of arms.  In my mind, two of the souls were transmigrated from hallowe’en crabs, which explains Herulus's fractionally monsterous form here.  Due to his eight-limbed appearance, the layout is influenced by Leonardo Da Vinci’s iconic representation of the Vitruvian Man.  There’s conspicuous ‘triple’ imagery - the front of the shield itself is obscured in the image, but its herald can be seen ‘screen-printed’ on the background.  It is influenced by the Delphic tripod and the bookcover of Round and Round.  Thus it is a snake eating the tail of a snake who is in turn is eating the first snake - a triloboros.  The trident reminds me of a debating speech I made in high school.  I don’t even remember what the debate itself was about, but I said that “the negative’s argument is like a three-legged stool - even if we’d just eliminated one of their points it would be useless, but we’ve knocked down all three, so now they’re just sitting on a wooden circle on the ground.”

A trident, however, is different - pull off one prong and it can still do the job just as well, pull off two and you still have a spear, pull off all three and you can still whack the hell out of someone with the handle.

(P.S. This is one image that looks much better full-sized, so if you click on it you should be able to see it in better detail.  I drew, inked and then painted it in acrylics on paper before scanning it in and breaking up the colours into Lichtenstein-esque Ben-Day dots in tribute to its comic book influences.)

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