You Might Be a Hornblower If…

I don’t usually make fan zines. Not because I’m above them—I love a good homage—but because it’s rare that a story from someone else’s world lines up so neatly with something I’ve been chewing on in mine.

But then Mat Cauthon picked up the Horn of Valere.

Let me back up.

It started with boredom. The kind of “maybe I’ll rewatch that show I didn’t even like” boredom, out of pure desperation for something to watch this summer. I wandered back into Amazon’s Wheel of Time series, which I’d bailed on partway through Season 1. Not because the production was bad exactly, but because the characters felt… wrong. Unrecognizable.

Nynaeve, for example, is one of the fiercest, most headstrong characters in the books. Stubborn as a mountain and proud of it. But in the show? She’s sullen, resentful, and a professional grudge-holder. And don’t get me started on her whole storyline with Lan. (Actually, let’s not get into that.)

As for Mat Cauthon—well, I didn’t love the first actor, and I wasn’t thrilled with the second at first either. It felt like they were circling around the character without really hitting the mark. Book Mat is chaotic and clever, a reluctant hero with a gambler’s grin and a heart he keeps trying to pretend isn’t there. I’m convinced a young Aidan Turner could’ve nailed it, if such a person exists somewhere out there in the Pattern.

Please let that person exist somewhere so that Amazon can find him.

But then came the moment.
Season 2. Mat raises the Horn. He blows it.
And then he turns.

“I’m one of you…”

And just like that, the pieces clicked. For the first time, I felt like the show understood him. That moment, the bravery, the finality, the sheer rightness of it, was the first time I felt vindicated in my long-standing belief that Mat was always a hero, even if no one (including himself) saw it yet.

That’s when the zine happened.

The idea came fast. But building the zine took more time, and not just because of the writing. This one looks different too.

Instead of my usual grayscale drawing style, I went back to a technique I use sometimes for urban sketching: layers of thinned India ink to create tone, letting each layer dry before adding a soft watercolor wash. The result is muted, weathered, and a little rough around the edges. Like something dug out of history. It felt right for the Wheel of Time world, where past and future are always cycling back on each other.

I knew I didn’t want to draw Mat himself. No portrait, no fan art, no scene recreation. I wanted to use only his motifs. The symbols that orbit him through the books: the dice, the ashandarei, the hat, the signet ring, the eye patch, and of course, the Horn.

None of them scream “hero” out of context. Without the story behind them, they’re just objects. A funny hat. A spear. A set of dice. That’s part of why I love them. They’re unassuming and easy to overlook.

So to bring the meaning into focus, I added text. A quiet voiceover of:
“How to know if you’re a hero.”

That was the key. It let me translate what those symbols mean, what they’ve come to mean to me, without explaining the entire backstory. And it gave me a way to talk about the kind of hero Mat is.

There are all kinds of heroes. The ones who stand tall from the beginning. The ones who rise through pain or duty. And then there are the ones like Mat. The ones who don’t believe in heroism. Who resist it. Who joke their way out of it. Who think they’re too selfish, too scared, too broken.

And yet, somewhere, buried under all that resistance, is the capacity to choose the right thing when it matters most.

That’s my favorite kind of hero—the kind I still secretly hope I might be.