2022 Hugo Award Nominees for Best Graphic Story, Part One (Patreon)

By Doris V. Sutherland

Welcome to the first of a two-part series exclusively for WWAC patrons, covering the six contenders for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story. Reviewed in this post are Monstress Volume Six, Once & Future Volume Three and Lore Olympus Volume One.

Monstress Volume Six: The Vow

Monstress has long been a favourite at the Hugos, the first three volumes each winning the award while the fourth and fifth became runners-up. And now, we have a sixth Hugo-nominated trip to the fantasy world created by writer Marjorie Liu and artist Sama Takeda – a world of magic and technology, as seen through the eyes of the troubled anti-hero Maika Halfwolf. Many of the characters in this land are part human, part animal; they are capable of human kindness and empathy – and also all-too-human brutality in the name of military victory.

This volume contains five issues of the main series preceded by the two-issue spin-off Monstress: Talk-Stories. The first of these is narrated by the fox-girl Kippa, and revolves around the relationship between her, her sister Perri and their mother. Momma showers Kippa with affection but neglects Perri, and so Kippa, to cheer up her sister, helps her to make a meal that will win the love of Momma. The brief moment of innocent childhood fun is quickly brought down by the reality of the adult world – by cooking meat, the two girls risk calling attention to their family’s secret food supply – but Momma forgives Perri in the end.

True to Monstress’ disdain for easy solutions, Perri never wins Momma’s love. In an emotionally-complex conclusion to such a short tale, Perri is forced to accept that while she has the love of her sister and father, she will never have the love of her mother, only forgiveness that she must learn to return in kind (The unsettling question of exactly what happened to Perri between this past-tense narrative and the present of Monstress, where Kippa is alone, is left to linger).

The second Talk-Stories issue is set during Maika’s childhood, and follows her on an adventure on the high seas where she is taken in by a pirate-queen. The story captures a feeling of carefree, childlike joy that again forms a bleak contrast with the world as depicted in the series’ present, showing a period when Maika was not so far removed from her current foil Kippa.

These two short stories are a fitting lead-in to the main narrative that takes up the rest of the volume, which likewise deals with family ties that are not always healthy. Considering that the surrogate mother-daughter relationship between Maika and Kippa – treated with the ambiguity of a will-they-won’t-they romance – is one of the more functional bonds seen in the comic, it becomes clear that Monstress is a saga where families are as scorched and twisted as their battle-scarred landscape.

The story’s antagonist, the Warlord, is none other than Maika’s maternal aunt. Her own wife, Baroness Tuya, frames the Warlord’s antipathy towards Maika as the result of a lingering sibling rivalry: “Your sister is dead. Taking out your anger on her daughter is unproductive, no matter how annoying she is.” The relationship between the Warlord and Tuya is itself fraught, with the Warlord accusing her wife of treachery one minute and having sex with her the next – sex that Maika walks in on. When both Maika and Tuya end up in the Warlord’s dungeon, this is nothing if not an appropriate family reunion.

The reunion expands when Maika’s lupine grandmother turns up, reigniting an old feud with Zinn, the demonic entity that has haunted Maika throughout the story. When the grandmother joins the battle, Monstress Volume Six becomes more of an artist’s than a writer’s comic, with Sama Takeda’s lush illustrations taking centre stage. Monstress has always been a sumptuous costume drama, the characters defined by their elaborate outfits at least as much as their facial and bodily expressions, but the climax to this volume demonstrates what happens when that drama is given an additional boost of energy: passion and melodrama ooze from every panel.

The volume concludes with the family saga folded back into the story’s wider military conflict, with a twist ending that promises more strife to come. Even if Monstress Volume Six does not become the series’ fourth Hugo-winner – and admittedly, it would be hard to say that it is more deserving of this award than the previous two volumes – it remains a worthy addition to one of twenty-first century comics’ greatest fantasy epics.

Once & Future Volume Three: The Parliament of Magpies

One of last year’s Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story finalists was the debut volume of Once & Future, put together by the team of writer Kieron Gillen, artist Dan Mora and colourist Tamra Bonvillain. That book introduced us to academic Duncan and his hard-as-nails elder matriarch Gran as they witnessed the return of King Arthur – not as the gallant monarch of legend, but as a hideous, homicidal zombie. Fortunately, Gran happened to have past experience with such folkloric fluctuations and was able to give Duncan a crash-course in the Ash Williams school of monster-slicing heroics.

The book was a pitch-perfect action-horror runaround, with a slick script, bold artwork, a sense of humour, and a thoughtful subtext about the nature of legend. But was there space for the story to be continued?

The first volume ended with a hook for things to come by introducing Merlin. The second volume, meanwhile, turned out to be something of a sideways jaunt: Merlin acted as a background player while characters from Beowulf pushed themselves to the fore, establishing that the Arthur legends were not the only stories that Duncan might be meeting (this despite Gran’s assurance that “Beowulf’s just a poem”). The undead Beowulf and his foes were all killed off by the end of volume two, and Once & Future showed every sign of settling into a monster-of-the-month groove.

And now comes volume three, which marks the series’ second spot on the Hugo ballot. And, after the diversion into Beowulf, author Kieron Gillen returns to Arthurian legend for inspiration: this time around the heroes run into the Green Knight (still playing his game by its peculiar rules) and Lancelot (once again at one tip of a love polygon). Of course, trotting out the greatest hits from the Matter of Britain is not itself a great feat – even if the characters are inserted into a zombie story – and so Once & Future is again elevated by its cerebral treatment of lore and legend. Any comic that opens by incorporating two distinct versions of the “one for sorrow, two for joy” magpie rhyme into a horror scene straight out of The Birds clearly has one eye on an encyclopedia of folklore.

A major part of Once & Future’s worldbuilding is that, while legendary figures can put in personal appearances, their roles can also be embodied by the modern characters. Over the course of the story, Duncan has been both Percival and Beowulf, while antagonist Mary – Duncan’s mother – was once Elaine but is now Nimue. The arrival of the Green Knight on the scene means that the story now needs a Gawain, and Duncan is willing to volunteer – but is told that having too many stories attached to one person is asking for trouble. And so it is Rose, Duncan’s fortune-teller girlfriend, who steps up in his place. “The closer you are, the better it is, and Gawain isn’t usually a girl”, says an uncertain Gran. “How many brothers do you have? Gawain had three, mostly.”

In this volume, the story delves deeper into its central characters’ family secrets. Rose goes up against Mary, who reveals that Gran – typically depicted through the comic as a cantankerous but likeable character – has a dark side. “She’s nothing but a monster covered with self-justifyng scales of ‘duty’ and nothing inside but hate”, says Mary of her own mother. “She’d have killed Duncan rather than let me have him.” Elaine, Mary’s Arthurian counterpart, slept with Lancelot by pretending to be Guinevere; the twisted family saga of Mary (and, by extension, Duncan and Gran) is designed not so much as a parallel to this as an addition, one that the comic slots onto the legendary narrative.

If the Beowulf elements in volume two took us a little deeper into the comic’s supernatural world, volume three is interested more in elaborating upon the mundane world – or, at least, what passes for mundane in Once & Future. As well as the expanding story of Duncan's family, with hints of branches yet to be explored, this volume folds the British government into its plot. It turns out that interest in the Otherworld runs all the way up to the Prime Minister – who is faceless, nameless and clearly Boris Johnson. Satire aside, the addition of the government and its agents to the narrative is a natural extension, drawing as it does upon a strain of popular culture – James Bond, Doctor Who’s UNiT – that is almost as part of British legend as King Arthur.

As delightful as it may be to disentangle the elaborate intertextuality of Once & Future, we should not lose track of a significant detail: the comic is a lot of fun. Kieron Gillen’s script is a fast-paced romp, full of character-driven intrigue and seasoned for flavour with the occasional splash-panel monster battle. Artist Dan Mora is on fine form: although he gets less in the way of otherworldly settings to explore this time around, his knack for cartoonishly expressive characters, striking compositions and bouts of grisly gore is on full show. Tamra Bonvillain’s colour artwork likewise remains a treat, the palette shifting from earth tones for the mundane world to trippy neons for the realm of spirits.

And finally, the volume arrives at a cliffhanger that really does raise the stakes. Once & Future is a comic that not only came up with a strong concept from the start, it knew exactly how to expand upon its premise – something evident throughout this third edition.

Lore Olympus Volume One

Hades, God of the Underworld, receives a phonecall from his partner Minthe cancelling a date. He is forced to suffer the humiliation of attending a party alone while his brothers Zeus and Poseidon have their wives for company, but his chagrin turns to passion when he notices a beautiful – and single – newcomer named Persephone. And so begins Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus, one of the biggest hits of online-comic platform Webtoon, the first chunk of which is collected in this hefty trade paperback.

Lore Olympus is set in an urbanised version of Greek myth with automobiles, nightclubs and mobile phones. These gods show little interest in manipulating the affairs of heroes as per Homer, nor in carrying out transformative magic as per Ovid. If anything separates them from the (largely unseen) world of mortals it is that they enjoy the privilege of lacking any sort of working lives, instead devoting their – eternally youthful, we presume – existences to affairs of the heart.

Visually, the comic belongs to a tradition pioneered in the mid-twentieth century by the likes of Mary Blair and continued by such stylistic heirs as Lauren Faust, often borrowing a touch of influence from anime. This is an aesthetic long found in the concept art of Hollywood animated films but obscured during production, and left to fully breathe only in “Art Of…” books. Its chracteristics are two-dimensional but graceful figures, striking compositions of form, and outwardly simple by sharply expressive facial features.

A casual observer might assume that Lore Olympus is parodying its source material, and there are indeed touches of burlesque to be seen: Hades owns not just a three-headed dog named Cerberus, but also (mostly) smaller and fluffier pooches named Cordon Bleu, Mushroom, Russell, J.P., Fudge, and Big John. However, the comic is not Disney’s Hercules and does not reduce the Greek pantheon to knockabout caricatures, instead granting its wide-eyed, pastel-hued cast a complex set of relationships.

Like the myths that inspired it, the comic goes to some dark places – so much so that it opens with a content warning: “Lore Olympus regularly deals with themes of physical and mental abuse, sexual trauma, and toxic relationships. Some of the interactions in this volume may be distressing for some readers. Please exercise discretion, and seek out the support of others if you require it.”

The combination of cute aesthetics and the unsentimental probing of society’s uglier aspects has long been common in webcomics (and before them, in the underground comix scene). It is also something that finds a strong analogy in the myth of Persephone’s descent into the realm of Hades, particularly when given a contemporary veneer. “Look at this girl!” says Eros of Persephone. “She’s like the personification of a friggin’ cinnamon roll. An adorable, pink cinnamon roll.”

As it happens, she is too much of a cinnamon roll to last long without an attempt to devour her. We see just this when jealous Aphrodite lays out a scheme to turn Hades and Persephone against one another: “We’re gonna hide her in his car. Once he gets home, he’ll find her. She’ll be super drunk and do a buttload of embarrasing stuff. He will think she’s totally gross. And then! Since he took her home super drunk, she’ll think he’s a creepy old man.” Behind the modern slang lies a chilling pettiness that is entirely true to the Greek myths.

While the Hades and Persephone narrative is central to the comic, Lore Olympus also draws upon other myths for inspiration. It sometimes does so to produce a throwaway joke, as when Zeus invites Odysseus to the party purely to annoy Poseidon. In other respects it is more substantial and inventive: the tale of Eros and Psyche turns out to factor into the backstory – Eros’ mother Aphrodite being angered by his son’s behaviour, and using it to extort favours from him. Although showing the soft-focus storytelling that comes with any long-form serialised narrative, Lore Olympus avoids padding itself with unnecessary asides and instead allows its plot to grow naturally from the mythic characters at its core.

Like the rest of Webtoon’s publications, Lore Olympus belongs to an up-to-date wave of mobile-friendly comics which abandon the formats of their print counterparts, instead running the panels in vertical strips. In this case the strip was consequently reformatted for the trade paperback, the panels carefully arranged into more conventional comic-book grids. There are a few telltale signs pointing to the comic’s Webtoon origins, particularly the large amount of white space between panels, but on the whole the revised layouts are imaginitively-conceived and add a new level to the comic’s storytelling.

For those who have followed the online version of Lore Olympus, this trade paperback offers an opportunity to revisit the story in a somewhat different light. For those who are new to the saga, meanwhile, the thick, chunky volume will serve as a deep pool of storytelling, just begging for a leap in from the high-dive.