Persephone | Review

Persephone
Writer/artist: Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky
BOOM! Studios; $17.99
Publisher’s rating: Ages 14+

French artist Loïc Locatelli-Kournwsky’s fantasy adventure Persephone, originally published through BOOM! Studios’ Archaia imprint in 2018, returns in a new paperback edition featuring a brand-new cover.

The graphic novel’s connections to the Greek myth of Persephone, Hades, and Demeter are few and vague enough that it is safe to say that it was inspired by, rather than an adaptation of, that myth—although I suppose one could also read Locatelli-Kournwsky’s graphic novel as some version of a “real” story of real women that that the myth was extrapolated from.

In other words, perhaps Locatelli-Kournwsky reverse-engineered his tale from the myth.

At any rate, this Persephone lives in Eleusis, a land that seems to roughly correspond to Europe maybe a century or so ago. It is currently at peace, but around the time of our young heroine’s birth, there was a terrible war between Eleusis and its underground neighbor state Hades, led by its obsessed and despotic king, also named Hades, who had mysteriously gained devastating magical powers.

The mages of Eleusis fought back and ultimately defeated him, in the process sealing the gate between the countries and severing all ties between them. All this is explained directly to the reader by an anthropomorphic cat wizard in a six-page prologue labeled “A Brief Introduction to the Realms of Eleusis and Hades,” a passage which may or may not actually be all that useful. It does a lot of world-building and stage-setting, but not all of information shared in this section necessarily pays off in the story that follows, a story that works all one needs to know about this history organically into its telling anyway.

Persephone has a green thumb and excels in botany, but, to her and seemingly everyone else’s disappointment, she is not a mage, like her powerful war hero mother Demeter.

One night, Persephone is somehow abducted from a school field trip by a loyal warrior of the now-dead Hades, taken to the underground realm, and forced to swallow a piece of “The Fruit of the Damned,” the only thing that grows in Hades; once eaten, the fruit curses whoever has ingested it so that they can never return to the world above.

Persephone thus seems damned to live the rest of her life in the underworld. While she waits for Demeter and her new, small circle of Hadean allies—the new king Lord Rhadamanthus, the cat mage Azrael, the castle’s keeper Minthe—to hopefully figure out a way to break her curse, she tries to help the poor people of Hades with her plant knowledge.

A reader will thus note some of the broad similarities to the mythic Persephone, and indeed the resolution will ultimately lead to her spending part of her life in each world, while also noting the differences, the most notable of which being that the personage of Hades has only a minor role and is relegated to the past that buttresses the story.

Locatelli-Kournwsky’s superior artwork is rendered with an extremely fine line, giving the worlds he conjures a delicate feel. They are fantastically imagined, expertly rendered and extremely detailed. As hand-drawn as both major locations look, they are beautifully realized.

The characters are all well designed and have a hint of sketchiness and abstraction to them, especially in the faces and when they appear in longshots or in the background.

It’s a really gorgeous-looking book, and one with a thrilling, compelling plot filled with fantasy history, political intrigue, character work, action, and magic. If you missed it in 2018, don’t repeat that mistake this year.

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