Graphic Novel Review: Persephone by Loïc Locatelli Kournwsky

Quote: Oh great. Would little miss Botany care to fill is in, on what 'amazing plant' we are helping her hunt today?
The answer to that my pet! Pop a seed and next thing you know, you're laughing so hard that you can't stop.

Throw me the words 'Persephone and Hades', I will gobble up any piece of writing. So while looking for Persephone and Hades' art I found this graphic novel on Google books and I fell in love with it.

This book is a very loose retelling of the Persephone myth, it is devoid of the romance element but definitely based on the snatching of Persephone to the underworld. Set in fantasy land, divided between the prosperous upperland Eleusis and the barren sun-bereft underworld Hades.

A brief history of both the lands at the beginning sets the story in motion. Demeter is the strongest magician of Eleusis, who help end the war with Hades.

The art is so dense, mangaesque, beautifully coloured and the lettering is bewitching! Each panel and pages so nicely put. The art is busy and always keeps the story in motion. It had the softness in colour balance that we find in Makoto Shinaki cinema and the wild child like the energy in the Miyazaki Stories.

The story is fast and well developed, it is also predictable at the end. But it's a story about a mother and a daughter. A mother who would go to any lengths to save the child she found in the middle of the war. Persephone is like ordinary, she suffers because she believes she is not destined for greatness like her mother. Yet she tries to do the right thing in her best way by studying the plants and magic in Hades.

The consequences of great ambition are always paid by the population. The population of Hades who can't grow any crops, and they have been cut from rest of the world after losing the war and deprived of trade rights, though they have no reason to like Persephone an upperworlder, they do their best when Persephone tries to create potions and studies the damn fruit that turns people blue who consume it.

The book beautifully explains why the most depraved of the social rebel and join the war, as fox warrior puts it: the poor have nothing to lose when they fight 'the Haves'

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