Supergiant Comics.
No one is telling stories in any medium quite like Supergiant Games. Their worlds dip their toe in familiar storytelling convention, but are unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. Their characters are often funny, even whimsical, but their stories are melancholy and complex. The Supergiant video games combine engaging gameplay with virtuosic design- especially when it comes to music and sound- that would be difficult to recapture in any other medium. But the best thing about comics is how adaptable they can be. Comics embrace storytelling innovation, and the best comic creators are constantly pushing the narrative envelope.
So kick back like a paper boat floating on a stream, and I’ll pitch you some dream comics.
Bastion
Written by Marjorie Liu
Illustrated by Brian Hurtt
After the Calamity the world fell into an abyss and precariously floating islands was all that was left of the land of Caelondia. The floating land is already a striking visual, but Caelondia isn’t your typical fantasy kingdom. It’s got more in common with small towns in West Virginia than it does with the pastoral English countryside. Caelondia is filled with strange creatures (such as the balloon-like windbags), steampunk technology, and forgotten gods.
Caelondia is just one city in a world full of strange lands. The comic could explore the world before the Calamity, or after the game. It need not even involve familiar characters. What would be important would be keeping track of the sprawling lore which includes silly names of alcohol, and the ability to write the lyrics to folk music. Marjorie Liu has proven herself to be amazing at delivering fantasy exposition in an approachable way in “Monstress.” If she can make Professor Tam Tam, a bespectacled feline with a half a dozen tails into a serious character, she can handle the world of Bastion.
Bryan Hurtt is most famous as the artist of “The Sixth Gun” and for his work on “Queen & Country.” His familiarity with the big skies and dusty trails of the western genre make him a good fit for the coal mining town/bayou in the sky setting of Bastion. He also is good at staying grounded while cranking things up just past the point of realism. His surreal approach to fantasy makes me want to see his interpretation of a city floating in a void.
Transistor
Written by Leah Williams
Illustrated by Clayton Crain
Just as Bastion turns fantasy and westerns completely on their ear, Transistor does the same for the cyberpunk genre. It’s about a mute lounge singer named Red, who befriends a sword that contains the soul of a dead man she once knew. There’s a dangerous organization trying to destroy the world as she knows it, and Red must discover their intentions- and let’s be real, put a stop to their evildoing.
Traditional storytelling wouldn’t work for a Transistor comic. One of your two heroes doesn’t speak, and the other one doesn’t emote. It’s going to take a singular writer, one who isn’t weighed down with bad habits. Leah Williams has written the odd X-Men story here and there, but her approach is always imaginative. Her writing serves the kind of story she’s telling. In her “What If? Magik” one-shot, she delivered heaping piles of exposition and character work that always managed to sound natural. In her “X-Men Black: Emma Frost” one-shot, she wrote a psychic action scene on an elevator that was unlike anything you’ve ever seen. Williams has the thoughtful approach that could allow a silent woman to communicate, and a talking sword to speak with subtext.
I hope Clayton Crain is up for the job, because I freakin’ love him doing cyberpunk. His action is explosively kinetic, and the dude draws the best neon signs and shiny composite exoskeletons in the business. His art would be nothing like Transistor’s cartoon-y design, but he’d give a wonderful sense of place to the city of Cloudbank.
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Pyre
Written by Skottie Young
Illustrated by Tonci Zonjic
Of all the Supergiant Games, Pyre is the one that would be most worth exploring. It takes place in the Downside, a wondrous purgatory realm that is at times beautiful, but filled with existential melancholy. The only escape from the Downside is a ritualistic tournament. It’s a game that sort of resembles 3-on-3 basketball, but with magic powers. At the end of a year of competition, one team may send one competitor back to the land of the living.
There’s so much left to explore in Pyre, especially because the original game focused so much on the tournament. There’s a huge cast of characters, a deep mythology of the denizens of the Downside, and a mysterious revolution brewing in the world above. Because the game is so laser focused on the rituals, that gives a lot of room for other kinds of storytelling. The series would best be given to someone who could write silly humorous characters, but still preserve the melancholic tone. Everyone who knows Skottie Young’s work knows he does whimsy well, but his series “Middlewest” proves that he’s also a master of setting and tone. He’d be able to write a gentlemanly dog monster, or a quixotic worm knight as well as he could get into the meaning of struggle and the other heavy themes.
The Downside is sort of a fairy tale land, with vast oceans, mysterious forests, and foreboding mountains. Tonci Zonjic isn’t an artist who screams fairy tales, but his work on “Lobster Johnson” has the right pulpy edginess that would prevent the Downside from becoming to saccharine. Pyre is the most surreal of the Supergiant Games, and Zonjic contributed to “Zero,” one of the least real-looking books ever to be rooted in the real world. He walks that line nicely.
Hades
Written by Mark Russell
Illustrated by Caspar Wijngaard
The latest Supergiant Game isn’t technically out yet, but the first few chapters are in early access. Hades is the first Supergiant Game that doesn’t invent its own setting. Greek mythology is one of the most well-tread stories in the whole friggin’ western canon. The game Hades follows Zagreus, the son of the titular Underworld God. Zagreus is trying to escape the land of the dead and meet the rest of his family the Olympians, especially his father’s missing bride Persephone. The Greek gods written as a delightfully squabbling family is old hat, but Hades finds fresh new life in Aphrodite flirting with her nephew, Ares broing out, and Poseidon trying to be the cool uncle. It also gives time to less overdone figures from myth, including Hypno, Achilles, Nyx, and freakin’ Primordial Chaos.
While the game gets decent mileage out of twisting up its familiar cast, the comic would need a writer who could be even more subversive. We’re talking someone who can take familiar characters and make us see them in a whole new light. And folks, there is no one better in comics for that right now than Mark Russell. After getting attention for his genius take on the “Flintstones” as a true “modern stone-age family,” Russell took his approach to “Snagglepuss.” If this guy can use a classic Hanna-Barbera character to tell a story about the Stonwall Riots and McCarthyism, his take on Greek myths oughta be legendary.
Hades really embraces the heavy metal imagery. It’s got a rocking soundtrack, and levels that are filled with boiling oceans of blood, shrieking ghosts, and skulls, so many skulls. For the art we must turn to the incomperable Caspar Wijngaard. You may have recently seen his work on “Peter Canon Thunderbolt” but this dude cut his teeth on “Dark Souls” comics, one of the most metal video game adaptations ever. He also did the art on “What If? Ghost Rider” which was explicitly all about heavy metal. When a guy loves blood and skulls as much as Wijngaard, you give him a book filled with blood and skulls!
