The Webcomics Weekly is back in your life. Your Webcomics Wrangler of the week, Michael returns from Anime Expo 2023 where he has seen things you wouldn’t believe, like a McDonald – Webtoon tie up. While standing in line at Line Con he also saw more than a few Lore Olympus cosplayers a sign of the continual popularity of this Eisner-nominated series.
Lore Olympus
Episodes 220-249
Updates Sundays
Written and Illustrated by Rachel Smythe
Assistance by Jaki Haboon, Lissette Carrera, Jaki King & Amy Kim
Reviewed by Michael Mazzacane
What new is there to say about “Lore Olympus”? That’s not such a drag on the property or Rachel Smythe’s continual work but an acknowledgment of how established it has become. This column has had extensive coverage of it, primarily by Mel. The reprints are on to the fifth volume, collecting just about a third of the series. We’ve even had years-long official and unofficial adaptation deals. It might not be the apotheosis of the comic book cycle, but it’s solid second act stuff.
Looking back on earlier episodes and the latter portion of the third season, the way Rachel Smythe and the assistants have refined the series’ formal structure stands out the most. In comparing the two it becomes easier to see why and how this series became such a compulsively readable melodrama. The core of the series now functions more on a shot reverse shot pattern, with lettering in the gutter space more often than not. That lettering choice is actually a fairly good solution to one of my most hated tropes in webtoons: pointlessly extended gutter space. With that lettering choice the creative team are able to play with the rhythm of that shot reverse shot pattern. While it’s more often thought of for snappy dialogue, they’re also able to use that gutter space and the lettering to extend things out and make the strip wait a beat.
Smythe’s scripting also stands out in this phase. Relocating dialogue consistently to the gutter space above the panel can disconnect it from the panel and image. This disrupts the idea of comics as words and pictures and pushes it more towards a sort of picture book format where words and pictures exist nominally in the same frame but are clearly disconnected. That disconnect allows Smythe’s scripting to create some solid tension and double meaning. In 243, as Hades is going to pieces over Persephone’s absence, the disconnect becomes the avenue to realize how much Hades is not handling this well. Or later on, as Persphone is revealing baby Dionysus the lettering is used to extend the pause and create tension out of the fear of the unknown, what is she going to reveal.
This sort of structure is later inverted in the season finale strip, episode 249, wherein Hera’s flashbacks to the Titanomachy and Kronos slowly give way to this blurring of boundaries and extension of panels. It creates a feeling of timelessness and memory, her narration is at times still served in the gutter space but more often than not, plays a crucial function of being embedded in these blurring extended panels. Even as Hera’s depression and dreaming is interrupted by Hestia, the blurring as a vague temporal transition motif continues.
While both of these episodes play with the rhythm of the strip for differing emotional ends, the image structure of the series has remained largely the same. It’s all about that back and forth, a shot and a reverse shot, an action, and a reaction. That structuring element works well for the cartooned and interpersonal melodrama that is this series, it’s about showing readers each party’s reaction to the previous moment. That need for reaction goes a long way in humanizing these archetypical characters by now, Smythe isn’t really changing their core beings so much as expressing that being with a millennial sensibility.
Looking over the other Eisner nominated strips this year, “Lore Olympus” isn’t the most avant garde or novel. It is a firmly established and now multi-time, contender. Being part of the establishment isn’t inherently bad of the noms it’s easily the most well-known and valuable property on the list – which isn’t a reason to give it an award. What it does though is highlight the formal choices that lead to that success.
