Medusa, the snake-headed gorgon from Greek mythology, is a character who’s been ripe for perpetual re-invention more or less since the mythology was first written. A priestess of the goddess Athena, she was cursed with the headful of snakes and the eyes that turned everyone in their path to stone after having “mated” with Poseidon on the floor of Minerva’s temple.
That’s a very…patriarchal myth, to say the least – a mortal trapped between gods, probably unable to fend off the advances of the god of the oceans, and yet it’s the mortal, and more importantly, the woman, who gets cursed. The story of Medusa is rape culture in a patriarchy, writ large in legend.
And in fairness to the character, she has had her fair share or reinventions in recent years. Every writer worth their salt it seems has a version of the Medusa story to serve up as a mythical counterweight to all the centuries of calumny piled upon her writhing head.
So why do we need a graphic novel version of her story by Tony Parker?
Well, in a word, quality.
If you’re going to radically re-invent Medusa, doing it as Parker does – on the premise that everything we know about her is wrong, and that she’s actually a kind of eternal, mortal protector of humanity from the worst excesses of both gods and monsters – is a great way to go about the thing, freeing her of enough of her Greek myth to make her interesting again in her own right, and in this version of her universe, while giving the Greek mythologies their own equivalent of a kind of Hellboy figure, born of legend, stepping between worlds, always doing the right thing, irrespective of how hard it is and how many non-mortals have to die in the quest to protect the innocent.
Here, there’s some interesting blending of mythologies, as we see Medusa with sprites, Medusa with Scottish warrior-gods, Medusa in Hephaestus’ workshop and more, all in a quest to avoid the birth and freedom of an all-consuming negative power that will, given half a chance, consume the world.
What you also get for your money here is a high percentage of utter gorgeousness. The artwork, also by Parker, is a banquet for the eyes, whichever part of reality Medusa is in or travelling through. Quality, quality, quality is the hallmark of this art, which is perhaps just as well, because this is a very visually-driven graphic novel. There are significant chunks of exposition – this is the situation, this is what you have to do, go do it – and then you’ll go pages without any further spoken word or even visualised thought, so the quality of the artwork is in some ways the thing that both saves and elevates the work. And the quality of the artwork, we’re here to tell you, means you don’t mind a bit about the dialogue-scarcity for page after page.
What you don’t get here is an over-serving of spoon-fed connective tissue. The chunks of exposition feel natural in their places, but you’re left to fill in some muscly gaps about Medusa’s history in this telling of her tale, so it never feels like a graphic novel that lets you laze about the place – you have to engage with it and do a fair percentage of the work. Oddly enough though, that ends up giving Medusa some important grit and gristle, and adds value to the dialogue that is spoken, so again, as with the Hellboy origins, you feel like you’re in on an important ground floor of something that could run and run, expanding all the while. That’s an exciting feeling to get from a graphic novel in 2024, especially one whose central character, as we mentioned, has been done and redone to death and beyond in recent years.
So is Medusa one to pick up?
Yes, if you want to be nice to your eyes for a bit, if you’re prepared to do some intellectual legwork as a reader, and if you feel like a gritty new entry into the “mythological protector of humanity” genre. The art by Parker and the vibrant, skull-punching colour-work by Tamra Bonvillain may at this stage be the main draw that leads you to shell out your shekels on this title, but there’s enough cleverly sparse backstory detail to persuade that Medusa, both the character and the graphic novel, could be going places for years to come. If it does, you’ll be glad you got in on it early. And if it doesn’t, there’s still enough to reward you for your choice of mythological retelling here. Tony Fyler
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