4 Graphic Novels About the Greek Underworld, From Orpheus to Persephone

Start with Yvan Pommaux if you want to travel into the land of the dead alongside someone who has every reason to fear it. For Persephone’s story, start with George O’Connor. Two other comics turn Hades and Persephone into romantic leads, with very different ideas about what might go wrong on a first date.

1. Orpheus in the Underworld, for the journey down

When Eurydice dies from a snakebite on their wedding night, Orpheus goes after her. The startling part is what he brings. A hero facing the guardians of the dead might want a sword. Orpheus is a musician. He has to persuade beings who have heard every mortal argument against death to make one exception.

Yvan Pommaux’s version makes a good short read with someone else. Stop at the moment Orpheus receives permission to leave with Eurydice and ask each other what it would feel like to walk ahead of someone you cannot check on. That is enough to make the last stretch unbearable, even if you already know the ending. TOON also provides a teacher guide for this edition.

2. Hades: Lord of the Dead, for Persephone and Demeter

George O’Connor puts Hades on the cover of the fourth Olympians book, but pay attention to the daughter of Demeter. What she calls herself, what she wants and which parts of her story reach her mother all matter. This is the place to start if you want to know how a goddess associated with life above ground becomes queen below it.

Read it beside the Homeric Hymn to Demeter if the family argument interests you. In the hymn, Persephone cries out when Hades takes her, and Demeter’s refusal to let the crops grow brings the gods to the negotiating table. Reading the ancient poem beside a comic makes it easier to spot the choices each storyteller gives the daughter, the mother and the husband.

3. Punderworld, for a slow courtship with terrible timing

Linda Šejić gives her Hades and Persephone an unusual head start. By the time her comic begins they have fancied one another for two hundred years. Neither has managed to act on it. A festival gives them a chance, and the rest of the family is on hand to make even a simple conversation difficult.

Pick this for the reader who likes watching two shy people misunderstand one another. It changes the ancient abduction story at its foundation by giving both gods a long-standing mutual attraction. Image Comics rates the 176-page first volume T+. Look for Šejić’s name on the cover, since several quite different Hades and Persephone romances sit on the same shelf.

4. Lore Olympus, for an adult reader who wants the whole social circle

In Rachel Smythe’s version, Artemis takes her new roommate Persephone to a party. Meeting Hades is only one complication of leaving her mother’s house. Everyone in Olympus seems to know someone who can tell them who went home with whom. If you like gossip in a setting where the people doing the gossiping are immortal, start here.

The first print volume collects episodes 1 through 25 of Smythe’s webcomic. This is the opening of a serialized adult story with sexual assault and abuse among its subjects. For a younger reader buying a book about Greek myth, Pommaux or O’Connor makes a more suitable first stop. For someone looking for the particular pleasure of a long webcomic on paper, look for Lore Olympus: Volume One.