MYTHOLOGICA

With its bold artwork in attention-grabbing, intense colors, this large-format collection of Greek myths and gods begs to be made into posters.

The fantastical images could come straight from 1960s album covers, mixing reality and symbolism, with a diversity of skin colors and some hint at gender fluidity—it’s definitely a mythology collection for a new generation. Full-page images fill one half of each spread on a particular personality while opposite are a few paragraphs and some smaller visual vignettes. Each entry includes a terse “Where” and What” section and the name of the figure in Greek, a unique feature of this enticing volume. The stories are told in a matter-of-fact, contemporary style. Writing about Ares, part of the description reads: “His most famous partner was the goddess of love Aphrodite. Even though she was married to Hephaestus they had lots of kids together.” Four stories are singled out for greater focus: those of Heracles, Odysseus, the Trojan War, and Jason and the Argonauts. Occasionally the visuals don’t correlate with the text. “The Fates were ugly, lame, old women,” it claims, but the artist depicts them as three handsome, brown-skinned women. This mythological encyclopedia should certainly encourage readers to find the new graphic-novel adaptations of the myths or Homer’s epic poems themselves, although the book lacks sources or a bibliography.

A visually over-the-top paean to stories that still resonate today.