Linnea Sterte is a fantastically talented Swedish comics maker slowly but surely building a (well-deserved) following here in North America, largely through publications released by PEOW (now PEOW2). From the lush, hallucinatory Stages of Rot to the playfully artful Frog in the Fall and then, with World Heist, her first, tentative steps into world building which has blossomed into full flower here.
Long in the works (since at least 2021), A Garden of the Spheres is an epic – and stunningly beautiful – work of comics fantasy, of the world-building, science-fictional variety. The world she has built for us here is a world of gods and monsters, one that evokes our pre-industrial past, when humans lived more in harmony with nature, while simultaneously embodying a magical and mythical halcyon age where occurrences and abilities that we, today, would call supernatural are simply presented as de facto, and so constitutes an alternate, fantastical history, a kind of “never was”. It is a world of creators and creations, of rulers and ruled – and also those who move in the spaces between – deliberately presented in a manner that forefronts the animal passions, notably cruelty and violence (and their corollary, pride), that constitute human natures.
Rather than a straightforward story arc, A Garden of Spheres presents a series of far-flung episodes in which readers find themselves repeatedly plunged in medias res into different times and places, confronting a variety of societies and beings, with no prefatory remarks or explanations. This narrative strategy provides readers with a disorienting experience that is analgous to that of traveling unaccompanied through foreign lands, where there is no option other than figuring things out on one's own; thus conscripting each reader into the world building process.
Sterte makes this process a pleasure by bringing this world alive on the page in crisp colorful comics art that displays such a level of mastery that it appears almost effortless. Working in both full color and black & white as per the dramatic requirements of the scenes depicted, A Garden of the Spheres provides readers with a ticket out of the dispiriting world in which we find ourselves today, and into an enchanted realm of mythic civilizations operating in harmony with the natural world, full of inexplicable magic and overseen by living gods, demi-gods, new people and old people. Of course, in the end, the world here is but our own world made strange. Yet it is through this estrangement and its concomittant alienation that we are able to see our world from the outside, and so discover aspects previously hidden and unearth meanings previously ungraspable. This is the secret power of fantasy, a power which Sterte weilds to great effect here.
This volume is Sterte's most substantial work to date, running 336 pages, craft printed on a choice of papers perfectly suited for the work, which allow the colors to recede or advance, to simmer or pop, so as to best convey the moment and mood, all signature bound in a softcover with French-flapped dustjacket; and it's only "Book One". You can get an online look at it HERE.
And, when you have a moment to spare, you can learn more about where Linnea Sterte is coming from, and how she works in this engaging interview with Gina Gagliano on TCJ.com, HERE.
