Comic Book Herald

A Comic Book Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans

Gillian Thomson

The Best Webtoons of 2022!

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As always, keeping up with all the comics that are published every year is nigh impossible. And that’s just the traditional publishers! Webcomics are a rapidly growing and easily available cornucopia of fantastic stories or all stripes. Added bonus, it lets small, independent comic creators get their content out to the wider world! To help with the arduous search for some of the best webcomics, I’ve compiled a short list of some of my favorite ongoing Webtoons this year!

If you want to look around on Webtoon for yourself, here’s the website’s rankings for most popular comics, broken down by genre. You can also check out CBH’s guide to the best Webtoon comics of all time!

Happy reading!

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Lore Olympus: A Culmination of a Millennia of Mythos

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[Lore Olympus Episode 183]
Ancient Greek mythology has been a popular subject of reading and study for centuries, largely thanks to the codification of The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Hesiod’s Works and Days among many, many other works that helped to preserve this complex mythology for millennia. Now, anyone familiar with ancient Greek mythology knows that it is far from internally consistent. These stories persisted for millennia even before they were written down. Many have been lost and others fragmented along the narrative telephone of history, and that’s not even touching on regional variations. The stories come with multiple versions, many of which conflict, and many more disagree with modern sensibilities. I mean, the most common inciting incident in approximately twenty percent of the myths and the origin story of three-fourths of the heroes is “unfortunately, Zeus was feeling horny” which is only a singular facet of what makes the mythology uncomfortable to consume at best, and unsuitable in the cases of younger audiences at worst. As someone who grew up reading nearly every book on ancient Greek mythology that I could get my hands on, it wasn’t until I was a fair bit older that I fully realized just how sanitized those tellings were and how—in a word—uncomfortable the full mythos was.

It seems to be a running theme nowadays to rewrite ancient Greek mythos into something a bit more palatable. Right now, the most popular retelling of ancient Greek mythology is Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson, which was a smash hit in the early 2000s and by all accounts, not a terrible modernization of a convoluted web of ancient stories, made suitable and engaging for a younger audience. I haven’t read them in a while, but I definitely recall that Riordan’s stories drew strongly from Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is understandable since Ovid’s work makes for a convenient reference as a singular book rather than a mess of scattered fragmentary stories. This is not a criticism of Riordan’s stories, but more of an observation. After all, tackling the subject of Greek mythology is no simple feat given its scope and breadth alone, but that’s probably part of what makes this material so magnetic for storytellers that they keep tapping back into it.

There are infinite ways that storytellers can rearrange the fragments of Greek mythology we have, and this is exactly what Rachel Smythe did with Lore Olympus. [Read more…] about Lore Olympus: A Culmination of a Millennia of Mythos

Lavendar Jack by Dan Schkade – WebToon Review!

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Lavender Jack is a comic on Webtoon by Dan Schkade (that’s pronounced “Shkah-dee”) set in the fictional country of Gallery in the early 20th century. The story is moderately ahistorical, most notably with an in-universe war known as the Platinum War, which at this point has only been vaguely referenced, but Schkade does a wonderful job in weaving together a compelling world and narrative.

So, let’s start with a basic summary. Lavender Jack is three “seasons” long, though it is currently on a temporary hiatus to organize the script for the final stretch of the last season, as well as for an authorial health break. It opens in the office of Gallery’s Lord Mayor Quincy Monmouth, reading a detective novel. His peace is abruptly interrupted by Lady Lackshore, an acquaintance and the city’s largest land developer, bursting into the office in a fit. The night before, a masked man broke into her home, beat up her butler—a veteran from the aforementioned Platinum War—and stole damning proof of her corruption before vanishing into the night. And setting her living room on fire with some strange, almost magical power.

However, this masked man is more than some common night robber. To a modern audience, he’s more akin to a vigilante, but more on him in a tick. Apparently, this vigilante, this Lavender Jack as the press has taken to calling him, has struck three times previously, his actions leading to the exposure of the corrupt actions of an upper-class individual and the ruin of their reputation. Lackshore demands that Quincy deal with Lavender Jack immediately before he can do more damage to the ruling class. In response, Quincy calls in his childhood hero and the subject of the book he was reading as Lackshore burst in: Madame Theresa Ferrier, the world’s greatest detective.

This singular action sets off a chain of events that have consequences that are felt throughout the rest of the presently published series.

For now, I’ll keep my description of the comic’s plot sparse to avoid spoiling any of the story’s twists and revelations and instead turn my attention to the characters featuring in this lovely little display.

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