By Jacob Cordas — I’ve said a lot of terrible, fucked-up shit that I regret but the statement that will haunt me for the rest of my life is when I told my mother with the utmost confidence, “You already beat it once. You can do it again.” She was dead only a few months later. It’s not the worst thing I’ve ever said. It was just the most wrong. 

There is something about the loss of a parent that creates a cosmic pit that you’re always picking at. It’s been more than a decade and I still come back to that same statement I said as a child who was refusing to accept the reality of the situation. It’s a black pit that keeps dragging you to another world you hate but have to be in. 

And as you drown in that nothingness, you fear for hope. There’s just a question you come back to: 

“Why does everyone I love leave me in the end?”

Olympia is a comic about the death of a parent. Curt Pires (Wyrd, Youth) developed the idea with his dying father, while he was in the hospital. And that weight is in every moment and page. As much as it is a love letter to the work of Jack Kirby, it’s even more so a rumination on how that loss functions. 

It is literalized and abstracted over multiple different relationships in the comic - often recontextualizing one character’s position into a new and unique parenthood. 

There is the fictional character and his creator. The character being a simple, cartoonish and most importantly childish Thor-type and his father a depressed man who wasn’t able to raise it to completion - the same way he can’t his own biological son. But when his creation needs it, he makes the sacrifice that it needs. 

There is the multiverse and the villian. He is a threat that rips through the multiverse turning each universe he finds to nothing, proving itself superior over the cosmic mother. His fictionality doesn’t matter. What matters is that he is dominant over the forces that created him. You can’t lose anything if you throw it all away. You don’t need to mourn anything other than your humanity if you chose to put them in the ground. 

There is the fictional character to the child who worships him. The child has already lost his biological father (though he reappears in a transcendental moment that left me teary eyed) and has thrown that hero worship at the character that is always in the right. The fictional character does what he can and wins. But winning is never enough. If growing up surrounded by soldiers taught me anything, it doesn’t matter to the family if you win. It matters that you make it home. 

And the fictional character doesn’t. 

As the child asks, “Why does everyone I love leave me in the end?”

But it’s his mother there at the end. After driving across the warzone of a city, she finds him in the center of the carnage. She takes him and hugs him and says,  I’m not leaving you, kid. I’m not going anywhere.”It’s beautiful and heartbreaking. Everybody stays with you but everybody eventually leaves. Time keeps going. The hero will eventually grow old. But here and now, they are together. They are happy. They are all they need. 

And that’s all I needed as a reader. 

Olympia Trade Collection Review

Olympia
Writer: Curt Pires & Tony Pires
Artist: Alex Diotto
Colorist: Dee Cunnifee
Letterer: Miccah Myers
Publisher: Image 
Price: $16.99
ELON is a latchkey kid who spends his days alone reading comic books... until his favorite superhero, OLYMPIAN, comes crashing off the page and into reality! But as he nurses his wounded and delirious hero back to health, he discovers OLYMPIAN isn’t the only thing that came through... something evil followed him. A comedic yet heartfelt love letter to the comics medium, OLYMPIA is also a meditation on hope and loss, conceived by CURT PIRES (Wyrd) and his father, TONY PIRES, while Tony was undergoing treatment for cancer.
Release Date: September 30, 2020
Buy It Digitally: Olympia

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My name is Jacob Cordas (@jacweasel) and I am not qualified to write this.