The genre of high fantasy can be a prickly subject nowadays. After all, having drunk from the well of Tolkien for the majority of the last century, it can be hard for fledgling stories to create an original-seeming world in the midst of a fantasy setting, and even if succeeding at that to stick the landing of a proper ending, as HBO’s Game of Thrones has demonstrated.
However, all the tropes and tassels of high fantasy remain, an overpowering force of darkness, a ragtag band of warriors bound in fellowship to stand against it and all manner monstrous beasties and exotic races. But, rather than celebrating these storytelling devices, The Last God holds a mirror up to them and reminds the reader what these tropes often represent: a harsh reality of hypocrisy, lies, sexism and racial strife.
The creation of writer Phillip Kennedy Johnson with art by Riccardo Federici, The Last God represents the first part of Johnson’s Fellspyre Chronicles,originate from King Tyr himself. This kicks off Cyanthe’s desperate quest to end the evil she let escape on her previous quest alongside Eyvindr, a slave who was prophesied to bring ruin to Tyr’s kingdom, and a new, colorful cast of barely-hinged adventurers.
What Johnson seems to be illustrating with his dual-narrative is that not only are the myths of yore these fantasy quests are based upon likely built upon half-truths and lies in their own world, but more presciently that the fantasy tropes themselves in these genre stories, which have captured so many imaginations over time, are grounded in real-world racism, sexism and power fantasies. This conceit plays itself out time and time again throughout the story, as Cyanthe’s past imagined heroism is brought to face to face with the very real consequences of her party’s callousness and failure. A proud queen and virtuous warrior in the present, Cyanthe’s younger self is shown to be a victim of Tyr’s chauvinism and her father’s domineering control. While her husband Tyr speaks of lofty notions such as emancipation of all slaves, the future sequences show this to be nothing more than that, and paint him as more of a common brigand than a heroic warrior-king.
Even more pertinent commentary comes in the form of the Aelves, a golden-skinned race of elemental magic wielders closely related to humans who carry on a heritage of hatred and fear against the race of man for atrocities long past which persists to the present day, even after they allied with Tyr following his supposed defeat of the Last God. Yet even so, the “King of the Ferrymen”, the Aelve leader Veikko is revealed to have allowed the systematic murder of her own people in order to maintain her alliance with the magic-wielders of men known as the Eldritch Guild. Heroes and monster are two sides of the same coin in this world, and often the greater the hero, the more heinous the monster.
Perhaps no better example of this storytelling technique occurs in the recent issue #8, which features the fellowship of the past meeting one of their supposed legendary Jorunn of the Dwarrow people. Though said to be close allies with Cyanthe in songs and legends, the queen informs her party that, in actuality, the dwarrows were sinister and mercantile, with Jorunn (now transformed into a giant fire creature) simply being a hired guide. What’s more, the exchange the original fellowship made with the dwarrows to acquire age to the Black Stair turn out to be a catalyst for abuse within the dwarrows, who used the magical artifacts they received to enslave and torture the race of magical stone people known as the Djorruk, eventually leading to their the destruction of all of their people.
The message is clear: even in worlds where magic, mystery and all manner of enchanted beasts and terrifying monsters dwell, people would still lie and cheat and play the crowd in order to maintain their own power and the image of their own sanctity. The real world that fostered Tolkien and his genre-continuing heirs is not so different. The past may have seemed like a safer, more kindly epoch, but the truth these fantasies belied was more banal than all that, and the strands of sexism, racism and power-fantasy that fed their way into those stories are even more apparent today than they’ve ever been. So, in using these tropes in this way, complete with a body-horror inducing magical curse, Johnson is drawing a direct parallel between how we come to understand the past in the very real present, free from aggrandizing fantasy, and the struggle his characters go through in the realm of Cain Anuun.
A gripping and tightly-told philosophical romp through fantasy, The Last God #8 is on sale now wherever comic books are sold.
