I found my story in ‘Once & Future’

Once & Future is a story about stories, how they evolve and take on new meaning over time, how these stories and legends hold power and can change us, and how we can change them and how we can reclaim them.

The series follows the adventures of Duncan, Gran and Rose as the world of Arthurian myths, often tainted and polluted from what we might think of (or pure, depending on your interpretation), bleeds into the world around us.

The release of Once & Future Book Two (collecting issues #19-30) is a reminder of what a fun and beautiful series it is. It’s a compelling narrative about family, love and loss filled to the brim with Dan Mora’s signature action, Tamra Bonvillain’s lush colors, and Kieron Gillen’s depth of story. However, more than anything for me, the series is about how stories give us the chance to remember those we’ve lost.

In issue twenty, Gran tells Duncan how important memory is, having seen dementia take everything a person is away from them before they gone. She tells him that even though they hurt and it’s easier to hide them, we are nothing without our memories.

I remember a lot about my grandma passing. I was sitting on a couch in my parents’ house, incidentally, reading an issue of Once & Future, when I found out she had died. My mum and brother walked back into the house only minutes after they’d left to see her. They’d gotten the call when they were in the car.

I remember the zombie-like way our family moved around the house, my dad folding laundry to Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives” and my partner hugging me while we sat on the couch. I remember not crying at first, at least not until the afternoon when I picked up the first volume of Once & Future.

I had only recently discovered the Once & Future series and rapidly became an avid fan. The story of protagonist Duncan becoming embroiled in the war against warped Arthurian myths with his Gran instantly hooked me. But it was moments like those in issue #20 that held me and for a long time I wasn’t sure why. 

My grandma was born in Southport, England, and the story of a grandma and grandson adventuring together struck something inside of me at a time when my grandma felt so distant. I didn’t realize it at first, but Once & Future was helping me to remember my grandma in a way I hadn’t been able to in so long. 

When I began reading Once & Future, my grandma’s memory was fading rapidly, and she was living in a care facility. Like a stone covered in moss, we knew she was still there in some ways, but she was hidden beneath the fogs of memory loss and dementia.

Hearing Gran talk to Duncan about the power of memory and reclaiming stories felt like I was hearing my own grandma speak with me. She was there in the comic with me, telling me that although it hurts it’s our responsibility to carry on the memory of those who came before us.

In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud said the gutters of a comic, the space between the panels, is where “human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea.” The gutters are where the reader and the work come together to create the unified reality of the story, where our own experiences bleed into and influence the printed page.

My grandma isn’t the same as Gran. She’d never cuss like Gran did, smoke or be so abrasive. But in Gran, I saw a woman who’d given up so much for her family, who does anything to protect them, a complicated woman not above making mistakes. That’s my grandma. 

In the gutters of the pages, I could remember a woman who walked through the streets with her mother, ensuring all the windows were blacked out during World War II. I remembered a woman who left a home she loved to move across the ocean with her husband for a chance at a different future. I remembered a woman who’d do anything to let her grandchildren, of whom I was only one of ten, know they were loved and safe.

Towards the end of the series there is a moment where a warped version of the wizard Merlin explains how he feels like he is lost in his story, no longer able to recall who he once was.  He was no longer lost in the woods but had rather become the woods themselves.

For so long, towards the end of her life, the grandma I’d known felt lost in the woods to me. Little bits of what had made her ‘her’ for so long were forgotten as her memory failed. It could be a challenge remembering that a woman regulated to a wheelchair trying to talk through an iPad during the pandemic was the same woman who’d been so adventurous and outgoing for so long. My memory was warping as I coped with the feelings of helplessness as my grandma’s health declined.

Like Gran hiding from her past with her daughter in the story, for so long I’d been hiding from the memories of who my grandma was, forgetting so much of who she had been before her health declined. It was an action to help cope with how much we’d lost over time. Like Merlin and the myths of Once & Future, the stories of my grandma that came before had been forgotten or twisted. 

Once & Future came into my life at the perfect time to allow me to remember so much of who she was — her strength, hope and love. Once & Future had become, and still is, a key to remembering the spirit of my grandma and the memories and stories she left with us.

I cried for the first time on the day my grandma passed after I picked up the collected edition of Once & Future Book One. Holding it in my hand, I was floored by the feeling of her loss but also, in some ways, of her return. The story in my hands allowed me to remember a woman I hadn’t seen in many years. 

The series itself is a tremendous adventure into the world of story, with immense beauty, action and violence (sometimes all in the same panel) in one of the most stunning books in recent memory. It’s a series about how stories shape us, change us and in turn how we can change the world around us because of them. 

I can’t review Once & Future in any traditional sense because I am far too emotionally invested in the series. However, I can say that Once & Future is a series with a story to tell. It’s a series that reminds me of the true power of comics, not in their super-stories or artwork, but in their gutters. 

In those small white spaces, the relationship between the reader and the work changes the story even when nothing on the page changes. Once & Future came when I felt like things were at their worst and helped me remember that the power of story keeps those we’ve lost with us. That even though it hurts, we need to hold onto our memories.

Once & Future helped me to remember and I will always be thankful for that.