Once & Future: The Complete Series by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora

Once & Future: Deluxe Edition, Book One
Once & Future, Volume 4: Monarchies in the U.K.
Once & Future, Volume 5: The Wasteland

Collection published: 2021
Contents published: 2019-21
Read: November 2023

Written by Kieron Gillen

Illustrated by Dan Mora

Colored by Tamra Bonvillain

Lettered by Ed Dukeshire

Once & Future is a recently concluded thirty-issue comic series from Boom!, written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Dan Mora (with Tamra Bonvillain on colors). It concerns an attempt by a sort of undead King Arthur and Merlin to reinscribe themselves on Britain; the main character is a modernist academic who discovers that the grandmother who raised him is Britain's chief monster hunter—and that he's inherited her story.

It's been collected in five trade paperbacks; over the past few years, volumes one, three, and four have been finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, so those are the ones I've read. This year's Hugo voter's packet came with PDFs covering the complete series: book one of the "deluxe edition" (collecting volumes one through three), volume four (the one that was actually a finalist this year), and volume five (which was eligible for the 2023 award, but was not actually a finalist). So I decided that once I finished Hugo voting, I would go back through and read the series in its entirety, in order.

Like a lot of Kieron Gillen comics, it's pretty good but it reads as though it could have been better, like it could have done more with its premise and its characters than it ended up doing. Once & Future has two big strengths; one is the way it uses its very concept to interrogate the idea of British identity. In the first volume, King Arthur is brought back by Anglo-Saxon supremacists... but what they've forgotten is that Arthur wasn't Anglo-Saxon, he was a Briton who fought off Saxons! So he turns on them and begins expunging what he sees as invaders from Britain. Bits like this recur throughout the series, deft moments of pointing out the way the stories we glom onto culturally often don't actually say what we imagine they do. A lot of the time the story is about the conflicts between different versions of the Arthur mythos, the early medieval version clashing with the later one; there's some fun stuff with Beowulf in volume two. The particular highlight in this regard is Boris Johnson's hilarious cameo.

Collection published: 2022
Contents published: 2021-21
Previously read: August 2023
Reread: November 2023

The other highlight is the character of Bridgette McGuire, the retired monster hunter, a grandmother who gives no shits about your feelings and will do anything to anyone—including her beloved grandson—to keep Britain safe. As Gillen points out in the series afterword, she's the kind of character who can be a vehicle for adventures forever, but that doesn't stop her from developing and changing in ways both small and big over the course of the series. I always enjoyed her shenanigans and dialogue.

However, the series doesn't do enough with its interesting premise. There's a lot of big action sequences, and certainly Dan Mora does a great job illustrating them, but it felt to me like Kieron Gillen spent more time asking "how could this mythological idea be used to make a comic book action set piece?" than he spent asking "what does the Arthurian mythos tell us about modern Britain?" I loved those moments, like I said above... but honestly, there just weren't enough of them across the series's thirty issues. At time the overlapping mythologies get confusing, and not in a good way; I don't think the series adequately delineates the difference between the multiple Arthurs, for example, and some of it gets wacky. Why would Tennyson's Arthur be steampunk!? The last volume feels like Gillen thought the series was going to run another thirty issues but was suddenly given only six to wrap it all up... I was surprised to learn from the afterword that he actually had twenty-four more issues than he originally thought he was getting!

Collection published: 2023
Contents published: 2022
Read: November 2023

I also felt that Duncan and Rose, the ostensible leads, deserved more of a character throughline than they ended up getting. They often end up feeling along for the ride, and I wanted a stronger sense of their development and choices in the face of all the weird things they go through.

Other than some of the jumpy issues near the end, it is (as Gillen-penned comics usually are) a pretty smooth read. There's a number of clever ideas in here. Mora's art gets a bit too grotesque at times but is usually excellent; Tamra Bonvillain is a revelation on colors. But I can't help feeling there's another version of this story that consistently treats its mythology as something to be interrogated rather than as a basis for clever set pieces.

Plus to name your final volume "The Wasteland" but then claim the poem was written by "T. S. Elliot" is a pretty unforgivable mistake!