“All your life you’ve never seen woman taken by the wind”
I liked Isabel Greenberg‘s last comic, so when I saw she was doing a take on Camelot, I figured I’d like this one, too. And you know what? I do! 
This is from Amulet Books (which is, naturally, an imprint, this time of Abrams), and here we go!
We know that Young Hag and the Witches’ Quest is a Camelot/King Arthur story from the very beginning, as the cast of characters at the front includes Arthur, Merlin, and the rest of them, but we don’t know how the three generations of witches we meet at the beginning – Ancient Crone, Nearly Wizened One, and Young Hag – fit into the story. Young Hag gets her name when she turns 12, and her grandmother (Ancient Crone) tells her that she can now learn to be a witch … but it’s just making potions and balms and such, because there’s no magic left in Britain. Young Hag is less than pleased about this, and when her mother (Nearly Wizened One) is killed when a mob chases them out of town, she rejects magic and witchcraft and her grandmother’s stories about an earlier time of magic. She had begun to learn about Arthur and how he came to be (the familiar story of Uther disguising himself as Igraine’s husband to fuck her and then making sure her daughter, Morgan le Fay, didn’t come with them to Camelot), but once her mother dies, she doesn’t want anything to do with that. Two years later, however, she’s forced into it when they find a boy trying to get his sister back because she was replaced by a changeling, and the grandmother realizes that magic is seeping back into Britain. So they have a quest!
I don’t want to give too much away about how the quest connects to Arthur, but it does, and it’s a fairly clever way to do it. What Greenberg does well is make the characters aware of the conventions of quests, so that they can comment on them as much as actually do them. 
This isn’t a new idea, of course, but when it’s done well, it works well, and Greenberg makes sure that Young Hag’s quest is actually a pretty good one, and there’s plenty of excitement and a little bit of danger to go along with the fact that several characters look askance at the entire endeavor of questing. Greenberg does some fun things with the “spells” that Young Hag does actually know, as when she tries to enter Faerie she needs to blend in, and she does it excellently and hilariously. Greenberg gives us nice spins on the Arthur stories without really changing them – Morgan, who in the stories is generally the wronged party (even the older stories don’t really try to hide that, even though she’s an icky woman), is presented as both with a grievance and also as a petty sorceress, and Greenberg does a nice job showing both sides of her personality. She modernizes the book a bit – there’s a lesbian couple, for instance – but that’s fine, as it’s more fun to read this with the characters saying at least some modern idioms rather than trying to parse an archaic form of the language. She also doesn’t really give us a villain, which is nice. In a lot of Arthurian literature, Morgan, or at least Morgan’s son, is the villain, and some more modern retellings make Arthur a villain, but Greenberg simply gives us characters trying to do the best they can, and occasionally things go horribly wrong. Young Hag learns as she goes that things aren’t always what they seem, and trying to do the right thing is hard, but if you treat everyone like a creature deserving of respect, things will go easier for you. This is definitely a YA book, so that’s a good lesson … which can also apply to adults, too.
Greenberg’s art remains rough and rigid, which doesn’t work for the few action scenes in this book but which is fine for everything else. For the most part, she needs to get facial expressions, and she does a good job with that. 
She shows us Ancient Crone’s weariness with the world, Young Hag’s anger and disappointment after her mother dies, Tom’s hope that he can get his sister back, and the slyness of some of the tricksters, from Uther planning his rape of Igraine to the goblin knowing that the humans will falter at the Goblin Market. Greenberg does this quite well, with a few different lines that tilt the faces just enough in the direction she wants them to go. She does a nice job with the surroundings, as her thick, ragged line helps create a world that feels a bit uncivilized, while her coloring of Camelot and Avalon – she uses more bright yellows for those scenes – contrasts with the mean world Young Hag lives in and also helps make it feel more magical in the readers’ minds. Greenberg’s art is certainly not for everyone, but she gets the job done and tells the story well. She’s not going to be drawing any Superman comics anytime soon, but that’s ok.
Young Hag and the Witches’ Quest is a delightful book, full of adventure and excitement but never losing sight of the fact that the characters in it are going through things, and they need to work them out. It’s fast-paced, often funny, and heartfelt. That’s a pretty good combination!
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆
