Submit Your Own Review

 Olympus Heights
Writer/Artist -  Kevin Munroe
IDW Publishing, Feb 2005

* This review contains several spoilers

Kevin Munroe can tell a story. He can draw one as well.
You won’t find your Marvel/DC art in Olympus Heights; you’ll find human figures more caricatures than characters, and Greek gods less than Apollonic, but you’ll find art suited to the material and material as good as comics get.

Consider the Greek gods removed from Mount Olympus with the coming of Christianity; where’d they go? The answer is Olympus Heights, Indiana. Well that’s the answer for Zeus, anyway.  He’s here under cover as Mr. Smith. You gotta like an old guy with snow white beard and hair down to there, protruding from a big floppy hat that Clint Eastwoord discarded thirty years ago and looks like it. Together, the hat and the hair, hide most of Smith’s face including his eyes.  His duster hides everything else, including his paunch.

It’s also the answer for a human, Oliver Dobbs, and his mother, Edna. Oliver still lives with his mother while he works at the Olympus Heights Museum, a place dedicated to every thing Olympic not connected with the quadrennial games. Operated by Mrs. MacKenzie, the museum also provides employment to a guard and Mr. Seymour K. Fitts, the museum’s manager.  For the public, the museum provides a learning center for everything they might wish to know of ancient Greece. It boasts some of the most realistic sculptures of ancient demons, beasts, and bad guys, as the world has ever seen. The mystery is where they all came from.

It seems that all the bad guys originally confined to Hell by Zeus and the other gods have been spent the millennia figuring out escape routes.  For a reason not fully developed, they all seem to arrive in the area around Olympus Heights requiring Zeus to zap them into immobility. These are the statues that keep turning up at the museum’s door.

Ollie tries to follow Zeus on one of his nightly excursions but falls asleep on the job, allowing us to follow Zeus home and learn what he is up to. The next day, Fitts sends Ollie off to collect more donations, a journey on which Ollie meets Thalia whose first words to him are: “That’s quite a left hook ya got there, slugger.” One of the great opening lines to any romance.
Back at the museum, that night, Ollie runs into the Caledonian Boar intent on doing him bodily harm. Zeus can’t let that happen; it’s why he’s here after all. In the aftermath, Zeus saves Ollie but the Caledonian Boar escapes. Zeus discovers he must explain to Ollie what’s going on, the imprisonment of the bad guys and the sundering of his family in the aftermath. The act of imprisonment, performed millennia ago, required all the gods and goddesses yield their power to Zeus to perform the crushing blow. Shorn of that power, all but Zeus found themselves condemned to immortality without power until “they learned to live as humans do.” Over time, the family drifted apart until only Zeus remains behind to confront evil as it appears.
Hades takes over Fitts’ body.  At Fitts’ apartment, Mrs. MacKenzie transforms into Persephone for a night of reunion, literally, but not explicitly.

Oliver’s friendship with Zeus continues to grow, so much so that Ollie takes Zeus’ advice and calls Thalia for a date.  On the date Thalia takes Ollie to meet her mother, a woman named Hera.
With Hades operating through Fitts, the release of all the demons of hell is about to take place. Zeus knows he must stop it, but he is weary of the whole thing and not certain he can pull it off. Ollie and Thalia explain this to Hera and the rest of the family, all of whom are little interested. Without their powers but retaining their knowledge, where and what do you suppose these gods and goddesses are up to in the modern world? Munroe’s take on Demeter, Aphrodite, Hephaestus, Dionysus, Athena, Artemis, Poseidon, Hermes, Apollo, and Ares coping with the modern world is superb. After centuries of making their own lives, however, none has the inclination to return to their former path and none wants to chance encountering Zeus’ fabulous wrath again. That, they claim, is what drove them away in the first place. 

In the meantime, Zeus continues to battle demons. He bests the Boar and sundry others but each win wearies him all the more. In the end Zeus must confront Hades and his minions. Assuming he will lose, Zeus takes his stand honoring his duty if not embracing it. As the battle begins his family, for all the right reasons, joins him. Together they defeat Hades, Persephone and the rest, and banish them again to hell.  In the process, the gods and goddesses discover how to live as humans do. The solution, trite though it may be, works.

Ollie wins Thalia and all seems right with the world except…two little demons decided to miss the party. Learning that they are all alone in this world, they resolve to do something about that. Hence, Chapter 2 must follow.

My major complaint is that all the battle scenes are done in dark colors, greys, dark greens, and blacks. This blurs the action, which may well be Munroe’s intent. Weaned on Marvel comics, I found this unsatisfactory. On the other hand, I admire Munroe’s storyboard. Every panel contributes something to the tale, sometimes predictably, sometimes not. Splash pages add to the story line as they occur, layout varies from page to page. Munroe knows his craft. With the caveat that purists might be turned off by the art style, I recommend they get past that annoyance and treat themselves to as fine a romp with the elders gods as you’re likely to find in a graphic novel or any other venue.

Dan Bieger © 2006