20 cool psychedelic comics to read after seeing Thor: Ragnarok

Cover of ODY-C (Image via Image Comics)

16. ODY-C

There’s something about age-old stories that prove themselves time and time again, no matter what format they’re in. Take Homer’s Odyssey, which has been around for so long that it’s become, for many people, a story so ancient and epic that it feels almost bound to your DNA. Phrases translated through many tongues and over many years feel oddly familiar — “wine-dark sea”, “gray-eyed Athene”, and so on. The bare bones of the tale — a man tries to make his way back home and encounters many different trials — echoes the stories of other epics in other world cultures.

All of this is to say that, for all of the glorious colors and spacefaring madness, ODY-C is also deeply familiar. Writer Matt Fraction and artist Christian Ward have managed to create something that balances these seemingly opposed ends, and it’s delightfully weird.

ODY-C versus Odyssey

ODY-C follows the basic premise of the original Odyssey. However, it’s now set in space and features a largely female cast. Hence, Odysseus becomes Odyssia, Agamemnon becomes Gamen, and so on. Rather than a simple gender-swap of the characters, however, Fraction was more interested in “really exploding things and showing how different literature looks when you invert traditional gender politics”.

Thus, not only are a majority of the characters women, but they are bold, warlike women. Moreover, they live in a world where men are practically extinct. He (the male equivalent of Helen) is the first known man born in ten thousand years. He is therefore greatly treasured and simultaneously imprisoned for these rare qualities. No matter that there is also a third gender, Sebex, that can reproduce with the women of ODY-C’s world. He is still apparently worthy of war.

If all of this sounds rather un-psychedelic to you, don’t worry. Odyssia and her crew visit many strange worlds and travel throughout the universe in time and space-bending ships that provide plenty of weirdness. The somewhat all-powerful gods that mess with the mortals also make for ample strangeness.