Plant by Mare
By wishjackedPlant is a story about a faerie and a human and their relationship.
It’s a quietly beautiful love story with an edge of tragedy— both the grief of tragedy past and the ever growing promise of tragedy looming in the future.
This comic is so special. It has a lot of strange little pieces woven together in a way that makes each piece feel fully realized, both in itself and as part of a whole. Part tender character study, part fae modern fantasy.
The story is told in a series of vignettes that are not ordered according to linear time, so as you read the plot unfolds and refolds around itself, giving the story a super unique flow. Each chapter is a little moment in the lives of these characters. As you read and gather information the scenes begin to fit together like puzzle pieces, revealing context that gives new meaning to previous chapters. This is an intensely rereadable comic.
Overall the writing reminds me of poetry— Plant is a work with a lot of depth and complexity, but the pieces of the story are so beautifully chosen and arranged that the overall experience of the comic is one of deceptive simplicity.
The actual plot of the comic revolves around a gentle-hearted cleaner who finds a fae who has had its wings removed… something that should kill the fae, but doesn’t. The two of them are bound together by the fae’s secret survival, hiding him from a world who would rather see him dead.
I LOOOOOOOVE!!!!!!! these characters. They have a lot of big emotions, this is a heavy comic at times, but there is also so much liveliness and levity to them. I love how their senses of humor play off each other, their relationship is really sweet and it’s fun to see them live their little lives together.
NOW THE ART. Multiple times I’ve just sent the art of this comic to a friend and just said LOOK AT HOW PRETTY THIS IS! READ THIS! with no further elaboration to what the comic is about, and honestly? The art is a great hook. The creator clearly knows their craft.
The settings have tons of fun little details and I also like the fashion design. The world feels really lived in, and that makes all the difference in a story like this one.
All the emotions and expressions are also perfectly rendered— anger and sadness and grief and tiredness and happiness and humor and wonder ALL have moments to shine in this comic, and they really hit me in the chest every time. The tears look so wet. The ways the hands touch look so tender.
Final words, this is one of those comics that I’ve read three or so times already, and EVERY SINGLE TIME I get something new out of it. Like each time I read it I get to see it through new eyes. A delicious comic and one of my favorites to recommend.
The Tumblr site where this comic lives includes this as part of the synopsis:
“This is how the story starts: grief is pressed under dried petals, inside crafted paper wreaths, into childhood songs, into baked bread, on the soft, stretching evenings of late harvestmoon. Love too. The story goes on from there.”
This really is what Plant feels like it’s doing. It is sharing the emotion and the memory baked into the small moments of a life. What a privilege to get to read a story like this.
You can read Plant on Tumblr (its main site) or Comic Fury (at the time of this writing the CF mirror is incomplete but catching up)
The site warnings include topics of death, loss, and genocide. Also some nudity.
Note: review redrafted from a previous entry on crowdsourced-webcomic-reviews.tumblr.com