Despite the anime world’s current fantasy renaissance, a fantasy series that truly feels singular is hard to come by. Nine times out of ten, whatever I pick up ends up echoing something I’ve already read or watched, triggering the urge to revisit the older thing instead. Comparison is the thief of joy, and all that jazz. AlthoughA Garden of Spheres doesn’t fully shake my mind goblins’ impulse to map its narrative beats onto other fantasies I adore, its sheer scope of myth-making and confident artistry left me oohing and aahing with every page turn to the point I felt genuine FOMO for its utterly alien world.
Created by Swedish illustrator and comic book author Linnea Sterte, A Garden of Spheres follows an immortal demigod of destruction with absolutely no memory of who she is. As such, she wanders the lands searching for who she is. She’s far from the most unique being roving the lands. Like its unnamed “unmaker,” A Garden of Spheres isn’t in a rush to railroad itself to any set endgame story goals. Instead, the graphic novel reads like a series of vignettes that shift focus among characters and across time, expanding its mythos as it lays tracks and takes the scenic route through its vivid, Moebius-esque world.
If titles like Scavenger’s Reign, Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End, Monstress, Primal, or To Your Eternity make you sit up in your chair, A Garden of Spheres is both a pastiche of their vibes whilebeing utterly batshit crazy in its own way. Like Scavenger’s Reign, the series reads like a David Attenborough nature documentary set on an alien world that will kill you and never notice you pass by. Much of that comes from how its dragons are born. Like seeds haphazardly thrown in the wind, dragons are hatched from spheres in riverbeds. Normal stuff by and large; however, the moment they hatch, they erode the landscape they were born from.
Each dragon birth yields a new biome of flora and fauna. Some dragons can be tamed and domesticated; others are hunted or revered as gods. This world also has actual gods who follow Greek pantheon rules. They make the world’s people and monsters based purely on their own tastes. You can meet them, though that probably doesn’t bode well for you. At the center of it all is the un-maker, a demigod whose existence doesn’t fit how gods and dragons work. Unlike dragons, she was born from a weird, pointy, stalactite-type deal, and unlike gods, who can create, she’s only gifted with the ability to destroy. As such, she wanders the land to discover more about the terrarium of a world she inhabits.
Flipping through the first volume of A Garden of Spheres felt like brushing my fingers over cave paintings and hieroglyphs. I walked away feeling that Sterte is a master of world-building. A Garden of Spheres tells its story in a real Genndy Tartakovsky way. Its lavish, water-painted panels can be entirely dialog-less, and you’re nonetheless fully enraptured by how little is happening. Whether the graphic novel showcases the unmaker idly wandering a desert, extreme close-ups of strange tropical fruits and lizards, or high-octane chase scenes between a hunter and a dragon, A Garden of Spheres‘ art-forward presentation has a gravitational pull that had me asking more questions about how its world works and how centuries passing like minutes would change those answers.
That being said, yes, I got lost in the naming-convention jargon of its many civilizations, rulers, and ethereal deities. But that didn’t stop me from getting the gist of what was going on and losing myself in Sterte’s worldbuilding and the breadcrumbs of mysteries she left in her wake. Thankfully, Peow’s edition of the graphic novel includes an appendix that breaks down the broad strokes of the story’s revelations so far. Key among them are pupil-dilating facts I didn’t catch, like its world “likely” being flat and its geographical time dilation: the farther folks wander from whatever counts as the center of its water-encompassed geography, the more time stretches.
My favorite anthology-style detours in A Garden of Sphere were the ones that had nothing to do with its wandering un-maker. The small potatoes stuff hit the hardest: two wounded warriors from rival nations limping through perilous terrain swappin’ god-lore, or the multi-chapter slow burn about a queer woman propelled into an arranged marriage because she resembled a painting a ruler liked, cascading into a choice that spirals into years of quiet, knife‑edge political plotting absolutely ruled. The real kicker is that these stories were just a handful pulled from the endless block of clay Sterte keeps reshaping as the series drifts forward into the unknown.
Learning A Garden of Spheres was born from Sterte’s half‑formed ideas from 2021—defining and redefining its world in real time as its nameless protagonist stumbles into new corners of it—never felt like an irksome mystery box dangling over my head as I read. If anything, it flipped a gripe I usually have with aimless, make‑it‑up‑as‑you‑go fantasy into the book’s biggest strength: letting me get blindsided by the unbridled weirdness blossoming from every direction of its storytelling right alongside its characters. I need more people to join me in crab-in-a-barrel style obsessing over this gem of a fantasy epic. If you’re looking for something fresh in fantasy, you owe it to yourself to see what Sterte is cooking up with A Garden of Spheres.
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