WeirdWorld

WeirdWorld is...a deceptively simple story. Across six issues, it tells the story of Becca, a girl in a freak plane accident who is then transported to a hostile alien planet. She then meets a wizard slayer named Goleta, a giant barbarian woman who...slays wizards. They then partner up with a wizard named Ogeode who is currently a flying cat, and the three of them embark on a quest to find what is lost.

Becca wants to return to Earth.

Goleta wants to kill wizards and find her lost love.

Ogeode wants to not be a cat anymore.

Simple, right?

The real hook here is that Becca’s plane ride was the direct result of her mother’s suicide; Becca was on her way to Zapopan, Mexico to bring her mother’s ashes to her childhood home. What makes this so transformative for the story is you can follow someone’s journey through their own grief. And while this is also reflected in Goleta, I wanted to primarily focus on Becca’s individual journey through this process.

If you’ve ever lost someone to suicide, you can understand the internal conflict this creates. You’re devastated, you’re enraged, you feel guilty, you regret. You’re emotions shoot all over the place, and every bit of that comes at you in waves. The real world can seem like a distant memory you can’t wrap your head around. The worst part is, reality keeps on moving anyway. An overwhelming cacophony of feelings and experiences, and you’re just struggling to keep your head above water.

And this is very much Becca’s experience in WeirdWorld. Her relationship with a sometimes comforting, mostly very hostile plane of existence is constantly shaping her feelings about her mother and her loss. And it changes her. And she slowly starts to come into her own, going from screaming “I don’t want to fucking be here, I can’t do this,” to fully embracing the quest driving her forward.

So Becca starts growing. In large ways like flying a plane originally piloted by a dog to fight lava-people, and in small ways like empathizing and really connecting to the people who choose to support her. Well I guess those are both big really, but the emotional stuff is more subtle.

At face value, the ending seems incomplete. There are a lot of events and character arcs that are unresolved. But to me, that reinforced that this is a story about grief, about loss, about our very complicated relationships with the dead.

The journey through grief and the feelings that come with it are never really “resolved”, but there is always something new, something we’ve lost within ourselves, waiting to be found.

And maybe that on it’s own is enough.