Goddess of Spring and Shadow

Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus reimagines the myth of Persephone through the visual and narrative affordances of the digital webcomic, presenting liminality not as a temporary stage of transition but as an enduring mode of identity. Through qualitative close reading of selected episodes representing key personal, social, and supernatural transitions, this study examines recurring visual motifs including costume, color, bodily transformation, spatial movement, and serial pacing. Drawing on the liminality theories of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner and Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, this article argues that Smythe transforms Persephone from a goddess who merely crosses boundaries into one whose identity is constituted by inhabiting them. Through interconnected personal, social, and supernatural thresholds, Persephone negotiates identities imposed by family, divine society, trauma, and mythology itself, ultimately discovering that her authority emerges not from resolving these contradictions but from embracing them. This article further demonstrates how the visual language of Lore Olympus and serialized digital storytelling renders liminality both narratively and visually, inviting readers to experience Persephone’s ongoing process of becoming. By bringing together liminality theory, classical reception studies, and comics scholarship, this study argues that Lore Olympus expands the possibilities of mythological adaptation for contemporary audiences and offers an interpretative framework for understanding how digital graphic narratives reinterpret ancient myths through the sustained experience of life at the threshold.