The best comics of 2021

Alexander, The Servant, And The Water Of Life (self-published)Reimena Yee’s ongoing webcomic is the latest addition to the long tradition of the Alexander Romance. Having received omens of his impending death, a frightful Alexander is told by a green-clothed servant of the Water of Life that will grant him immortality. They set out from Babylon in search of it, recounting the legend of Alexander on their journey.As with Yee’s The Carpet Merchant Of Konstantiniyya, which was also a webcomic, the mesmerizing comic is chock full of historical and archaeological references. They make frequent use of lavish splash pages, the details of which the footnotes elaborates on. Most of Yee’s work is steeped in the visual—and often sequential—traditions that came before it, but with their take on the Alexander Romance, they are directly adding to one. The narrator of the webcomic is, technically, the character of the Author within the larger frame narrative, creating the rest of the pages for the reader. What’s fascinating about the webcomic are the additional layers of metatextuality that Yee adds. With Alexander, The Servant, And The Water Of Life, the reader is quite literally witness to the continuation of the Alexander Romance tradition. That tradition is primarily rooted in the written word, and Yee incorporates that while expanding the accessibility of their book with captions, often poetic in nature, describing what occurs in the panels. The captions, which arguably function as sequential poetic images in their own right, further expand the notion of what constitutes a comic. [M.L. Kejera]