lumenquill | That Time I Didn’t Know Who The Snow Queen Was

The year is 2013, and I am seventeen years old. I have friends on the internet I regularly play competitive Pokemon X and Y with, I’m in what would turn out to not be my last year of high school, and Disney’s Frozen is sweeping the globe late that year.

Frozen is a movie that somewhat pains me to look back on, as while it is one of the most accurate and thoughtful portrayals of what growing up with a mood or panic disorder is like, allegorically through Elsa’s powers, it is also one of the most over marketed films on the planet and not an especially interesting story otherwise. I personally have been tired of ‘subversive’ fairy tales for most of my life, after seeing Sondheim’s Into the Woods in a Stratford theatre as a kid and determining that was the best it was probably going to get.

However, when Frozen came out, something came up that was a surprise to me, and my friends of the time. It seemed strange, because I’ve always held an interest in folklore, fairy tales, and mythology, and thought I knew those subjects as well as I could in my teenaged arrogance, but for some ungodly reason before the debut of Frozen I had never heard of the Snow Queen before.

This was a true fact! That particular Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale was unknown to me. I could tell you all sorts of odd and obscure stories I had picked up from around the globe, but I had never heard of the Snow Queen. Not to say Frozen is an accurate adaptation of the Snow Queen, it certainly isn’t, but it is at least loosely inspired by it, so it struck me at the time I had never heard of it.

Now, it turned out this was because my mother really hated the Snow Queen. She found it a kind of freaky and upsetting fairy tale when she was a kid, and its not like she actively tried to keep it away from me, but it never came up as a result of her dislike of it at the age where mothers ought to be sharing fairy tales with their children.

But this is how, many years later, I ended up having to do a little bit of prep work to read the webcomic Demon’s Mirror by Harry Bogosian.

Demon’s Mirror is an adaptation of the Snow Queen story, and probably a more accurate one than Frozen but it also goes off track a bit by keeping a lot of the side characters around for more of the story and being set in the same universe as Bogosian’s other work, A Better Place. We’ll get to that.

When I discovered Demon’s Mirror, it had started updating daily on a website connected to the webcomic publishing collective Hiveworks, in preparation for the release of its less-Snow Queen oriented sequel, Angel’s Orchard. For those who don’t know, Hiveworks comics all have a little bar on their website that links to other Hiveworks comics, so you can easily flip between them. I discovered Demon’s Mirror by chance this way, and like I always do, checked the comics “About” section before reading the comic.

in said “About” section, I discovered the comic was an adaptation of the Snow Queen and instantly thought, well, thats no good. I still don’t know anything about the Snow Queen, it’s no like Frozen taught me much of anything about the original Fairy Tale and it had been almost a decade since I read up on it for Frozen.

So, to better understand what I was getting into, before reading Demon’s Mirror, I went off and read the Snow Queen. Gonna agree with my mom here, thats a kind of creepy fairy tale. I understand why as someone with very thick glasses she would be kind of squicked by the concept of magic glass getting in your eyes to do horrible things to your perception of the world.

So after reading the Snow Queen, I sat down to read Demon’s Mirror… only to discover I was still missing something to get the full context here. See, each page of the comic has some cryptic and often funny lore notes in the description of the post. At the beginning of th comic, those start off talking about God, and a brother, and… what? How is this relevant to the Snow Queen? Well, it isn’t. This is information relevant to A Better Place, the creator of Demon’s Mirror’s other comic that acts as a prequel to Demon’s Mirror and explains how its world came to be the very strange way it is.

Now, It’s not that Demon’s Mirror doesn’t stand on its own fine, it certainly does, but when people in the comments keep talking about someone named “Hannah” who clearly isn’t in this comic, you start to wonder what your missing.

So, I tracked down and read A Better Place. And wow, I’m glad I did, because it was extremely good. The entire concept behind it is basically that a young girl gains god like powers and takes over the world, remaking it how she thinks things should be and becoming the world’s god. The whole thing is thematically about the concept that nobody knows whats best for the world and everyone in it, and that trying to make it a better place (har har) by force will never succeed, but its peppered with bombastic action, clever character design, and worldbuilding that never ceases to be as cool as it is unsettling. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, with how it balances its themes with its over the top action and visuals, although it is significantly more cynical a story.

But, by this point I will have read a fairy tale and a whole comic to read Demon’s Mirror. I’m sure your wondering, how’s it then? Is Demon’s Mirror good?

Yeah its good. I like it. It doesn’t quite have the philosophical backbone I loved from A Better Place, but I liked it enough to support the artist on patreon so I could read early updates of its sequel for a good long while before my finances changed and I had to cut a bunch of patreon subs I had to do some other stuff that needed doing.

I’d highly recommend all the mentioned webcomics here if you like philosophy, over the top action, and kind of grim worldbuilding. I’m just amused I ended up reading so much background just to read one comic, because I probably didn’t need to.