Coming Soon: The Final Odyssey, from PSYComics

By John Freeman on 31 October 2026 • ( 0 )

Simon Harrison, the extraordinary artist whose work has appeared in 2000AD and whose unmistakable visual imagination helped define strips including Revere, returns to full-blooded comics storytelling thanks to PSYComics, the British indie run by Laurence Alison and Neil “Bhuna” Roche, soon.

The Final Odyssey Book One by Laurence Allison and Simon Harrison - Cover (PSYComics)

A Kickstarter campaign for The Final Odyssey, a new mythological epic written by Laurence Alison, launches soon – and it is a spectacularly strange, beautiful, and frequently horrifying, piece of work.

At first glance, The Final Odyssey is exactly the kind of material Harrison seems born to draw: ancient gods, monsters, transformed bodies, impossible landscapes and creatures that seem to have crawled out of some collision between classical mythology, medieval religious art and biomechanical nightmare.

But beneath the spectacle, Issue One is a story about death – and why death might be the thing that gives human life its value.

Odysseus has survived everything. Troy. The Cyclops. Circe. Calypso. Shipwreck, slaughter and the anger of the gods. But there is one adversary even the great trickster cannot defeat: time.

The Odysseus we encounter here is no longer simply the heroic figure preserved by legend. He is confronted by what remains when the stories have been told, the battles are finished and the people who made a life meaningful begin to disappear.

And The Final Odyssey asks an uncomfortable question: What if immortality isn’t a gift?

The Final Odyssey Book One by Laurence Allison and Simon Harrison - Sample Page (PSYComics)

The gods of Olympus possess everything mortals have spent millennia dreaming about. They do not age. They do not disappear. They can preserve beauty, power and reputation indefinitely. Yet, precisely because they cannot lose those things, they may have no idea what makes them valuable.

That question runs through the first issue, particularly through Circe, whose understanding of mortality is captured in one of the book’s simplest images: a dandelion.

Something does not need to last forever to matter.
Perhaps the opposite is true.

Transience makes us precious

That idea becomes increasingly important as Odysseus confronts not simply physical death, but the other deaths awaiting every human being: the ending of consciousness, the ending of the body, and finally the moment when nobody remains who remembers that we existed at all.

For a man whose name has survived for thousands of years, that last possibility carries a particular irony. Because this isn’t really a story about whether Odysseus deserves to be remembered as a hero. It asks whether being remembered as exceptional matters at all.

Those ideas sit alongside something far more visceral. Harrison’s pages make mythology feel dangerous again. His gods aren’t clean, marble statues and his monsters aren’t simply obstacles waiting for a hero to kill them. Bodies mutate. Scale becomes overwhelming. Beauty and grotesquery occupy the same image. At times the artwork has the density of an illuminated manuscript; elsewhere it explodes into the organic, nightmarish territory that made Harrison’s work so distinctive.

There is something appropriately unsettling about seeing Greek mythology through his eyes. These are not safe museum pieces. They are ancient, sexual, violent, jealous and profoundly strange beings. And Alison’s script deliberately allows that strangeness to coexist with much quieter questions about fathers and sons, lovers, regret, ageing and the stories people construct about themselves.

Odysseus may have been called a hero. He may have been exceptional. He may even have been a man whom gods learned to fear. But, eventually, even the exceptional must confront the same question as everybody else:

When everything that made you who you are begins to disappear, what remains?

The Final Odyssey Issue One begins there. Not with another celebration of an immortal hero. But with an old man discovering that perhaps the greatest gift the gods could ever give him is the one thing they themselves can never possess.

An ending.

• The Final Odyssey Book One is a 64 page, American size purbound graphic novel. The Kickstarter campaign is going live on the morning of 13th November from Table C57 in the 2000AD Hall at this year’s Thought Bubble | Click here and head to Kickstarter and sign up to be notified of launch

Odysseus - In Defiance of the Gods: The Collection by Laurence Alison and the late, great Vú Danh

• Odysseus – In Defiance of the Gods – The Collection and Circe will be available at Thought Bubble – and from select bookshops in 2027 | ISBN: 978-1066679805

The Odyssey brought to life as a graphic novel – The 156 page, collection of Odysseus – In Defiance of the Gods! Books One to Four

About the Author
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John Freeman

John is the founder of downthetubes, launched in 1998. He is a comics and magazine editor, writer, and Press Officer for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He also runs Crucible Comic Press.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine and Overkill for Marvel UK, Babylon 5 Magazine, Star Trek Magazine, and its successor, Star Trek Explorer, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics; and has edited several comic collections and graphic novels, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”, and Hancock: The Lad Himself, by Stephen Walsh and Keith Page.

He’s the writer of comics such as Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs”, with Dave Hailwood.