We Called Them Giants: A Fairytale at the End of the World

WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Proceed at your own risk!

We Called Them Giants, the new young adult graphic novella from the creators of the TTRPG isekai comic DIE, is part post-apocalypse story, part fairy tale. Its resourceful heroine Lori awakes one day to find she is one of a few people left after a Rapture-like event, reinforcing what a lifetime of foster care taught her: everybody leaves. Lori quickly befriends two fellow survivors, the young naïf Annette and elderly pessimist Beatrice. Together, they face all manner of threats and unknowns. In town, there are the Dogs (a roving gang who wear carrion-esque bird masks) and Wolves-with-a-capital-W (mysteriously returned to Britain); in the nearby woods are giants. 

Unlike standard fantasy giants, these giants are overtly alien in both their origins and their visual language. Their bodies and dwellings, which Stéphanie Hans paints in vivid shades of ruby red and emerald green, disturb the dull gray landscape. While they may be vaguely humanoid in shape, their designs also evoke natural elements like feathers and geodes – at once familiar and profoundly Other. Hans’ compositions almost constantly constrict, communicating the horror that comes with living in the shadow of something almost too massive to comprehend. When splash pages allow a moment’s breath, the breath is a gasp—either in awe of the world’s emptiness or how the giants have filled it. 

Spiritually, however, these are still very much fantasy giants, and We Called Them Giants is, at its heart, a fairy tale. Like many a fairy tale heroine, Lori lives in a town at the edge of the woods, her world disturbed by wolves and giants. Other tropes—the scavenger gang and rapture-esque event—are borrowed from sci-fi. Early on, Kieron Gillen’s narration playfully alludes to “Jack and the Beanstalk,” noting that the “rapture” did away with most of the food but spared the beans. While there are certainly aspects of “Jack and the Beanstalk” (particularly in the personality of the giants) and other fairy tales, We Called Them Giants isn’t a retelling. Rather, Hans, Gillen, and letterer Clayton Cowles are telling a new fairytale for the present day. 

This is clear not only from its blunt moral on the final pages but the construction of its characters and settings. Lori’s friends and enemies are often one-dimensional in terms of depth and development. Yet unlike stock fairy tale characters—or, indeed, the protagonists of Cormack McCarthy’s post-apocalypse novel The Road—they are named. This may seem like a small detail, but points to the comic’s greater struggle to satisfy the expectations of both fairy tale and post-apocalyptic sci-fi genres. Fairy tales and The Road are both successful in part because their characters are often nameless and archetypal. In We Called Them Giants, both Annette and Beatrice function allegorically, representative of the optimistic naiveté of childhood and cynicism of adulthood that the adolescent heroine Lori lives between. But while a character called “The Old Woman” might be anyone and still satisfy a similar role, Beatrice is specific. (Given the comic’s occasionally religious themes, her name evokes the Beatrice Portinari, who guides Virgil to Paradise in Dante’s Divine Comedy.) The same may be said of character design. As Scott McCloud writes in Understanding Comics, “The more cartoony a face is… the more people it could be said to describe… [W]hen you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face–you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of a cartoon–you see yourself.” While the bird masks make most of the Dogs amorphous, Hans’ painterly style and character designs add further specificity and personality. In naming several of its characters, giving them distinct visual identities, and placing them in a quasi-sci-fi space, We Called Them Giants creates an expectation of depth that it never wholly satisfies. This extends to the comic’s worldbuilding and lack thereof. While the science fiction genre tends to embrace explanation, Lori and reader alike remain ignorant to many of the comic’s central mysteries (e.g. what caused the “rapture”). This general vagueness is partially demanded by the constraints of fairy tales and in part by We Called Them Giants’ compact graphic novella format. But it is also central to the larger thrust of the narrative, as Lori learns to accept living with the unknown—especially our limited ability to know one another. 

Gillen’s prose and dialogue, like the comic’s visual landscape, is stark without sacrificing beauty or sentiment. We Called Them Giants also broaches difficult subjects like faith, patriarchal violence, and foster care without speaking down to its teen readership. Some subjects, like Britain’s ongoing cost-of-living crisis, play at the narrative’s periphery, anxieties about hunger and electricity safely displaced onto a fantastical setting. And much like DIE, We Called Them Giants finds hope in a seemingly doomed world, at a time when hope feels akin to rebellion.