A Garden of Spheres – Book One
Cartoonist: Linnea Sterte
Publisher: Peow2
Publication Date: December 2025
A Garden of Spheres — Book One is a new god-driven, nascent-society-contemplating, extra-long-spanning total stunner of a graphic novel, and it’s out this month in the U.S. from publisher Peow2. It’s also the work of multi Eisner-nominee and Angouleme Prix Revelation winner Linnea Sterte, and it is, simply put, a triumph of ethereal storytelling.
Sterte’s artwork in this book is beautiful in a way that might leave a reader content to wander its pages, watching its characters and landscapes pass by as one might observe the clouds in a vast and bright sky. Clearly, I’m struggling to articulate the way this art makes me feel. My purple prose aside, perhaps its best to just note that as I read A Garden of Sphere, I found myself equally likely to linger on plot-consequential sequences as I was on a single stunning panel of a bird chirping on a branch, or even just a lonely tree in a field. The book is the sort of gorgeous where it really doesn’t matter at a certain point what Sterte is putting on the page, you’re there for all of it.
As a story, it’s tempting to call A Garden of Spheres non-linear, closer to a narrative poem than a structured short story or novel, but it’s not that, not quite. It is structured in vignettes to an extent, yet as you move through them, thematic unity becomes clearer. The first half or so of the book is certainly loose with its storytelling, giving us glimpses of the most consequential moments in our lead character’s eternal life. But as I got the third act of this story, the arc came into focus.
A Garden of Spheres reads like a slow journey from the earliest days of wispy, lost gods trying to figure themselves and their roles in the world out (to varying degrees) right on through to the evolution of organized societies. And so too as it nears its end, A Garden of Spheres becomes a more traditional — or at least recognizable — sort of fantasy comic, one of dragons and warfare and technology. And it does so without its artwork sacrificing any of its precision or delicacy.
And while I’ve devoted the bulk of my words here to the art, I also found the prose and dialogue on the page to be sparing yet memorable, with beauty found in how concise it manages to remain. There is, in fact, one exchange that I’ve thought about each day since reading, in which one god realizes, “Ah, I can fly.” And another replies, “Most people can.” As if to convey — with no more than seven words, mind you — the casualness with which the gods realized and subsequently wielded their powers, and how common it must have seemed in the earliest days of existence.
I also realize that I have perhaps spent the bulk of this review contemplating what I’ve just read, rather than evaluating it, and that’s deliberate. A Garden of Spheres is a comics achievement, both in how it tells its story as well as the lofty peaks of artwork it uses to convey it. It gets my full recommendation, and I don’t have any notes. We are all better for its publication.
The last bit I’ll note, however, is that it also joins Tongues by Anders Nilsen and Drome by Jesse Lonergan as 2025 magnum opuses that start with gods, take place in the early days of civilization, and confidently repurpose the details and feelings of our well-worn mythologies. In this way, 2025 has been a very good year for the grandiose.
A Garden of Spheres – Book One is now available
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