Rachel Smythe Books

Rachel Smythe changed what a comic could be. A self-taught artist from New Zealand, she launched Lore Olympus on Webtoon in 2018, retelling the myth of Hades and Persephone in a modern Olympus of office towers, group chats, and nightclubs. It became the most popular webcomic of all time, passing 1.1 billion reads with millions of weekly subscribers at its peak, and won the 2022 Eisner Award for Best Webcomic. For a huge slice of the romantasy audience, especially readers who came up through BookTok and fanfiction, Lore Olympus was the gateway drug into the Hades and Persephone obsession that publishing has been chasing ever since.

The premise is simple and the execution is not. Persephone, a sheltered goddess of spring newly arrived in Olympus, meets Hades, the awkward, lonely king of the Underworld, at a party. What follows spans years of slow-burn romance, office politics among gods, family dysfunction, and one of the most carefully handled trauma storylines in popular comics. Smythe depicts Persephone's assault by Apollo and its long aftermath with a seriousness that earned the series real credit, treating recovery as a story worth telling rather than a plot device to move past.

What defines Smythe's work is color as emotion. Hades is blue, Persephone is pink, and the palette does half the storytelling: rage reads as red bleeding into a panel, intimacy as two colors softening into each other. Her line work is loose and expressive, sometimes deliberately rough, and the honest criticism is that the pacing sagged in the middle years, with weekly episodes that could feel like they advanced the plot by a single conversation. Reading in collected volumes solves most of that problem, which is one reason the print editions became New York Times bestsellers.

The series concluded after more than 280 episodes, and the final print collection, Volume Eleven, arrived from Del Rey collecting episodes 261 through 280 with a bonus short story. Eleven volumes now sit on shelves as the complete saga, which makes this the rare webcomic you can binge start to finish in either format.

On our spice scale, Lore Olympus sits around 2. It is sensual rather than explicit, heavy on longing, charged glances, and tasteful fade-outs. The heat lives in anticipation, and Smythe is genuinely great at anticipation. Content-wise, be aware it deals with sexual assault, abusive relationships, and family trauma, all handled with care but very much present.

Smythe herself has stayed relatively private through all of it, letting the work carry the fame. Interviews with her tend to focus on process and craft rather than personality, which in the influencer age is almost radical, and it means the parasocial energy her readers might have pointed at her flows into the characters instead. That restraint extends to the page: for a creator with an audience in the millions, the comic never chases trends or panders, and its emotional beats land because they were clearly made for the story rather than the algorithm. Hades and Persephone became the internet's couple partly because their creator got out of the way.

Her influence on the genre is hard to overstate. The current flood of Hades and Persephone retellings in romantasy publishing, and the broader Greek myth romance boom, owes an enormous debt to Lore Olympus proving the appetite existed at massive scale. She also demonstrated that a webcomic could function as a romance novel, with slow-burn pacing measured in years rather than chapters, and a generation of readers who now expect their myth retellings to have both bite and softness learned that expectation from her.

Start with Volume One in print, or from episode one on Webtoon if you prefer scrolling. Read it for the romance, stay for what it becomes: a story about two damaged people learning they deserve gentleness. If your favorite part of romantasy is the ache before the kiss, Smythe wrote the definitive version of it, one pastel panel at a time.