Felicia Day has had a hand in almost every nerdy enterprise you can name. She was a pioneer in gamer-centric streaming content with her web series The Guild. Her YouTube and Twitch channel and content studio Geek & Sundry was Critical Role’s original platform. As an actor, she’s known for fandom-favorite projects including Supernatural, Eureka, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, and she’s also a producer, writer, showrunner, streamer, and podcaster, as well as the author of the New York Times bestsellers You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and Embrace Your Weird.
Her latest project, The Lost Daughter of Sparta, is new territory: an original fantasy graphic novel built around a virtually unknown character from Greek myth. Philonoe, the sister of Helen of Troy, Clytemnestra, and Timandra, is mentioned in passing in one historical source, which mentions an intriguing fate for her, but not the reasons behind it. Day was fascinated with what her author’s note in the book calls a “throwaway line from more than twenty-five hundred years ago.” So she gave Philonoe the story that history and myth never gave her.
Day’s version of the character was born with a facial birthmark that causes her parents, Spartan king Tyndareus and Aetolian princess Leda, to reject her as cursed. When they try to marry her off to secure an alliance, she learns she’s carrying a family curse as well — like all her sisters, she’s fated to betray her husband, because Tyndareus offended the goddess Aphrodite. Desperate for love and approval, Philonoe begs the gods for a way to lift the family curse, but the quest she’s given teaches her that there’s more to life than trying to please powerful men, or be useful or attractive to them.
It’s a scathing, uncompromising fable — and a beautiful, rousing love story. Polygon spoke to Day about how this newly created ancient myth is a personal response to her experiences in movies and television, how she chose artist Rowan MacColl to illustrate the book, and why everybody needs angry stories to push back against the political and personal gender messaging we’re steeping in every day.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Polygon: You’ve worked in so many different forms and formats. Why a graphic novel for this specific story?
Felicia Day: I decided to tell this story because I stumbled upon an obscure mention of a character who is the youngest sister of Helen of Troy. There’s only this one mention of her in all the historical documents we have. And I was so intrigued by that. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was like, “Well, there has to be a story here,” and yet there isn’t. There’s no mention of this character in any other fragments of history that we have now. So it was a very fertile world for me.
When I decided to explore making a hero’s journey for her, I thought about doing a novel — but my daughter only reads graphic novels. She’s 9. And I felt like my fans are comic readers, so it might be a nice bridge between the subject matter and my fans.
Also, I’ve never done one before. And if you look at my career, “Never done it before” is always one of the predecessors of anything I do.
How much were you trying to counter the other kinds of stories your daughter was being exposed to about women’s place in the world?
I started writing this in 2020, because the world had shut down and I was cut off from Hollywood. For the first time in a very long time, I was allowed to tell a story in my mind that would not be useful to Hollywood. I was so used to pitching TV and pitching ideas [that had] to be palatable and marketable and sellable to a certain demographic and certain buyers? This would not be something where I was like, “This is a winner for ABC” or whatever.” So that was part of it.
But also part of it was that my daughter loves mythology because I love mythology. D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths is one of my favorite books from my childhood. I still have that copy, and I shared that with her. I also got some very simple Greek myth [books], and she just happened to really glom onto them. But when I’m telling her these stories, I’m like, “Well, where are the characters she can relate to? Where’s the hero’s journey for a woman in this time period?” And let’s be honest, if you know Greek mythology, the ladies in these do not get treated well. I mean, Herackles murdered his family, his wife too, but he went on to do great things. Theseus is a dick. He dumped Ariadne on an island and just kind of left her there after she got him out of the Minotaur’s lair.
Also, fun fact, people don’t know this, but Theseus actually helped kidnap Helen of Troy when she was 12, so real great dude. So anyway, I wanted to tell a story that would stand with these stories that we love and they’re amazing, but maybe we could have a different perspective.
You’ve said that when you were looking for an artist, you went to Kelly Sue DeConnick, who gave you hundreds of artist portfolios to look at, and you eventually chose Rowan MacColl for the book. What about her work spoke to you?
Rowan really stood out to me because of the way she was able to do monsters and convey emotion. I knew I was going to have some fantastical creatures in this, but I wanted expressions of emotion and style that weren’t infantilized. YA-girl graphic novels have a certain stylistic tone — they’re very wide-eyed. Very cherubic faces. I read all of them with my daughter, believe me. And I wanted something age-universal, but also gender-universal.
I wanted this to work for anybody, because the story is universal to me, the way Heracles’ journey is for everybody. Fairy tales and myths are told in oral tradition to people of all ages, to entertain everybody and teach some of society’s rules to people. That’s what I really wanted to aim for with this book, and I wanted the art style to reflect that. So it’s a little more edgy, a little more adult, just really special and raw in a way that I wanted it to be. And I really feel like she accomplished some beautiful work that took my work to a next level. The way she used red in a very particular way on each page, that was all her, being able to figure that out. I love it.
Did any particular past work of hers convince you?
It was her website — she had a picture of a warrior girl in armor that I just adored, from the Cursed Princesses series. There’s a girl sitting on a decapitated dragon, and she’s looking very Joan of Arc, very morose. It’s so moody and beautiful. I love it. And she’s just so talented at the macabre. If you look at her website, there’s macabre stuff on there, but there’s also feeling in people’s eyes. And I think that’s hard to do, in my experience, looking through literally hundreds of artists. It was really beautiful. So I hope people discover more of her work. I can’t wait to see more of it myself. I would love to work with her again on something.
Did you have any input into the art style or approach? Did you leave it entirely in her hands?
I really trusted her. We did do some character studies, but I automatically liked what she was doing. I was particular with the characters of Artemis and Philonoe themselves, and I wanted to be as faithful as I could to the time of the piece.
It’s technically set in Mycenaean Greece, in the time before Sparta. Even when Homer was writing down The Odyssey, that was an oral tradition of something that was in his almost ancient past, like 500 or 600 years ago. So it’s interesting to have that perspective and try to be faithful, but then also not be reined in by the geography and everything. I tried to do my best. I’m sure classics majors will pick out a lot of things [wrong], and I will learn from them, and if I do another thing set in Greek myth, I will fix it.
The tone of this book is angry in a way that’s going to ruffle some feathers — it’s satisfyingly righteous. You aren’t pulling punches about how men control women, judge them for their bodies, and belittle them if they don’t quietly cooperate.
This story is very personal to me, because I was a home-schooled kid. I grew up very sheltered, and I gravitated toward very geeky things, and geek identity was not even a thing yet. And when I got into the greater world, especially Hollywood, a lot of people judged me for my appearance, and judged me for what they could do with me, versus thinking about me at all.
A lot of times, I went along with that, because I was so innocent and kind of naïve and dumb. I didn’t know my needs were important. And so this story is very feminist, but I wanted to make it accessible for anybody who’s ever felt like, “The way I look defines how other people treat me, and what they want to do with me, and yet maybe those directions are not the way I want to go. How do I find the strength to stay true to myself and to put myself forward on the ladder of importance?” That’s the deeply personal theme I want to convey — not only to my daughter, who I dedicated the book to, but everybody, whoever reads it, whatever their gender or background.
Part of fairy tales is that we teach girls, in the most traditional way, that they are pawns to be used by their family, and there’s never any protest. We have a lot of modern literature that’s trying to turn that upside down, but it kind of gets lost in the repetitiveness of it. So I really sought to try to do this in a different way than other people who came before me and did amazing work.
At the same time, one of the things we’re constantly told as women is “Tone it down, be more demure, don’t step on other people’s feelings, anger in a woman is offensive or unattractive.” Were you worried at all about going full-throttle?
I wish it was even angrier. I mean, at a certain point, what else can we do? Just look at the world right now — I don’t want to get political, but there are certain things that are just appalling in the lack of caring, and the clear entrenched power dynamic of taking advantage of young women. It is just part of history, and it shouldn’t be. We should be beyond this. There should be outrage. There should be people in the streets.
And it’s not just one incident, although there is a big thing going on. But why? Why do we not value our children enough? To potentially put them through this, whatever their gender — but especially girls. When I see the front page of certain websites, like Twitch or YouTube, and I’m shown the most sad, misogynistic places where people are congregating and agreeing with themselves, it’s not an improvement.
The precedent of the internet giving us these pockets of existence where views that are just unacceptable to broader society flourish and therefore bleed over — it’s really sad, because I think it sells a lot of men and women short. We deserve to be able to love each other without being looked at as objects, both of us. We should be able to see each other as human beings. And I think that society sometimes doesn’t allow that, from when you line up boys and girls into two different lines when they’re a kid, or when you see male colleagues going out for drinks afterwards and the women aren’t invited, or if they are, it’s only because somebody wants to hit on them.
It seems like we’re all just going to be at war with each other because our realities are not the same. So if there’s anger in this, that’s okay, because people should fight for themselves. At the end of the day, this is not just a story for women. It’s for anybody who feels like when they step out the door, they’re pegged as something that they don’t want to be, and they’re limited by other people’s perception of them, and they have to fight, or they’re just subsumed. I don’t think anybody deserves to be subsumed.
I would encourage someone to write a hero journey for a man right now, a young boy trying to make it through the world and reflect what’s going on now. I think that there is another story where they should be angry as well, because honestly, it’s just keeping us apart in ways that keep our happiness at bay.
Would you want to write that? You’ve talked about going down endless rabbit holes of research for this book, and looking at hundreds of artists for it. Do you want to do another graphic novel soon?
Oh wow, maybe. I have several projects lined up in front of me, so it’s going to be a year or two before I get to another graphic novel. But I have a couple of ideas — TV ideas that I pitched that were not taken. I actually have faith in myself now. I think my ideas are good. They just might not be Hollywood-appropriate, and that’s okay. Stories can be what they need to be. I guess that’s my new philosophy: I don’t want to just throw away something because it’s not usable by somebody else. That’s kind of the heart of this story. Just because you’re not useful to someone else doesn’t mean you’re not useful to yourself, and I’m going to treat my stories like that.
The Lost Daughter of Sparta is available in bookstores now.
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