Felicia Day has built a career out of making nerdiness cool. The actor, whose creds include hit series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, launched into Internet stardom in the 2000s as the writer and star of the web series The Guild, about the misadventures of an online gaming group, which later became a comics series. Her first full-length original graphic novel, The Lost Daughter of Sparta (Gallery, Mar.), drawn by Rowan MacColl (Nightmare in Savannah), imagines an origin story for Philonoe, an obscure heroine from Greek mythology—the fourth sister of Helen of Troy. The work “spin[s] an ancient Greek myth into an enchanting and unexpected love story… Peppered with knowing references to classical mythology, it’s a smart and spirited retelling.”

PW talked with Day about myths, monsters—and making it as a mom in comics.

How did you get interested in writing a graphic novel?

I wrote comic books for The Guild, but I never dipped my toe back in until I had a kid. My reading pattern shifted because I had horrible postpartum issues. I could not sleep if I watched or read anything too stimulating. I had to read the most boring thing I could find for my brain, which at first was physics. But that was existentially angsty—because we're insignificant, really, in the grand scheme of things. Then I turned to Greek mythology and history. I've always loved mythology. My daughter is named after a Greek muse.

I found this character who sparked my imagination, Philonoe. The graphic novel format was best, because I wanted to tell the story simply and universally, like the tale of Hercules or Jason or any of our beloved Greek heroes.

The journey I created for Philonoe is very personal to me. I was a homeschooled girl and I went out into the world without knowing anything about it. Some things seemed like fundamental truths to other people and yet didn't make sense to me, especially around gender.

Were there mythological characters you absolutely wanted to get into the story?

All the antagonists—who aren't really antagonists—fascinated me. I wanted to explore some angles with them and deconstruct, for example, what someone might think of when they hear of Medusa. Echidna is special to my heart. I'm a mom, so the story around her is touching to me.

But at the end of the day, Philonoe really is me. The things that she's going through are things I noticed when I was telling my kid fairy tales and mythological stories, about how women are presented. A girl who sees princesses being married off without their consent is going to translate that to modern existence, maybe not literally, but in an emotional way and in expectations.

Everything in society is arbitrary. It’s very Plato's cave, right? You're born and you see shadows, you think the world is the shadows. With today’s media and AI, it's even more important to analyze what truth is outside of the warped lens you’re given. It’s like a seven-layer bean dip of reality we're living in now.

How did you find the artist, Rowan MacColl?

Kelly Sue DeConnick, who is a comics luminary, used to do a #VisibleWomen hashtag on X or Twitter, and every year I’d see this hashtag go by and all these wonderful artists from around the world share their work. I emailed Kelly and went through about a thousand artists that she compiled over the years. Rowan's style was exactly what I wanted. It’s fresh and not particularly cutesy.

There are a couple of panels that literally make me tear up, mostly around the relationship between Philonoe and Artemis. I love the way she developed those two characters together and their journey from beginning to end.

What do you hope readers take away from this book?

We all deserve to be ourselves, to be supported and have space to realize who we are. I think that's pretty baseline, but it doesn't seem that society always likes people being true to themselves. That's also the gift I'd like to give to my daughter, who read it in one sitting and was excited to see a dedication to her in the beginning. It was kind of like, as a mom, I'd made it.