Some months ago, I looked at the first issue of Briar and delved into how we keep coming back to fairy tales. As I mentioned earlier, a distinct panic throbbed through Briar‘s pages with the sudden change of the world from the perspective of Briar Rose, and with the finale of its first arc Christopher Cantwell, Germán García, and Matheus Lopes bring that feeling full-circle.

Briar is a version of the Sleeping Beauty story—one in which her prince never woke her up. This prince and their kingdom instead opted for a warpath that left it blighted and bruised the land while their castle fell into ruin. Hundreds of years later, Briar Rose is awoken with a kiss to an unfamiliar world. But instead of despairing for the lost kingdom, Briar seeks answers. While the lands are at times putrid facsimiles of what she had once known, she trudges through them with the help of Spider, a Norrish woman from the frozen north. We learn the nature of Briar Rose’s sleeping curse and the fairy godmother who placed it—but we’re never certain if this spell was to keep Briar Rose safe or to help her godmother slowly sap the life from their world.

Uncertainty is a part of the charm of Briar. While I do love a good short series, these first four issues culminate in what was going to be the full series. It’s a trend happening more and more often with some comics being green-lit for a four to six issue run before being given a larger issue count to better tell a longer story—Once and Future and Damn Them All being two of the strongest examples of this in recent memory. And, for comics, it does make a lot of sense as some series do only really need a few issues to move us through their stories. Others need that expansion to give us more of the world and to show us some fuller character arcs. Luckily, Briar is one of those series that’s going to continue after that initial four-issue run.

While comics may be an odd industry at times, it’s also adaptive in ways others can’t be due to the monthly nature of its releases. What we’re seeing more recently with series like Briar shows us how to tell comic stories in such a way where we can leave those open-ends for potential stories in the future while still giving the audience a more satisfying conclusion should those next issues never manifest. It’s a strange balancing act, but it’s one Cantwell, García, and Lopes execute perfectly. 

Get excited. Get sleepy.

Drew Barth (Episode 331, 485, & 510) resides in Winter Park, FL. He received his MFA from the University of Central Florida.