After years of building one of WEBTOON’s most devoted followings, Lysandra Vuong is closing the book on Covenant—literally. Covenant: The Final Chapter will debut in print rather than digital, a deliberate break from the platform that made the series a hit to ensure the creator’s health and well-being.

Covenant has always been more than genre fare. Weaving shonen-inspired supernatural fantasy with the mythology, ritual, and cosmic weight of Catholic iconography, Vuong built a world where angels, demons, and chosen ones become vessels for something rawer: the long, difficult work of healing from trauma and learning to accept love—queer love, specifically—on one’s own terms. It’s the story Vuong wished existed growing up, one unafraid to name the queerness so often left out of tales about damnation, rejection, and the fear of being unworthy.

Ahead of Covenant‘s print conclusion and accompanying Kickstarter campaign, Vuong sat down with Prism Comics to talk faith, healing, betrayal, and enamel bookmarks.

---

OLLIE KAPLAN: What does it feel like to deliver Covenant: The Final Chapter to readers—is the ending always where you intended to land?

LYSANDRA VUONG: Yes! I have always known what the ending would be from the conception of Covenant; it was the journey there that has changed quite a bit.

KAPLAN: The decision to debut the conclusion in print (before digital) is a significant one for a series, which built its massive following on WEBTOON. What drove that choice, and what do you hope it means for longtime readers?

VUONG: My relationship with WEBTOON is famously tumultuous, and ultimately, I felt betrayed by my digital publisher, so the decision is very much bittersweet. I’m very thankful I was able to find a means to continue and finish Covenant, one in which I feel much more supported in! I hope that longtime readers will understand that the spirit and story of Covenant will still very much be the same, but the change in medium was one I needed for my personal health and well-being.

KAPLAN: You’ve talked about Covenant as a deeply personal story about trauma, love, and the courage to choose your own path. What was the creative spark behind reclaiming these traditional religious aesthetics—and what do you hope readers—especially queer ones—take away from the story?

VUONG: I think the creative spark behind Covenant came from a desire to reclaim imagery and stories that had always felt deeply meaningful to me, even when I didn’t always feel like there was a place for me within them. I grew up being fascinated by the Catholic Bible, its mythology, rituals, aesthetics, and sense of cosmic scale. At the same time, I grew up loving shonen manga and supernatural urban fantasy, and I wanted to create a story that combined all of those influences while making room for the kinds of queer characters and relationships I rarely saw represented in them. In many ways, Covenant became a way for me to explore my own relationship with faith through the lens of fantasy: asking what happens when the institutions and beliefs that shape us fail us, and what it means to choose for ourselves what is sacred.

KAPLAN: How do you view the relationship between healing from trauma and the capacity to accept queer love—in your story and in general?

VUONG: Trauma often teaches us that we are unworthy of love, that our value depends on our usefulness to others, or that accepting ourselves comes at a cost. For many of the characters in Covenant, healing begins when they reject those narratives and allow themselves to be seen and loved as they truly are. I don’t think queer love exists separately from that process. I think, for many people, learning to accept queer love, whether from others or for oneself, is itself an act of healing and self-determination. More than anything, I hope readers, especially queer readers, come away from Covenant feeling that they deserve to define themselves on their own terms, and that they are worthy of love exactly as they are.

KAPLAN: The romantasy and supernatural genres have a long history of using the metaphysical (angels, demons, chosen ones) as allegory for queer experience. Was that tradition something you were consciously in conversation with when building Covenant‘s world?

VUONG: Yes! I was actually deeply upset that the supernatural books I read growing up were very straight. What do you mean this is a story about being rejected for your very core being and fearing a punishment of eternal damnation for it, and it’s not queer whatsoever!? That feeling is definitely one of the things that drove me to make Covenant.

KAPLAN: You famously left a career in mechanical engineering to draw “hot anime characters for a living.” How has your background in engineering influenced your comics creation process?

VUONG: I’m willing to “engineer” almost any solution to my problems in the comics creation process. Anything that can be made efficient via templates, turned into 3d model assets, I will at least try it! Even as a novice to the industry I was creating new techniques and tutorials to utilize art software to its fullest potential and sharing it with my peers!

KAPLAN: Can you tell me more about how you decided on the Kickstarter rewards for this project? Is there a particular reward that you’re extra excited for backers to receive?

VUONG: I have always wanted to make enamel bookmarks! And it makes so much sense to have a physical bookmark to pair with the physical books. 

Check out the Kickstarter campaign for Covenant: The Final Chapter at this link, and look at the preview pages below: