Written/Drawn/Lettered by Andi Watson
Book designed by Patrick Crotty
Published by RH Graphic (Random House) in 2020.
. . .
"A child who eats thornberries and listens to talking snails. It is no surprise that the forest swallowed you whole."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
A boy named Kerry is journeying home with medicine to save his mortally ill parents back on the farm. He decides to take a shortcut through a sinister enchanted forest which turns out to not be a shortcut, because the forest is ruled by an evil spirit who takes over the minds of people, animals, and monsters. Fortunately, Kerry meets a talking, floating, one-eyed boulder that offers to lead him through the dark forest. Adventures ensue.
Kerry and the Knight of the Forest is a straight-ahead children's fantasy comic book of some two-hundred fifty pages of scratchy, leafy, woodsily charming art, in which a selfless boy has an extended philosophical/moral dialogue with a cynical cyclops boulder while adventures happen. (Weirdly, it reminded me of Roger Ebert's interpretation of the Michael Mann action thriller Collateral, but without the brutality. Ebert basically describes it as an extended dialogue between a killer and their victim embedded within an action flick.) It is totally unpretentious. There's action, and danger, but no gore, no blood. Small children will like it. Adults will appreciate its willful, well-intentioned, mildly delusional optimism.
Even though this is by a British creator, and is therefore, presumably, drawing on American and European comics, it actually ends up playing, for me, in the style of an 'uncompressed' manga. It's cinematic. The pacing is superb. I inhaled it in one sitting, and, even though I do not share its cheeriness, I would recommend it on the strength of its craft alone. It works on a similar wavelength as animated films such as Kubo and the Two Strings, Ponyo, and The Black Cauldron-but not as edgy, not as intense. Kerry and the Knight of the Forest is much mellower, much gentler.
Really, I have no criticisms of Kerry and the Knight of the Forest, just a different outlook. This book is exactly what it wants to be, in defiance of the gloom and doom of this world. No one can take that away from it.
