The Weirding Willows, Volume 1: What the Wild Things Are Review

Story by Dave Elliott

Line Art by Barnaby Bagenda and Sami Basri

The Weirding Willows is a blending of fairy tale lands and well-known fantasy stories created by Dave Elliot and drawn by Barnaby Bagenda and Sami Basri. It brings all of literature’s most well-known fantasy worlds into one comic, a concept found in the television show Once Upon a Time and in Vertigo’s Fables. The main character, Alice, is based off of Lewis Carroll’s own Alice, and she lives with her father, Dr. Philippe Moreau, in a mysterious, borrowed mansion in Willowy Weir. Scattered around the mansion are portals to lands like Oz, Wonderland, Elysium, and more.

This is a big concept, and the first volume of The Weirding Willows is primarily expository. The reader is introduced to many different characters, and it’s often difficult to keep track of what character belongs to which name as well as what their original story is. Most of the time, introduces the characters clearly, but he also relies on character profiles in the back of each issue to give everyone a back story and footnotes on the bottom of pages to tell the reader where the characters are from.

When Alice is introduced, she is half-naked (for no apparent reason, other than the fact that she is female) and interrupting her father, who is in a meeting. Dr. Philippe is working with a strange woman dressed in green named Margareet Marche to engineer a species of flying monkeys, with the help of his peer Dr. Henry Jekyll. Dr. Moreau and Dr. Jekyll met while studying together under Charles Darwin, a strange blending of fantasy and real-life history.

Elliot does his best to weave all of these characters together in a way that makes sense, but some of the connections are a little more far-fetched than others. Dr. Moreau’s assistant, Montgomery, is the son of Dr. Doolittle and helps Moreau by capturing animals. Elliot doesn’t even give the reader a chance to connect the fact that both Montgomery and his new captive, Mowgli, can both understand animals before he reveals in the character profiles that Mowgli is Montgomery’s illegitimate child, so the character profiles often do the reader a disservice by eliminating the element of surprise, and it lets Elliot get away with adding plot elements without actually writing about them, which feels like a cop out.

There is a little bit of added confusion to the keeping the characters straight because their names are not always spelled consistently through the chapters in the volume. Sometimes it seems like it’s just a typo, but Mowgli’s fellow captive’s name switches between Kamaria and Kamira throughout the book.

Because the first volume spends so much time introducing these various characters and trying to explain their relationships in a way that makes sense, the plot itself is slow building. The chapters are short, so when this is published serially, I imagine it’s frustrating for the reader to get such small pieces of the story at a time. By the end of the volume, there’s only been one large action sequence, and it’s one that involves a dinosaur, but it doesn’t really come together until the sixth or seventh chapter.

Besides a few spelling inconsistencies, there were also problems with other elements of the story. Dave Elliot was clearly trying to place this story somewhere in the 19^th century, as most of the stories that the characters were pulled from were written then, and the dialogue only reflects this sometimes. It seems that most of the adult characters speak with a little bit of an historic inflection, but Alice’s dialogue is straight out of the 21^st century. She is sassy and sarcastic in a stereotypical “valley girl” sense, and it often clashes with the way the other characters are speaking to each other.

The art in Weirding Willows is appealing and appropriately dark. It’s obvious that there are multiple people working on the line art and color, as the style drastically changes between the first five chapters and chapters 6 and 7, but thematically, the coloring and characterizations expressed through the art are fairly constant.

For all the problems, it’s really not a bad story, and there are a lot of different places it can go. The map in the beginning of the book shows there are a lot of lands that Alice probably hasn’t explored yet, and we only saw glimpses of the Wonderland, the world she visits the most. If the chapters were longer and there was less character introduction, there could be a lot of ground covered by Elliot and his team. I worry especially about the character introduction, as it’s clear they intend to include a lot more characters. While there is potential here, there are a lot of other people who are working with similar ideas that are doing a better job. If you love fairy tales and mash-ups, this is a quick read and it will hold your interest.