Book 1

My kids have reached the age where they love to read anything they can get their hands on—as long as that “anything” is comic books or graphic novels. While I wish they would get more into chapter-books and novels, I’m not too worried about it. I was the same way growing up. In fact, whenever our family would go to the Public Library, I’d rush to the bin where they kept all of the Garfield book. I barely even knew that other books existed.

I say all this because we’ve recently been hitting up the Public Library as a family, and I find us all gravitating to the Tweens’ section of graphic novels. They’re seeking out Minecraft code books and comics, and I’m perusing the shelves looking for what might entertain me. Aside from I Survived: The Sinking of the Titanic, this series by Robert Kondo and Dice Tsutsumi jumped out at me first. What looks like an innocent tale with cute little animal creatures is actually a bleak story of death and danger. It’s quite unique!

In this first book, The Dam Keeper, Pig is a young lad whose father had built a dam at the end of Sunrise Valley as a means of keeping the Fog at bay. This Fog is a darkness that kills everything beyond the wall, including eventually Pig’s own father, leaving Pig to be the Valley’s only Dam Keeper.

A windmill atop the wall blows the fog back when it encroaches, but recently, the fog has been behaving oddly. Like a moving tide, it comes in waves. The longer it stays away, the more powerfully it returns. When Pig’s friend Fox and her pal Hippo visit one day, the wave returns with a vengeance, destroying the windmill and casting all three of them over the wall. Now, Pig figures they have just 9 days before the Fog returns for one final blow against the dam, sending everyone in the peaceful Sunrise Valley to their deaths. The three small animals must find a way to protect the valley before it’s too late.

Now, I get it. Some people might not like the idea of graphic novels, thinking they drain readers of their own imaginations, not letting them create the fictitious worlds themselves within their own minds, instead spoon-feeding them in a way that’s no different than a cartoon or a movie. It’s a fair argument, and one I’d generally be inclined to agree with.

I’ve read enough novels in my life to know what level of description I like in a story and from an author—I know where I want the author’s vision to end and mine to begin. One author in particular that comes to mind as someone who gives his readers just enough description for them to populate his world with their own images is Jack London. Months and even years after the fact, I can smell the grease or see the foliage or feel the cold from his stories. He was a master at it. Not all authors are.

Still, I am also drawn to the artistry of graphic novelists, and I find them far less like a cartoon or movie than like a series of paintings in a museum. The artwork offers an added element of fantasy to their stories, and I as a reader am invited to see their dreams and visions on paper. It’s as much an adventure as would be a Jack London novel…only different.

I read in the backmatter of this book that this story was also made into a short film. I would like to think that the book came before the film—and I definitely hope that I’m not just looking at a bunch of screen shots from the movie here! Some of the magic would be lost, if that were the case. But I’m also not going to pursue it further (because I’d like to read the next installments without being disappointed first!). I don’t want to watch the sausage being made, as they say.

This book might not be good for young children as it contains a number of scary images, yet I think anyone 10 or older would find it a terrifyingly exciting tale worth reading. I certainly did.

©2021 E.T.