bookheaven | The Mushroom Knight Vol. 1 (Reply)

The Mushroom Knight Vol. 1 by Oliver Bly

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The art in this is a hardcore 4 star. Bly knocks it out of the park artistically. It's the storyline where this graphic novel falters. (also CW, on-page death of an animal and on-page bullying of a young girl)

Gowlirot is a sentient mushroom knight riding into the human (giant) realm on his beloved steed, Hopalong the frog. They were tracking a missing faerie only to come up against dark magic, death and betrayal. During the course of this, Gowlirot sees a young girl Leumelle looking for her lost dog, Bean, in the woods. He is forced to borrow something.

Barely surviving his mission, he has to go back to find this girl again and return what he borrowed from her (which was weird and didn't make a whole lot of sense). Meanwhile she's putting up posters all over town in her attempt to find Bean and we see her withdrawing from things she loves as bullying over her weight and glasses ramps up with her peers.

The problem is, Gowlirot hasn't met a sentence he wants to complete. I think Bly tried a little too hard to make him non-human with non-human speech but ended up with a lot of nonsense sentences (not to mention misspelling grisly as grizzly on the first few panels...) So it ends up disjointed, hard to follow and we're not sure what his mission fully is or what it going on in the worldbuilding side of things.. It got a bit better at the end but I'm not sure if that's because it's more with Lem than it is with Gowlirot or is the story finally becoming cohesive.

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