Review time! with ‘Danger and Other Unknown Risks’

“The planets align so rare, there’s promise in the air and I’m guiding you”

Ryan North and Erica Henderson had a wildly good (and, I guess, financially successful) run on Squirrel Girl, and now they’ve teamed back up for a new YA-ish graphic novel, Danger and Other Unknown Risks, which is published by Penguin Workshop (yet another Penguin/Random House imprint). Let’s check it out!

First, a rant. This is called a “YA” book, which annoys me. Yes, the protagonist is a YA, and her co-protagonist is a YA, but it annoys me because there’s really nothing that makes this all that YA in the first place. You can call it a “coming-of-age” story if you squint a little, and Marguerite does experience some romantic feelings for the first time, both of which are hallmarks of a YA book, and the villain is older and crustier, allowing Marguerite to be the “spirit of youth” fighting the oldsters, but again, that’s not unique to YA stuff. I guess what bugs me is that because this lacks the markers of “mature” “literature” – gore and sex and cursing – it’s a “YA” book, and I suppose, with the way YA books sell like crack these days, North and Henderson are perfectly happy with that. But this shouldn’t just be YA. Was Star Wars a YA movie? Was King Solomon’s Mines a YA book? Those were just good, solid adventures, but because they star “adults,” they’re not YA. Well, Danger and Other Unknown Risks is an adventure, and I hope it doesn’t dissuade older, maturer adult comic book fans from picking this up simply because the star isn’t an older dude but a younger teenager. Not you guys, though – you’re too smart to ignore a book just because of where it’s shelved at the bookstore!

Because this is a terrific comic. It’s very much in the “hero’s quest” mold, but North and Henderson are very good storytellers, so the adventure itself is compelling and they also know how to subvert it to make it fresher. Marguerite and her talking dog, Daisy, live in a world where magic is a bit out of control, as it exploded onto the world on 1 January 2000 (Y2K was real! just not in the way that you think), and they’re collecting artifacts that will help Marguerite’s uncle, Bernard, bring back the “normal” world. The world is in some chaos, as we see as Marguerite goes through it – she knows one spell, which works differently in each “magic zone” to which she travels, and she has to test each zone (which she does a bit hilariously) before they enter to make sure they can survive in it. Things seem to be decaying around her, slowly but surely, which is why she’s helping her uncle, who’s at his home preparing to cast a big spell. Spell-casting, apparently, hurts the caster a bit, so Bernard needs to prepare for it. Along the way, Marguerite has to pick up an item that exists before the turn of the millennium, and she enters a big box store that is displaced in time and meets Jacin, a security guard who does not dig her job and decides to jump into the future with Marguerite when the time pocket holding the store disappears. She becomes Marguerite’s friend, obviously, and they have more adventures. Of course, Marguerite soon learns that things aren’t exactly what they seem in this world, and she, Jacin, and Daisy have to fight the big villain with reality itself on the line!!!! Oh dear.

What makes this such a fun book is that North and Henderson, as we saw with Squirrel Girl, know how to walk a fine line between an epic adventure and deflating the notions of said epic adventure. Marguerite and Daisy and Jacin know how a quest is supposed to go, so they comment on it as it’s happening, and if a writer can make that clever, the book is better for it, and North and Henderson are clever. Similarly, because we know the basic outline of a quest, we can anticipate some things … which North and Henderson can then subvert, if they so choose (and they do sometimes, and don’t sometimes). It’s all about balancing the adventure of a quest and poking a little bit of fun at the notion as well, and when writers can do that, it’s a good thing. When Marguerite finally figures out what’s going on, North and Henderson do a terrific job making the answer both weirder and bit more pathetic than we might expect. You know how writers have taken old plots from old stories that are written to be epics and just boiled them down to the essential idea, which is usually a bit banal and even ridiculous? North and Henderson do that here, and it works beautifully because it ties into their overall theme of what magic is, what we can learn from it, and how the young need to step forward at some point and take over from the older generation (sorry I’m being vague, but I don’t want to spoil anything). They also make some subtle political points – not in a wildly obvious way, and it’s vague enough that they won’t get raked over the coals by those who disagree with them (who probably aren’t reading the book anyway), but it’s still interesting. There’s a lot going on in this book, in other words, and it’s far deeper than you might expect.

Henderson’s art is superb, as well. Obviously, she has a nice cartoony vibe that works well for a kinetic adventure book, and her characters’ rubbery faces allow them to show off a wide range of emotions, even the quieter ones. Despite the relative simplicity of her faces, she’s able to convey a lot of different expressions just by shifting eyes slightly or cocking mouths slightly, and the effect is terrific. She’s become a bit more detailed over the years, which adds to the beauty of her art, but where she really excels on this book is in the brushwork and the coloring. Her inking just feels lusher than it has in her earlier work, as she adds wonderful texture to clothing, hair, and fur, making the characters in the book come more alive and adding precision to her loose pencils. Meanwhile, the coloring is excellent – she uses shading and gradients to make the world a wild and fascinating place, one we can believe is full of dangerous magic. Occasionally her line work is even looser than usual, but her colors fill in the blanks brilliantly. A few scenes stand out – one that calls for her to be incredibly and intricately detailed, and she nails it, and another where she drops some holding lines and just overwhelms the page with viscous coloring, and it’s a searing image. Henderson is (probably) an underrated artist, but she shouldn’t be after this book. It’s gorgeous.

As you can tell, I really like this book. It’s a great adventure, it’s quite funny, it’s heartfelt, and it’s beautiful to look at. I wouldn’t be surprised to see it show up on a best-of-the-year list (if I get around to doing one!), but we shall see. Do yourself a favor and pick it up!

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆