Down the Mysterly River,' by Bill Willingham

This was an intriguing and sometimes entertaining read that eventually left rather disappointed. Willingham set the bar pretty high with his excellent Fables series of comic books/graphic novels, where the inhabitants of various fairy and folk tales carve out a life for themselves in New York City. That deft imagination comes through at times in this adventure, where a bright and inquisitive Boy Scout joins up with a talking badger, cat and bear in a strange land as they try to work out where exactly they are and why folks with blue glowing swords are trying to kill them.

It's pretty clear early on that we're working with meta-fiction here and that these are characters drawn from various creations. This really isn't a spoiler, as this is pretty clear from the first few chapters, even though the narrative denies going down that path, even though it is pretty screaming obvious (our young lad, Max, thinks of his past adventures with italicized titles, for heaven's sake).

That's certainly not a bad foundation, but Willingham stubbornly clings to this first-level exploration, never bringing any of the various sides beyond the basics. This is certainly true of the bad guys (and gals), who mainly wander through the story as bogeymen without much in the way of clear or nuanced definition. It's especially bad at the end, when Willingham's analogue in the story lays every thing out on the table (most of which I had guessed) and then gets some knocks against, I don't know, bad copy editors? Fan fiction writers? that probably would have fit in better in an essay about the creative muse than in a young-adult adventure.

What's left -- and what makes Down the Mysterly River a fun read -- are the well-drawn characters who spend plenty of time bickering as they journey across the mystical land. Max is clever, resourceful and a great ad for the Boy Scouts (he doesn't once try to set the forest on fire, which puts him ahead some of The Scouts from my troop). His friends, Banderbrock the badger, the bear Walden and mad Tom cat McTavish, show equal amounts of resourcefulness, though none of them are free of the flaws their creators may have built in to them at the beginning.

I so desperately wanted to like Down the Mysterly River more than I did. The adventure is fun and clearly drawn, and the main characters show plenty of life, but our author didn't push this, or his main idea, hard enough to make it more than a frustrating diversion.