Two hundred years ago, humans drove the dragons from the islands of May. Now, the last of the dragons rises to wreak havoc anew—with only a healer’s daughter and a kite-flying would-be hero standing in its way.
See below for a review of Jane Yolen and Rebecca Guay’s graphic novel The Last Dragon.
I’ve been a fan of Jane Yolen since I read her Pit Dragon Trilogy in junior high (though I haven’t read the fourth book in the series that came out almost 20 years later; I heard it didn’t quite live up to the rest of the series.) She has a quirky, matter-of-fact style that works very well in the story of a matter-of-fact village trying to deal with a dragon.
I’ve also been a fan of Rebecca Guay for a long time; her images are beautiful and etherial, and I’ve even collected a few of the cards she drew for Magic the Gathering (I played a little in college, but never got into it, but I still keep a collection of cards with art that I really like.)
When I heard the two of them were collaborating on a book about a dragon, I knew it’d be excellent.
And for the most part it was, though there were one or two things that kept it from being perfect, but that didn’t spoil the book as a whole.
I expected the story would be about the last dragon, a misunderstood creature that struggles to survive until it’s found by people who see past its fierce exterior to its true heart and it finds friends and new family in the end.
Not even close.
The dragon eats a baby at one point. (We don’t see it, but it happened.) It eats people and it doesn’t take long for it to eat a character you like, so it’s not misunderstood, it’s a monster.
The story has a twist-that’s-not-really-a-twist anymore, where the tomboy daughter doesn’t wait to be rescued, she figures out how to rescue herself. It’s a trope, but it’s done very well here, because we like her and we hope she does well.
One of the tropes I wasn’t expecting was that the hero-who-turns-out-to-be-a-cowardly-fraud actually ends up being someone we like too (usually we’d hate him and just root for the heroine, but he’s very likable, and not completely useless.)
One of the only two things I didn’t care for was the anachronisms in the dialog. One boy says “cool!” when he hears something he likes, and seeing how this is a pretty solidly medieval story, with softly antiquated language, the modern phrases that crop up a couple times are a little odd.
But I think the story is targeted to a slightly younger reader, who isn’t going to mind, or even notice, those kinds of slips. And the story really is very fun.
The only other thing I didn’t like was the occasional slip in the artwork.
For about 95% of the book Guay’s art is completely gorgeous. The colors are rich, the figures have this lovely balance to them, she does wonderful things with texture and faces. I’d want to have some of these pages framed, they’re really beautiful.
But every once in a while there’s a slip. It looks different enough that I assumed for a few panels she got a stand-in artist, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. The art in those panels looks rushed and a little sloppy, very noticeably so.
I’m only guessing, but I think Guay didn’t have enough time at those spots to finish. Her artwork must take forever, going by all the gorgeous detail she puts into it. Printing deadlines can take a toll on the best artists, but I wish they’d given her more time in those places.
But, if it’s a choice between having a few pages looking a little bad, or having every page look mediocre in order to keep the quality consistent overall, I’ll take a few rushed pages, just so the other pages can be as beautiful as they are.
I wish the excerpt pages we got were a little better, the story doesn’t really start until about ten or fifteen pages in, and that’s where the beautiful stuff starts. But if you’re not familiar with Guay’s work (she’s often referred to as “celebrated artist Rebecca Guay” but not everybody wanders in the same circles) make sure to check out her collection of Magic: The Gathering prints if you want to see what she’s capable of.
Intro courtesy of Dark Horse.