(courtesy Simon & Schuster)
Now five collections into the wonderful world of Wallace the Brave, it struck me as the latest volume, The Great Pencil Quest, thumped onto my doorstep (figuratively at least; apartments aren’t known for their door steps) it struck me once again how much we need cartoonists like Will Henry in our lives.
Much like Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts) and Patrick McDonnell (Mutts), Henry has a way of drilling down into the quirky goodness and imaginative wonder of being alive and to make it sing even more beautifully than it already is in comic strips that feel, each of them, like a wondrously escapist trip into the delights of what it means to be human.
That matters whatever age you are, of course, but it really matters when you’re an adult, and life with all of its demands and disappointments, worries and concerns, saps the joy out of you despite your best efforts to hang onto the giddy optimism of youth.
What Wallace the Brave, and does with visual creativity and humour-laden whimsy is remind us how incredibly wonderful life can be, and that while the day-to-day world can be pretty pedestrian that how you are live that out is entirely affected by how you see it and thus, how you respond to it.
Take the time that garrulously adventurous Wallace and his far more timid bestie Spud discover that Mrs Macintosh, their teacher in the small New England coastal town of Snug Harbor, has just got a new pencil sharpener.
Not that exciting, right? Oh, you are wrong, so very, very wrong.
In the endlessly possible world of Wallace the Brave, the arrival of this piece of relatively mundane stationary becomes a supremely exciting development, a chance for Spud to sharpen the giant pencil known as “Big Betty”, and even when it looks like their breathlessly grand plans will be thwarted, they don’t give up with Spud treating their quest like something out of Lord of the Rings. (“And so”, he says to himself, “Spud left the Shire.”)
But it’s not just in the classroom (where slingshots are used to convey Tootsie Rolls across the desk-filled void) that Wallace, who is the excitable optimist we all need to be, really comes into his life enlivening own.
When Wallace, Spud, Amelia and Rose find a disused dinghy on the scruffily sandy seashore, they don’t just pretend to sail but talk about goblins and how they haven’t “been seen in these parts for decades”.
Sure you can picture yourself sailing on the waves but imagining Snug Harbor goblins afoot? That’s a whole other level of imaginary diversion and one that marks Wallace as a joy and a delight and someone you absolutely need to have in your life.
Wallace, and by extension his friends, finds so much wonder in the simplest of things.
Pockets full of birdseed? Why, you’ll birds swarming all over you in happy abandon and who doesn’t love that? (They are very cute birds.) Imagining what life might be like for a cabbage tipped into a dumpster? Worry not because with sufficient creativity, it becomes a story of a cabbage coming to life when an unholy lighting bolt strikes it.
Or how about turning a walk in the woods in a spot Lord Licorice in candyland? Sure, trees and animals are fun but reimagined as something colourfully and sweetly reimagined, they become something else entirely and speak to the spirit of adventurous joy that percolates through every last frame of Wallace the Brave generally but The Great Pencil Quest in particular.
There’s something innately restorative about going with Wallace anywhere.
Every moment is magic, every cold night a chance to go somewhere you shouldn’t but really need to go, and even if friends like Spud aren’t always onboard, you know they love the idea of Wallace being around because life is just better with him there.
Wallace is all the fun and wonder of childhood poured into one tenaciously out-there boy who isn’t by life’s mundanities and ordinariness but who treats it all as a chance to see and experience in a way that all half-glass-full and completely expecting of good, not bad things, to happen.
All of this imagination and adventure comes buoyantly and happily alive with Henry’s artwork too which conjures a safe and comfy hometown when life isn’t banal or small but big and wondrous and able to go to extraordinary places because there’s so much love and belonging to be had.
Wallace’s parents are a quirky, hip joy, his younger brother is hilariously weird and all the townsfolk from the teacher to the shopowner epitomise why Wallace feels safe away to do the outrageously fun things he does.
The Great Pencil Quest is proof, if we needed it, that living in the world of Wallace the Brave is what we all need and that without it, all the colour, fun and possibility drains from the world because we forget how incredibly alive and imaginatively wonderful the world can be if we only let ourselves see it that way.
Filled with imagination, snappily hilarious writing and cosily colourful and clever artwork, Wallace the Brave is the tonic we all need because it reminds of all the good things that can happen to us regardless of the age we are, and that yes, while Wallace has the edge by still being in the thick of everything-is-possible childhood, we can all still find the magic in the everyday and be all the better for it.