Naturally we also get to spend a lot of time with Wallace’s weird younger bug-eating brother Sterling and his long-suffering but fun parents who while they have to enforce fairly normal rules like wearing clothes and going to school on the first day after summer break, are also not averse, in this case Wallace’s cool surfing mum, to joining their sons on the second floor of the house to soak an unsuspecting father and husband with water or attending Wallace’s annual end of the school year, shoe toss into the water: Simply put, reading a Wallace the Brave strip, or ideally as many as you can get your hands on, is like bike riding with your friends on a summer’s day through the countryside or, perhaps, searching for a fish-man coming ashore to sell you vacuum cleaners?Īh yes, that is another joyful part of Wallace the Brave – its capacity for playfully OTT flights of fantasy when you imagine a simple water puddle leads through a portal to another dimension or that Bigfoot and mermaids hang out by the seaside drinking coffee or what it might be like to bring the beach inside to the pinball parlour.Īll these imaginative drops of speculatively silly joy are part and parcel of Are We Lost Yet?, a collection that takes us back to Snug Harbor and Wallace, besties Spud, riven with anxiety and often trailing along nervously in his BFF’s wake, eager rulebreaker Amelia and newcomer Rose, a nerd who knows things and is the rule-observant to everyone else yang (she’s even a hall monitor for goodness sake!) If you note a sense of optimism and hopefulness in a title that would usually cause some alarm (no one likes losing their way, right?), then you’ve nailed the very essence of this wondrously lovely comic strip which harkens back to the types of carefree childhoods evident in the comic strips like Peanuts, Calvin & Hobbes (with which it shares a lot of surreal-adventures-of-a-super-game-for-anything-young-boy DNA) and Cul De Sac.
Snug Harbor, in which the adventures of Wallace McLellan are set, draws much of its inspiration from Jamestown, and it’s honestly a delight to return to this piece of cosy small town America in the latest Wallace the Brave collection, Are We Lost Yet? If you’ve forgotten what that’s like, and honestly, it’s a hard thing to do hang onto (though not possible), then one way to get it back, at least for the time it takes to read 171 pages of comic strips is to dive into a Wallace the Brave collection, a love letter to the surreal innocence and fun of childhood by Will Henry (the pen name of William Henry Wilson, whose own growing up took place in the town of Jamestown, Rhode Island. One of them is that sense of carefree abandonment that comes with a loving childhood and secure family home – no matter how awful the world around us might be, and for this reviewer there were bullies everywhere 24/7 from kindergarten through to the final year of high school, you can take refuge in the endless possibilities and wonder of being a kid.
There’s a lot of things we gain on our headlong rush to adulthood – increased self-choice, that special someone (hopefully), personal and career fulfillment all of them mostly good and wonderful things – but there are some very precious things we lose.
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