Castle Waiting by Linda Medley

 

This one was actually a re-read for me, because this comic is always such a delight to come back to. It's not a wildly dramatic quest, there's no big battles, and if you're looking for action and adventure this one might not be for you. But it *is* about fairy tales, and the spaces in between them.

Castle Waiting starts with a classic fairy tale- the princess falls asleep for ages and ages, and all the servants in the castle with her. Then a handsome prince shows up and wakes her, and she agrees to be his bride and rides off into the sunset and... well that was abrupt. What are the people left behind by this magical happy ending supposed to do?

So the castle sits, without a ruler, and the people get on with life, as even people in the background of fairy tales must do. Some people seek their fortune elsewhere, others come traveling by and end up staying, and so the dusty castle becomes home to a hodgepodge of characters who each have had their own way of weaving in and out of fairy tales, but at the castle they're pretty much just getting on with the daily business of living.

Good art is important to me, in comics, as an artist. Maybe not just objectively good art, but an art style that really clicks, and the art style here is beautiful. People are drawn in a way that is achingly human, not fashion-model glorious, but interesting and with a variety of differing facial features and body types. The attention to detail in the environment and architecture is no less, but for me it's the realism in the character designs that really hits me as lovely.

Our story does loosely follow a pregnant woman fleeing a bad situation, who ends up finding a weird safe haven in the castle with its assortment of strange characters. Over time we get to hear the backstory of a number of them, while the main character's past remains shrouded and only hinted at until it finally comes back to haunt her. There are a mix of genders in the characters, but the whole story does feel to me like a feminine one- the plot is driven by problems that are uniquely those of women trapped in a patriarchal society, and very much acknowledges the struggles of that. Definitely a good feminist read, but also I'd recommend this to anyone who wants to see the lives between the pages of fairytales.