Not Just For Kids: ‘Down the Mysterly River’ by Bill Willingham

Down the Mysterly River

A Novel

Bill Willingham, with illustrations by Mark Buckingham

Starscape: 336 pp., $15.99, ages 10 and older

Bill Willingham is a comics icon, best known for his imaginative fairy tale mash-up series, “Fables,” which begins with the Big Bad Wolf as sheriff of a town populated by Jack (of beanstalk fame), Beauty (and the beast) and the long-divorced couple Snow White and Prince Charming. Published by the DC Comics imprint Vertigo, the series earned the author multiple Eisner awards after its 2002 premiere and catapulted him to his current status as one of the bestselling international writers of comics.

Now Willingham is turning his attention to middle-grade readers with a tangentially themed fish-out-of-water tale that subtracts most of the pictures and is much more of a true fable. In “Down the Mysterly River,” a lost Boy Scout named Max the Wolf is cast in the lead role of a woodlands adventure populated with talking animals.

“Max the Wolf was a wolf in exactly the same way that foothills are made up of real feet and a tiger shark is part tiger, which is to say, not at all,” Willingham writes in the book’s humorously intriguing opening line. By and large, the rest of the book adopts a similarly playful tone as Max attempts to figure out where he is and in the process befriends Banderbrock, a warrior badger; Walden, a kindly bear; and McTavish, a terrifically feisty and boastful cat described as “30 pounds of pure meanness, spit and bile.”

Pen and ink drawings at the beginning of each chapter from “Fables” artist Mark Buckingham subtly underscore each animal’s temperament and the many predicaments in which they unwittingly find themselves. The book’s front and back endpapers double as a map for the Heroes Wood where the action takes place.

For reasons unknown at the book’s beginning, all four characters are being hunted by a group called the Blue Cutters, so called for the blue swords they use to slice and dice threatening individuals into characters more to their liking. It’s a plot similar to “The Stepford Wives,” with a more medieval setting and kids and animals subbed in for suburban housewives.

Like the best quest stories, this unlikely cast makes for great dialogue, especially between the badger and the cat, whose exchanges are riotously adversarial. Readers are sure to love McTavish, who regularly unleashes outrageous one-liners. “On my worst day,” he boasts to the badger, “blind in both eyes, with three broken legs, busted teeth, and a bad case of runny-butt from eating too much rotting carrion, I could still beat a pretty-boy like you, all the while sparing enough attention to compose love songs for each of my three dozen mistresses.”

Max serves as the group’s level head. Relentlessly earnest, he leads with his Boy Scout training and an affinity for mystery similar to Sherlock Holmes, constantly deducing conclusions from his environment. Readers are privy to additional information, as the book volleys between Max and his crew and what the Cutters are scheming.

A talk with an oracle, who turns out to be an aspen tree, and a character called the Eggman, who claims to have created the world in which Max and his friends are traveling, eventually lead the group down the Mysterly River toward the answer Max is seeking to the question: Why are he and his pals even in the Heroes Wood since none of them seems to recall how they got there?

The answer is the best part of an already wonderful book.

susan.carpenter@latimes.com