4 out of 5

Before I buy a book from creators with whom I’m not familiar, I’ll do a little dive beyond into their past works. At a surface level, this can sometimes be a “red flag,” as it’ll remind me that so-and-so worked on a book I either read or previewed and didn’t care for, or maybe the opportunity to read some previews of these others works will convince me that adding something new to my overstuffed backlog isn’t yet merited.

Supposing this book passes these intense criteria, the next hurdle is when I’m actually reading the darn thing: if I pass the first relative chapter or so and I’m still pleased, I’ll go back through that back catalogue and reassess my assumptions / findings, and also start looking for interviews and whatnot, getting a feel for creatorly intentions or mindsets.

Sometimes, though, a book shortcircuits all of this, and I just know I dig it. And then when I’m reading it, I know I’ll dig everything else the creators have done, and woe to them – they’ve just earned a diehard fan.

Sara Goetter and Natalie Riess have joined that exclusive fandom club with their Cryptid Kids graphic novel, The Bawk-Ness Monster. It is funny – laugh out loud funny – but it’s also heartfelt in that way that the best youth media can be, allowing for a degree of innocence not found in our sad and mopey adult comics, but also also: the story and characters are legitimately interesting! A hunt for a rooster / lochness monster mashup cryptid should be super silly, which it obviously is, and Goetter and Riess spin up a comfy sense of lore around their leads and said cryptid, making the book such that it’s interesting even when it’s not up to hijinx: you want to hang out with the characters; you’re ready to exist in this world.

In short: Friends Penny, Luc, and K agree to band together for a final outing before Penny and her mum move out of town: they’re off to the lake where Penny knows she saw “The Bawk-Ness Monster” as a youthier youth, so that she may see the creature one more time. This requires convincing Penny’s mom – Ronnie – to take them, and some humorously kid-conceived (and diagrammed) plans for distracting her while they track down Bessie. Ronnie isn’t so easily fooled, of course – and besides being protective as a parent, has reason to worry about Penny, and this lake – but an adventure kicks off anyway, as the kids and Ronnie stumble into the plans of Alvida, a cryptid collector, working the lake and not caring if some pesky kids get in the way of her hunts.

“Adventure” is the best term for the genre at play: Goetter and Riess conjure up all the danger-dribbled fun of classic 80s fantasies like The Goonies, but modernized with much more awareness of culture, and kids, and yet without it all feeling especially sanitized for a 2023-era audience. It is, as mentioned, quite funny, but the story also ducks and dodges around some of the expectations we might have for an adventure structure, thanks to the adaptability and intelligence of the kids (and Ronnie), and some really off-the-wall gags. …Our creatorly duo do go back to the well for some gags a little too much, but it pays off in some really great ones later on; similarly, some plot beats feel a bit buffered to – perhaps – reach a page length, but the balance there is that they get character work done in the meantime, so though the pace slows, it’s not without merit.

Artwise, I’d normally report that the Boom!-like bubbly style of cartooning has its limitations, but that’s simply not the case here. Rather, Goetter and Riess – splitting up different aspects of the art – are able to cover dialogue beats, visual gags, puns, action, and scene-setting with equal aplomb, setting things on par with, say, Bryan Lee O’Malley in terms of “this is simple looking but it’s actually not” layouts and pacing. Bright, well-toned colors seal the deal.

Very briefly, I also want to touch on representation, which I’m by no means qualified to speak on, in my cis white male bubble… so I’ll just say: this is always the way I (again, not qualified to speak) feel representation is most effectively presented: as matter of fact. Surely when it’s a central part of the story, it deserves more focus, but when you have characters who (as children in this case) are maybe exploring how they want to present themselves, it’s so nice to just… show that. Just show it as part of the characters, and that they’re accepted by their friends, and parents, and so on. This conceptually scales to when you’re dealing with adults, when it’s not exploration but fact, and etc. Normalize it. There are so many things I interacted with as a kid that I didn’t know were “different” until someone else made sure to tell me they were. Even in these statements, I’m sure I’m minimizing, so, to summarize: I really appreciated the way representation was handled in this book.

And then to summarize everything: this book is great. Sara, Natalie – I’ve already ordered other books from your collective catalogue. Sorry in advance for the obsessive reviews I’ll be writing.