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Eldwyn was quite unlike one’s typical fire-breathing, knight-battling dragon. He was instead entirely laid-back, snacking on cheese doodles, puffing on weed, and blurting out random, occasionally profound philosophical statements. Other evil dragons spent their time kidnapping princesses, while the protagonist simply “hung out,” smoking. Fellow dragon Dendryl abducts Princess Summerbliss, while Britsyl invades and runs off with Princess Cellulite. When they celebrate their conquests at the local Ye Olde Dragon Bar and Grille, Eldwyn just watches it all “glassy-eyed” and says that he digs it.
All of the dragons party late into the night, and in the morning, Dendryl is attacked by “one of the bravest knights in the land of Gwent.” The knight slices off the dragon’s hands with his sword. As a rather silly battle ensues, the knight, using a fancy summersault, kills Dendryl, first striking his leg and then deep into his brain. Princess Cellulite’s rescue is next after an embarrassingly awkward hesitation. Dragon Britsyl’s guts are strewn all over Wales, throughout London, and, in some cases, as far away as France and Spain. Eldwyn, peering out from his cave with deep red eyes and “heavy eyelids,” takes a puff from his joint, coughs, wheezes, and drags himself back into his cave.
The unique graphic design—including the use of a specifically stylistic font resembling Medieval, knight-and-dragon-period aesthetics—immediately places the reader into the quirky and fun time and place of Soling’s fire-breathing, laid-back Eldwyn. Battles rage between knights in shining armor and the dragons they seek to slay, as princesses are rescued and new heroes throned. Here, ironically and delightfully unexpectedly, our title character, Eldwyn, throughout the graphic novel, is much more concerned with smoking his marijuana and subsequently getting high than just about anything else, including the kidnapping of damsels in distress.
Soling and his team of illustrators excel in the specific graphic novel genre of the “cracked fairy tale,” sometimes referred to by fans as “fractured tales.” Meant for an adult audience, this novel—like its counterparts both within the Rumpleville Chronicles series and elsewhere among the similar literary landscape—can appear to the uninitiated as being appropriate for young children, yet readers will quickly become accustomed to the adult nature of the text’s specifics. While other, perhaps less eccentric dragons do battle knights and kidnap princesses in these pages, Eldwyn is content to simply “hang out... and smoke dope.” It goes without saying that this characterization is not something one’s ordinary parent, caretaker, or classroom teacher would wish to impress upon any child’s growing, developing mind.
Readers who are not easily offended and have the tools and knowledge necessary to know that this title, and others by this series’ author, are intended for a mature audience may find this type of literature oddly satisfying in a way that tamer fiction may not be. This is the type of work that is boldly unique, uncanny in its zany presentation, and loose and free in its flagrant “breaking of the rules.” Soling is a truly gifted master of the genre.