First look: Young teen, old knight in land of 'Dragons'

• Coming-of-age graphic novel 'The Reason for Dragons' is out in May
• The story follows a teen bookworm and an old man who thinks he's a knight.
• Influences range from 'The Goonies' to 'Time Bandits'

Dragons are among us. Maybe.

The possibility of large fire-breathing creatures is just a small aspect of something much deeper in next year's Archaia Entertainment graphic novel The Reason for Dragons, the creator-owned debut of writer Chris Northrop and artist Jeff Stokely.

A boy named Wendell is a loner who keeps to himself and his books, mostly to avoid his biker stepdad Ted, but school bullies one day persuade Wendell to venture into the forest and explore the remnant of the Renaissance fair grounds, which most of the town believes to be haunted.

Wendell doesn't find any ghosts but instead a man in a barn who is convinced he is Sir Habersham, a medieval knight tasked to slay a dragon in the woods.

Weird, right? Well, Wendell begins to wonder if Habersham is on to something when the bookworm begins to hear loud rumblings and the old man's stories start ringing true.

"Wendell doesn't believe Habersham's story about the dragon in the woods, but he wants to believe it," Northrop says. "This gets him caught up in Habersham's quest to kill a dragon, which may or may not even be real."

Along the way in this coming-of-age graphic novel (out in May), the two also find they need this suburban adventure to break down the walls they've built against society, their fathers and even themselves.

Stokely finds Habersham and Wendell are perfect for each other.
"Wendell wants nothing more than to escape into his books of chivalry and adventure, and Habersham is the embodiment of all that — he's a man who rejects everything in society Wendell is hiding from," the artist says.

"This relationship is great, too, because an adult would immediately dismiss Habersham as insane whereas a kid can easily immerse themselves in such a fantasy. Wendell is a teen, though, so there's this great reservation he has about believing Habersham."

A colorist who's worked with Marvel and DC, Northrop hatched the concept with Sean Murphy — who gets a design credit and wrote the introduction — after he moved to Los Angeles and, when spitballing ideas, came upon the idea of a crazy man in the woods no one took seriously except the nerds living in a small New England town.

The biggest influences for him, though, were The Goonies, E.T. and other 1980s films that were for kids yet didn't talk down to them.

"The scripts gave those characters real problems," Northrop says. "Nothing was sugar-coated. All of those movies dealt with kids without parents, or with single parents: Broken families that needed to be fixed, and some outside force or mystery fueling that resolution."

The Goonies also helped inform Stokely's visual vibe in addition to Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Time Bandits.

"There's something really amazing about a child being thrust into these larger-than-life experiences," says Stokely, who got his break drawing a short story for Archaia's Fraggle Rock series. "You get to see their unbridled imagination unfolding before them.

"You also see the real relationships with their families, the way the parents treat them, which is often something parents can't see."

Stokely geeks out for the Middle Ages as well as medieval and Renaissance culture, so he gladly went to a Ren fair for "research."

"The stories and lore of those ages have always intrigued me," the artist says, "probably because America has always been void of true mythology aside from Native American culture, and my family lineage goes back to roots in England around the time of Queen Elizabeth I."

Adds Northrop: "I like that most people have this romantic version of what history was like. A big theme in the book is that people make the past it what they need it to be, not what it really was, so they can deal with the world today."

Northrop says he can definitely identify with his main character. Wendell tries to prove himself to his father figures but would just as well rather sit in a corner quietly than get his hands dirty.

And when Northrop was a teenager, he'd read comics and books full of adventure, but knew his father lived them for real in the Navy and as a world traveler, martial artist and E.M.T.

"I ended up feeling like I had a lot to prove as a teenager in that dynamic," the writer says. "It's no coincidence Wendell faces something very similar in this story with his stepfather."

As a natural escapist, Stokely feels he's a "Wendell," too — "I'd rather draw all day than anything else," says the artist, who brought character to The Reason for Dragons in the Wendell and Habersham's surroundings.

"I wanted the world their escaping from to be just as rich and full as the worlds in their heads, they just can't see the forest for the trees. And what trees they are! I think if anyone walks away from this book with a thought about the artwork, it will most likely be 'That guy really loves to draw trees.' "

There is a lesson youngsters and others can take away from the modern fairy tale, too.

"You are your father, but you are also something completely different and new," Northrop says. "Never let that cause distance. It's a thing that should bring you together — even if it takes a crazy knight in the woods to help get you there."