Grasspeople

By Allan Linder

“The morning dew clings to the lush green grass that spreads out to the horizon. Within in, lies a forest thick with life.”

You have a few options here – you can either grab a copy of Grasspeople #1 to read the compelling fantasy story within, or take a look just to gaze at the beautifully crafted work of Allan Linder… there’s also the chance you want to read and look at the pictures… which is what most people do, it’s just that, we’ve never met before so… didn’t want to make any assumptions.

Writer/artist Allan Linder blends a few paragraphs of detailed prose into the intro to his fantasy comic Grasspeople as we’re introduced to young Monk, a boy who just found out his birthday present is his parents kicking him out of the house! Linder brings the reader down into the thick grass as we travel inside a small mushroom house to meet our protagonist. Unfortunately for young Monk someone is lurking in the shadows (why can’t anyone ever be baking a cake in the shadows?), and leaving his parents behind might not be the best thing for Monk to do… (do you guys hear that eerie music too?!)

Linder uses what looks like some wild combinations of crayons and colored pencils to create some very imaginative scenes packed with various colors blending together to give this little world its own big feel. From the get-go we’re shown the sun blazing over the grass, looking like a nice Summer morning, but soon we travel deeper and the blades of grass become an array of different colors blending together as the morning dew still drips. The mushroom house Monk and his family lives in would make Papa Smurf’s house look like a cardboard box (wait… is a box better than a mushroom?), and the orange and yellow colors inside create a nice contrast to the green world of the outdoors.

A great scene from this issue comes when the mysterious figure with the scarred face shouts “Ergot, look!”. The figure is atop a beetle stead (the stead wearing a pretty cool spiked collar) as the image takes up a full-page. The colors in this image are sharp, and the beetle’s eyes a cosmic looking blend of blue and green.

This story is Honey I Shrunk The Kids meets Lord Of The Rings. Is that enough for you?