CASTLE WAITING... What happened?

For years, I've been raving about Linda Medley's ongoing comics series Castle Waiting to anybody who would listen. (Click image to puchase the Castle Waiting 2006 graphic novel on Amazon.com.) I've been a fan of the book since 1996, when Medley got a Xeric grant and began self-publishing. I stuck with it through several lengthy hiatuses and publisher changes, and I've purchased every issue as soon as it was on the stands. Until fairly recently, my mania for Medley's work stopped just short of getting a Castle Waiting tattoo.

Medley looked at fairy tales from the perspective of the background characters - the girls whose feet never fit the glass slipper and the frogs who never got kissed by a princess. As she put it, her stories explained "what happened after 'Happily ever after...'" Her debut, stand-alone graphic novel The Curse of Brambly Hedge offered her vivid and imaginative take on the Sleeping Beauty story, and from there she focused the rest of the series on the denizens of the crumbling Castle Waiting, an endearing gang of misfits with their own tangled histories. Issue by issue, we learned the "real" story of Simple Simon, Doctor Fell, and others. It was a kind of Rumpelstiltskin and Tweedledum Are Dead, and it was a beautiful thing.

But the last few years, something strange has happened in the book... Or, to be more accurate, something strange has stopped happening. Issue after issue passes and the characters just seem to be hanging out over the course of one endless evening, doing laundry, bowling, exploring the castle's dark passageways and eating Turkish delight. The book's exciting, inventive storytelling has given way to a seemingly eternal slumber party.

When you read Medley's issue summaries in the sales pages in the back of the book, it's clear that even she's struggling with how to summarize a story so lacking in incident or urgency. She sometimes retreats behind irony ("A catch-your-breath issue of sorts, as we gear up for the next two issues' massive bowling extravaganza,") while at other times she just gives up and offers a flat recounting of the book's non-events ("Rackham searches for a missing shovel and ends up arguing with Chess; Flora the Goat is fed up with being penned up.") In the book's early years she proved she could tell a great story, but her new issues read like the work of somebody who simply doesn't know how to plot.

Every now and then something interesting threatens to happen, but Medley rushes past it or abandons it to leave her characters just killing time again, as they have for a good part of the last decade. The story of the mysterious Doctor Fell is a prime example of Medley's missed opportunities. Fell is a highly eccentric medieval physician who wears a bird-like mask, and he's always been one of the book's most intriguing characters. In the past, Medley used the current stuff in Castle Waiting as a framing device, and she would spend most of the book delving into flashbacks of each character's life. (It was sort of like a fairytale Lost, come to think of it.) But recently she skipped through Doctor Fell's tragic origin in a few panels, so we could get right back to the endless "bowling extravaganza" that Medley would've once confined to a page at most. The book has become all framing device, with no story to frame.

Medley's drawing is as beautiful as ever, and her characters are still charming. But I've now spent years watching these charming characters kick back by the fire, and they're starting to feel like houseguests who just won't leave. In the real world entire wars have been fought and lost, while Medley's Lady Jain and her green baby have still been settling in for the night. According to Wikipedia Medley is now at work on a nine-volume series of stories about L. Frank Baum's Oz. That's encouraging. Playing with a new set of characters could be just the thing to shake Medley out of a routine that's apparently become far too comfortable.

But while it pains me to say it, I think I've picked up my last issue of the book I've loved for so long. I'm done waiting for Castle Waiting to be as great as it was, once upon a time.

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