If Lord of the Rings, Redwall and Haru by Joe Latham had a book baby (though I’m assuming Haru could have been influenced by this story) Digger, Volume One by Ursula Vernon would be the result. It is funny, dense, dark, mysterious, slow in parts, yet it keeps you hooked wondering what is next. It is not for young or sensitive readers, as the images are mostly “tame,” the text and descriptions are not always so. The black and white art is both positive and negative. The positive is that it keeps things with a serious, old-school, classical feel to the tale. The negative is sometimes characters and places are not always fleshed out as I would have liked. But color might actually be a distraction as it could distract from the adventure.
And that adventure is when a wombat is digging, as wombats are apt to do, she finds herself in a patch of underground “gases” that have her hallucinating, disorientated and terribly turned around. She will eventually burrow her way through a floor to a temple where the avatar of Ganesh is a talking elephant statue. Digger (a perfectly good name for a wombat) must figure out where she is, how she got there (was it a who or a what?) and try to survive creatures wanting to eat her or kill her or both. Not to mention there is a shadow child that has little to no knowledge of what it is. These adventures she will undertake are both humorous and intense. The characters have agendas and they might not always be beneficial to Digger.
It is, to say the least, a straightforward yet complex read on many levels. And now I say, IT’S ONLY VOLUME ONE???????????????? What have you gotten me into Ursula Vernon???????????? She got me hooked on this series and “made” me go out and buy pre-loved copies of all six (minus volume five as it was over $150) volumes. There might be a collection of all of them, but I wasn’t able to find one. Though I will keep looking as it isn’t every day you get a wombat heroine, a Golum-like lion/wolf creature called Ed or almost Gods in a book.
This book is a Journey without a Map, still I’m going to use it for cbr18bingo Bingo Map.
