“A chivalrous faerie mushroom embarks on a quest to uncover a clandestine threat that has brought calamity to his magical woodland kingdom.
An adolescent girl from northwest Philadelphia desperately searches for her lost dog.
As their destinies coalesce, a whimsical friendship forms. But peril is nigh, and their respective journeys threaten to challenge the foundation of their realities… and reality itself.
David the Gnome meets David Lynch in this boundary bending ecological fantasy filled with humor, horror, depth and delight."
The Mushroom Knight is my first graphic novel, and the first in a series, coming to stores in March 2024 from Mad Cave Studios. It tells the story of Gowlitrot the Gardener, a diminutive fungal creature, and his adventures in the Wissahickon woodlands, a sprawling and serene wilderness in Philadelphia. The book blends together my interests in mycology, ecology and psychology, as well as storytelling, contemporary druidism and the occult. The world where the book takes place is similar to ours, in gritty 1990’s Philadelphia. But it is also populated by a cast of complex spiritual beings that have taken the form of whimsical cartoon characters, so we can perceive them the way a child may have three decades ago, through the lens of the pop-culture imagination and aesthetics of the time. That is, of course, how they first began talking to me.
This book is a story of how adverse childhood experiences form our personality and set the parameters for the hero’s journey we will be called to in our adult lives. “If you do not heal your childhood, you will be drawn to it in your adulthood like a moth to a flame.” And so patterns are calcified and the wheel of us begins to turn. It is the story of Lemuelle Clemmons, a young girl who is reluctantly teetering on the edge of adult awakening, as our world compels her through tragedy to make unconscious decisions about how to interpret her ecosystem and the people that inhabit her cosmos.
It is a mystery in a mystery in a mystery, a wheel turning in a wheel, and I invite you to walk this path with me to see what we can unearth. Everything is connected—our thoughts, our bodies, the bodies of those around us, the molecules in the air we breathe and the granules of soil in the ground below. All touching each other and vibrating together in an incredible dance through time and space. It is imperative to me that everyone be made aware of how deep the depth of us truly is, as individuals, and as a collective of spiritual creatures netted together in causality. There is gold at the bottom of the well. Let’s find it.
