★★★☆☆ Squire & Knight, by Scott Chantler
A story about characters from Walt Disney's The Sword in the Stone
Squire & Knight
Scott Chantler
A story about characters from Walt Disney’s The Sword in the Stone
When I began Squire & Knight I instantly recognized the pictures of the two titular characters. In 1963 Disney released a movie called The Sword in the Stone loosely based on the book by that name that is the first volume of The Once and Future King by T.H. White. No story passes through Disney's hands intact, and White's classic was no exception. Disney published a short comic book version of the story that I read at the age of seven. (Many years later I read The Once and Future King.) Scott Chantler, I am confident, read this same comic book. Indeed, he himself writes
The title characters were inspired by brainy, sensitive "Wart" and his overbearing brother Sir Kay, in T.H. White's classic novel The Sword in the Stone, ...
Although Chantler doesn't specifically reference the Disney comic, his Sir Kelton so closely resembles Sir Kay of Walt Disney's The Sword in the Stone that I feel confident he has seen that as well.
The plot of Squire & Knight, however, owes nothing to The Sword in the Stone. He describes it as "T.H. White plays Dungeons & Dragons with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle". That is a reference to Sherlock Holmes. Squire & Knight is a mystery, and you can probably guess to which of the two characters -- one based on "brainy" Wart and the other on overbearing Sir Kay -- to which of the two the solution of the mystery falls.
The story and mystery are not bad. However, I was not thrilled with how they were told. There is a sort of rule in mystery books that the reader is supposed to know everything the sleuth knows that allows him to solve the mystery. With one exception, I didn't see most of the clues that Squire used to figure out the mystery. It is very likely that this was my fault. I am not a visual thinker and am not terribly fond of graphic novels. If there were subtle visual clues, I probably missed them. However that may be, Squire's solution of the mystery seemed to me to come out of nowhere.