The editor of the popular Flightanthologies—Kazu Kibuishi—flies solo this month with the release ofAmulet Book 1: The Stonekeeper, the beginning of a new fantasy series aimed at an all-ages audience fromBonepublisher Scholastic.
Amulettells the story of Emily and her younger brother Navin who have to explore a very unusual world in order to rescue their mother from a variety of critters and creatures. Luckily Emily has a mystical amulet and a group of strange new friends to help her save her mom and fulfill her destiny. There’s a bittersweet tinge toAmuletthat anchors this fantasy story alongside other such all-ages classics asSpirited Away and E.T.
The idea for the book came to Kibuishi when he was looking for a large story to tell. He had done a graphic novel for Viper Comics called Daisy Kutter , and he regularly contributes a short story to Flight and hosts a webcomic called Copper on his site , but the ideas for a larger project kept percolating in his head. /
“One of these projects was the story of two kids who moved into an old house owned by a missing puzzle maker, where they found giant stone puzzles in the caverns below the residence and worked to figure them out,” Kibuishi said.
This was a couple of years ago, after Kibuishi had just graduated college. He initially pitched the concept as a graphic novel, and then as an animated film when he was working for a small animation studio. When he left animation to work in comics full time, he decided to make a more serious attempt to get Amulet off the ground.
“This time, I was quite a bit older, and I had just gone through some hard times working to help my family financially, having to become an adult at warp speed, and so I decided to talk about the things I went through in the guise of this concept.”
Family plays a big part in Amulet, both in terms of the idea’s gestation and within the world of the story itself.The Stonekeeperopens with the death of Emily’s father, and how that forces her to grow up pretty quickly, looking after her younger brother and now pushed into the role of rescuing her mother.
“I saw the first book series as the life of a single generation in a family,” said Kibuishi. “This is where Emily and Navin grow up to be adults. I hope to continue to explore what family and friendship mean to people as they grow older and change. How the perception of a child looking at an adult changes drastically once they grow up and see what it’s like to become one.
“Aside from this, I also want to make a bunch of cool stuff I always wish I could have seen in a comic book. The first book ends with the promise of some high fantasy to come, and I mean to deliver on that promise.”
And Kibuishi has the talent to back up such a promise. When reached for comment about Kibuishi, Scott McCloud—the author of Understanding Comics and Flight enthusiast/occasional contributor—had this to say about Kibuishi and his peers:
“Kibuishi is the focal point of an important new wave of classically trained, hard working animation and web-influenced cartoonists for whom storytelling is paramount, and the reader is king. More humble and yet, in many cases, more formally ambitious than their iconoclastic predecessors, artists like Kazu are rediscovering values of clarity and communication as old as storytelling itself.”
As for the future of Amulet, Kibuishi said he has the stories for the second and third books pretty clear in his mind, and that he knows how the story will end. What he doesn’t know is how many books it will take for him to get there.
If readers are lucky, it’ll be a while.
