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The Girl in the Midnight Gown

A mysterious journey into a magical world

Simon Birks author Juan Fleites illustrator

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Blue Fox Publishing

Published:30th Nov '17

Should be back in stock very soon

The Girl in the Midnight Gown cover

Amidst a magical quest, Lela searches for her missing twin sister in The Girl in the Midnight Gown, uncovering secrets and challenges along the way.

In The Girl in the Midnight Gown, Lela's life takes a dramatic turn when her twin sister, Darby, goes missing. Desperate for answers, Lela receives an enigmatic message that leads her to Abe's, a barber shop steeped in history and known for its extraordinary clientele—heroes from various tales. This unexpected clue sets Lela on a path filled with mystery and adventure.

Accompanied by Sarah, the girl in the midnight gown, Lela plunges into a magical realm that blends elements of fairy tales with the challenges of her quest. As they navigate this enchanting world, they encounter strange creatures, solve riddles, and uncover secrets that test their courage and resolve. Lela's determination to find her sister drives her forward, but the journey proves to be more complex than she anticipated.

As Lela delves deeper into this fantastical adventure, she begins to realize that the world around her is not what it seems. Each encounter reveals layers of deception and hidden truths, forcing Lela to confront her own fears and the nature of heroism. The Girl in the Midnight Gown is a captivating tale of sisterhood, bravery, and the unexpected twists that life can take.

Lela’s family has been torn apart by the loss of her twin sister, Darby, and even the notebook of the girls’ original stories doesn’t bring any solace.  When a mysterious email leads Lela to Abe’s, a barber shop/pub/gathering place for heroes, she starts on the first steps to learning the truth behind Darby’s disappearance.

Anyone who escapes into the world of a TV show, book, or movie knows how easy it can be to lose yourself in an alternate reality.  The Girl in the Midnight Gown from Blue Fox Comics simply takes the idea a step further by showing the cost of staying outside your own time and space for too long. Darby is gone, but it is not an outside antagonist preventing her from returning home but her love of the narrative that has sucked her in thoroughly.  It’s a lovely way to take exterior conflict and beautifully invert it in a way that both reveals deep love for imagination-based escapism and cautions against hiding from life within it.  Ultimately, the story teaches that we should embrace flights of fancy, because they can bring us gifts of adventure, acceptance, forgiveness, joy, etc., but don’t forget to live life, as well.

My description of the plot of The Girl in the Midnight Gown is very vague, because the beauty is how the story unfolds.  One touch I especially appreciated is that Darby and Lela’s family is portrayed as people of color; their ethnicity is not defined, but they are clearly not white.  So many fantasy epics focus on white men that this gently inserted representation (It doesn’t affect the story; it just is.) gave me a great deal of joy.  I also enjoyed the diversity of the heroes at Abe’s; women were equally as represented as men, and while each adventurer represented an archetype, they came from a variety of cultural backgrounds. Abe’s clearly was meant to be a crossroad between all worlds where anyone could find the adventurer that fit their story.

The artwork for The Girl with the Midnight Gown reflects the otherworldly feel of the imagination.  It’s not photo perfect, but it’s how someone might describe what they saw in a dream.  The number of different adventurers portrayed in Abe’s is incredible, and there are some panels in Faerie where the sheer number of tropes must have been a lot of work to draw!

Overall, The Girl with the Midnight Gown left me with a soft feeling of contentment and warmth.  Acceptance, family, love, and adventure flow throughout the entire piece, including the short illustrated story in the final pages. It’s not the type of graphic novel to pick up if you’re expecting swords, sorcery, and swashbuckling, but it tapped into the essence of some of the old fairy tales my father and grandmother read to me as a child and has a way of feeling both engaging and comforting.

-- Jodi Scaife * Fanbase Press *

Jam packed with the type of quality that has drawn me to Indie comics.

-- Gary Watson * Comics Anonymo

ISBN: 9780957342675

Dimensions: 259mm x 170mm x 5mm

Weight: 226g

80 pages