Daisy Goes to the Moon by Matthew Klickstein & Rick Geary
Daisy Ashford was real. She was born in 1881, and wrote a cluster of stories in her youth: weird, oddball things with eccentric spelling and an often-shaky grasp on how people actually lived and talked to each other, all bathed in the sunny happiness of a coddled girl of the Victorian age. After she grew up, she rediscovered those stories, and some of them were published around 1919 with the help of J.M. Barrie. There have been periodic revivals and rediscoveries since then; a movie of her most famous “novel,” The Young Visiters, was made by the BBC about twenty years ago. (I know I saw it, but it must have been before the life of this blog.)
Daisy Goes to the Moon is about Daisy, but not by Daisy. Matthew Klickstein wrote a short novel in Daisy’s style – which seems to me to be the opposite of the point of juvenilia, frankly – and it was published in 2009, full of 1950s imagery and ideas. And now Rick Geary, master of both whimsy and Victoriana, has turned Klickstein’s story into a short graphic novel, full of authentically Daisy-esque spelling and moderately appropriate Daisy-esque situations and comments.
(Daisy herself died in 1972 at the age of 90, so she’s no more going to complain about what people have done to her memory than Shakespeare is.)
This begins with Daisy about the age of nine, when she wrote her most famous works, and dressed up in the usual Victorian-girl look, down to the big bow in her hair. She’s sitting under a tree, Alice-like, when a “rokit” lands nearby. It’s piloted by Mr. Zogolbythm (Mr. Z), a tall, skinny man all in black who comes from the moon, to which he proceeds to whisk Daisy for an adventure.
The story continues somewhat episodically, somewhat along the lines of the usual tour-of-the-future style for utopian works. Daisy experiences the high-tech of the moon – including a “so-you-can-hear-and-read-too” device implanted in her brain to allow her to understand moon language – flees Moon Monsters and creatures from other planets, shops for shoes and goes to an automat, and so on.
Soon, though, another character pops up: Mr. Blahdel (Mr. B) an American time-traveler from the 1950s, lugging a TV that’s missing an important part. B and Z have some mostly minor disagreements, which lead to further adventures when they dispute over the navigation of a spaceship. We also descend into metafiction when Daisy finds a book written by her sister Angie, which retells the first half of the story badly – the bratty Angie has followed Daisy (somehow; this isn’t clear) to the Moon.
And, of course, in the end Daisy gets back home safe and sound, and declares that to the best place to be.
Geary’s art is as detailed and energetic as always; quirkiness and whimsy typically brings out some of his best work, and that’s the case here. I might think that was an odd project, but it’s done as authentically and honestly as it could be, and this is a fun, amusing story.
Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.
