Zach Weinersmith, best known as the cartoonist of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal but also author or co-author of a series of non-fiction books, had a crazy idea a couple of years ago. It might even have been too crazy. But he got his agent to go along with it - then the great French cartoonist Boulet, and the kid-book powerhouse First Second. So it was happening, no matter how crazy it was.
The book came out not quite a year ago, back in March of 2023. And, to avoid burying the lede, it is both crazy and wonderful in equal, utterly mixed amounts, with the craziness making it that much more wonderful and the wonder emphasizing just how crazy it was.
Yes, Bea Wolf is a contemporary retelling of the oldest long poem still extant in English - or maybe I should say "a language we can call English," since languages change a lot over time, and Beowulf is old. And not just "contemporary," mind you: transmuted into a story for middle-graders, retold with a cast of preteens and a monster that turns them old and crabbed and dull.
Even more so, Weinersmith's version mimics or updates the meter and structure of the poem - he even has an afterword to explain what "kennings" are, among other things - so this is a Beowulf that begins like this:
Hey, Wait!
Listen to the lives of the long-ago kids, the world-fighters,
The parent-unminding kids, the improper, the politeness-proof
The unbowed bully-crushers,
The bedtime-breakers, the raspberry-blowers,
Fighters of fun-killers, fearing nothing, fated for fame.
The subtly brilliant thing is that this is clearly a storytelling mode, a style of discourse that says "sit down and let me tell you this wild story" - and what audience gets "let me tell you a story" more than kids? No one, that's who. Also: kids can be conservative in their tastes for stories, but they handle newness all the time. Every kind of discourse, every storytelling trick, is new to a kid at some point - and probably not all that long ago, since they don't have long ago.
One of the semi-secrets of the world of books for kids is that reading out loud makes some books vastly better, and diminishes others. Not every book for kids will be read out loud all the time, sure - but it happens a lot, and vastly more than any book for adults. So a book that demands to be read out loud, a book constructed around a voice, has a sneaky leg up in that competition - it will just work better, in millions of bedrooms and story-circles across the country.
Bea Wolf is better read out loud - it's a book to be chanted, at least a little bit louder than you think you should, and preferably to an audience at least a bit unruly but ready to be quiet enough to hear the story. (I didn't do this: my own kids passed these years more than a decade ago.)
Anyway: should I tell you the story? If you know Beowulf, you know the story. Some time ago, in the legendary times, there was a leader of kids, a king named Carl. From his line - which, in modern style, includes Sunita, Dave, Hrothred, and a monkey - eventually came Roger, a strong king who built the great tree-fort Treeheart. The kids rampaged through the neighborhood from that base for some time, happy and free and wild.
But - there's always a but, isn't there? - Treeheart overhung the yard of a man called Grindle. Grindle was serious and grown-up and an enemy of all kinds of kid-fun. He was wily and powerful and implacable. And his mere touch to the forehead of a kid aged that warrior into a teen, or, worse, a middle-aged wage-slave, droning about 401(k)s and sensible shoes and complaining about the government and Kids Today.
Grindle decimated Treeheart, retuning night after night to destroy more warriors.
Until, of course, a warrior came from the next neighborhood over - the mighty Bea Wolf, renowned in battle in Heidi's Hold, a doughty warrior of five years. And she led the battle against Grindle and bested that foe.
Along the way, like the original, there are digressions to tell other stories, the Beowulf stories of battles changed into kids skirmishing with bullies and playing tricks on adults and so forth. And, again, it's all told in that same style, all rolling alliterative lines, self-consciously grand about the small transgressions of a kid's life.
Boulet's art is at least half of the brilliance: he works in black and white here, filling pages with inky black nights of despair and bright sunlit celebrations, his characters crabbed, twisted adults and round-faced stalwart kids. Both he and Weinersmith are clear on the drill, here: this is crazy, this is silly at heart, but it needs to be presented 100% seriously at every moment - that's what makes it work. There can be no winking, nothing to break the story.
So this is quite nutty, maybe even more so than the concept implies. Weinersmith and Boulet dig into the retelling with lots of odd but appropriate touches - mead turned into soda, heaps of meat for the feast into similar heaps of candy, and lots of descriptions of kid-stuff with plastic and sparkles and other specific unexpected details.
I do think this is best read out loud to an appreciative audience - probably an audience just about old enough to read it themselves, but still willing to hear things read out, if it's worth it. But it can also be read by those young readers, or their aged parents, silently as well. And it it a total hoot, the kind of book you need to check out at least once just to see how crazy a great idea can be.
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