The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James by Mike Dawson

Like many cartoonists who like to eat and live indoors, Mike Dawson has made books for younger readers. It's a big audience that buys a lot of books - both personally and by proxy through schools and libraries - and that is really happy to have a creator come and do an event at their school, especially when the creator can stand on stage and make drawings on a pad of paper.

For those of us who are adults, we can sometimes miss those books, or notice them but think "maybe that one's not for me." So I've read a bunch of Dawson's comics, but not his middle-grade Fifth Quarter series, for example - and those two books look to be his major output (and probably major income source) of the first half of this decade.

But Dawson had a new middle-grade GN this year, and maybe it looked more appealing to me as a no-longer-tween, or maybe I thought it was time I actually paid attention to Dawson's middle-grade work, or maybe something else.

The book is The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James; it came out in January of 2026.

Geordie James is the viewpoint character, a sixth-grader who spends most of his time in a MMORPG called Dominion, a fictionalized Minecraft or Roblox. He's not good at talking to other kids his age and mostly wants to be left alone to do Dominion and hang out with his dog Crackerjack. He has an older sister - slightly annoying as older siblings always are, but not a major character - and a Scottish architect father who clearly means well but is not very plugged in to what his son is going through. There's no sign of a mother in the current day; she does show up in flashbacks. (Yes, that will be important. No, I won't spoil it.)

Geordie is failing science. His teacher Mr. Fritts gathers him and four other students failing the class - abrasive jock A.C., probably enby Taylor, possibly ADHD Alex, and potential-Geordie-friend Samesh - and tells them they have one chance to turn their grades around. They have to do a group project together for the science fair - the whole class will participate, but these five have to work together - on the topic "our place in the world."

All five of the kids hate this idea for obvious reasons - who likes group projects? - but it's their only chance, so they start meeting...and mostly devolve into playing Dominion together. This at least makes them friendlier to each other, but does not get much work done.

Meanwhile, on the news is a story about a piglet escaping (from what the book carefully does not call a slaughterhouse) and running through nearby towns. Geordie becomes obsessed with the piglet: researches animal husbandry, decides his whole family should go vegetarian, makes his new passion the focus of his work on the group project, and even blows up at A.C. over it.

Things go on from there: Geordie's father tries to ground him from Dominion and schedules "playdates" with Samesh, neither of which goes quite according to plan. The project moves forward in fits and starts. Geordie starts spending a lot of his afternoons and evenings out in a wooded area nearby - something of a waste ground, used as a dump for Christmas trees and other random detritus - where he makes a fort out of what he finds there. Oddly, the Wifi signal is very strong there, and he advances quickly in Dominion there and even shows Samesh the fort he built.

But then there's a plan to redevelop that wooded area - into a park for kids, among other things, so most people think it sounds great - and Geordie's fort is destroyed. He lashes out, smashes a lot of the group project's work to date, and runs off into an ominous and dramatically-timed storm.

This is a book for middle-graders, so nothing Geordie does is irrecoverable or final. We learn what happened to his mother, and the group does manage to finish its project and pass the class. No one ever finds the piglet, but Geordie is sure it's still out there, somewhere.

Dawson gets in little character moments for the other kids and for Geordie's dad - none of them take over the story, but we get glimpses of what their stories might be, if this were a different book. There's a part of me that wants to characterize those as loose threads that Dawson could have tied off more cleverly at the end, but that's too dismissive: this is a book about one character, but he's not the only person in his world. Hidden Dominion is Geordie's story, but it knows others have their own stories.

It's a colorful, cartoony book with a lot of visual appeal: Dawson contrasts the real world with the more saturated world of Dominion and light blue-toned flashbacks to keep the reader visually oriented in space and time. And Geordie is an intriguingly flawed character: he's angry for reasons we'd don't know at first, not good at expressing his emotions, and just plain twelve years old, which is never easy. It is all pitched in a tone and style appropriate for other sixth-graders, which an older reader needs to align to, but it tells a strong story well and Geordie is an interestingly flawed kid hero with elements that many of us may find familiar from our own youths.