Living skeleton, pile of goo join music competition
“Listen,” the living skeltteton says to encourage the lovely Canta in a new graphic novel, “You don’t need a big audience to sing. You don’t need adoring fans or chests of gold. And you don’t need approval from anyone. You just need the music. … We sing because we love to. The melodies, the stories … they inspire us.”
The skeleton, along with his sidekick, a talking hunk of gelatin, and a group of oddball friends, have journeyed far to the city of Harp’s Edge, there to join in a great music competition that will, in an unexpected way, bring down the house.
“Rickety Stitch And The Gelatinous Goo: The Battle Of The Bards” ($16.99 in paperback from Knopf Books for Young Readers; also for Amazon Kindle), illustrated by Ben Costa, and created and written by Costa and James Parks, is the third outing for Rickety and company.
Book 1 of “Rickety Stitch And The Gelatinous Goo” set our heroes on “The Road To Epoli”; Book 2 saw them on “The Middle-Route Run.” For Costa and Parks, both from the Bay Area, Rickety’s stories are part of a larger universe, the Land of Eem.
Readers coming first to Book 3 will miss the backstory, but there’s plenty of action — and poignant betrayal — to keep teens and adults mesmerized.
Rickety desperately wants to find out who he is, and his purpose. He comes from an earlier time, never co-opted by the again-resurgent Gloom King; as one character puts it, he’s “the undying ember of a golden age that has been all but forgotten.”
Throughout the story, there are flashes of that reality, and oh, the song: “What Once Has Been, Again Shall Be,” written by Costa and Parks, and sung by former Chicoan, and now Oaklander, Evin
Wolverton, who co-wrote the lyrics (listen at RicketyStitch.com). Wolverton performed in several E-R Sessions, back before the COVID plague.
Outcasts and outsiders find courage together. As the song says, “For every sorry heart, we’ll lift each other/ For every crashing wave, we’ll brave the sea.” Though a deep sorrow has come upon the world, Rickety’s antics will keep readers in stitches.