Throw in school friends Spud – a running gag is that Wallace’s dad can never remember his name – and ballsy Amelia, who doesn’t quite get the nerdism of her two male friends, and you have one of those comic strip casts that are witty, silly, sweet and above all, a joy to spend time with.Ĭoming in cold when I first saw the collection on a web page somewhere, I had no idea how much of a delight Henry’s Calvin and Hobbes-ish strip would be.īeautifully-coloured worldbuilding and brilliant characterisation, such that you pretty much get Wallace and his idiosyncratic family and friends within the first few strips, give the strip the air of the lost world of childhoods past where filling in time meant racing around town, spending time in comic bookstores, imagining that the drab reality of life is way cooler and more exciting that might otherwise be the case, and lending your expansive imagination run gleefully riot.Īccording to a piece on Henry in The Sun Chronicle, Wallace the Brave reflects the artist’s own relaxed childhood, and while he denies he and Wallace are too alike in an interview on The Huffington Post – “I don’t believe I was THAT rambunctious as a kid. Such is the delightfully oddball childhood of Wallace, “a bold and curious little boy” who lives in Snug Harbor with his fisherman dad who has a dry sense of humour and a willingness to push boundaries, his loving but no-nonsense mum and his off-the-wall weird brother Sterling who is best described as lovably feral. Or what about wishing you could have a rhino or a talking pelican as a pet? Speculate that prints in the snow were made by a garrulous multi-legged monster, and picture the fun you’d have with an accordion-playing gnu. In the world of Wallace the Brave, drawn by Will Henry, the pen name of Jamestown, Rhode Island-based Will Wilson, it’s all that and more, a whimsical, fabulous place where you can muse on what it would be like to “heroically a llama to school in front of grandiose sunrise”, speculate whether the gnarled stone wall on which you’re walking saw some serious sabretooth companionship, and dream of how much fun it would be to live in a house atop a giant tortoise so you never got bored with your location.

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