Dungeon Club #3 : Final Face-off out today!

some thoughts on roleplaying and youth and art

I’m really proud to announce that the final book in the DUNGEON CLUB series, written by me and drawn by Xanthe Bouma, is in stores everywhere today!

look at that cover GOD xanthe is a genius

A few thoughts on the end of the series:

This trilogy is my love letter to when I was 13 and discovered roleplaying. Middle school hit me hard, like it does to so many of us who are different in some way. I was terrified of getting older, could barely open my mouth to speak at school, and felt my friends slipping away as they became interested in things that felt grown-up, alien, and scary. I knew I couldn’t stay in childhood, but I didn’t want to be a teenager either. I explored these feelings in book one of the series, through Jess, but this third book from Tyler’s perspective feels the closest to my experience (Jess is way cooler than I ever was at 13).

I don’t care to think who I would have become if I hadn’t discovered a local LARP camp at 13. Here was a group of people doing the thing I loved most - playing pretend, losing myself in fantasy worlds - and they were doing it together.

The first event I went to, I barely said a word, in or out of character. At 13, I had resigned myself to a lonely life; but here was this community full of people I desperately wanted to befriend. Of course, I had no idea how to do this. It was agonizing - it would have been so much easier to stay away - but I kept going back. Because I wasn’t ready to give up on magic, and roleplaying was the closest I’d ever been to magic. I needed to find a way to be a part of the community that still had access, like a secret portal hidden in a wardrobe, to a magical world. My dad still gets teary when he talks about picking me up from the next event I went to, because I had totally transformed. I was hugging people and talking and smiling. I had friends.

And getting older - becoming a teenager - it became a bit less scary, when I saw other people who had done it and who still could play pretend. When I could play as characters who felt and did things I was too shy to do in real life. When I realized that, just like building a character, I had some say in the person I was becoming. When I realized it didn’t mean I would have to lose my connection to magic.

LARP camp led to D&D (my first campaign and many subsequent ones were run by internationally renowned DM Brennan Lee Mulligan, thank you Brennan!) and a lifetime of caring far too much about fantasy worlds. When Wizards of the Coast and Harper Collins approached me about making a D&D graphic novel series, I knew I had to say yes, and I knew what it would be about.

Finally - writing about this series would be nothing without discussing Xanthe Bouma’s art. I have admired Xanthe’s work for years and leapt at the chance to work with them. I have a theory about cartooning style, that it’s a spectrum where one end is ‘beautiful’ and the other end is ‘relatable’. I don’t know how Xanthe manages to do both with such ease and expertise, I really don’t! They have this amazing quality of making the fantasy sections feel so immersive, badass, and beautiful, while still being very funny and relatable. And then the real life sections are drawn with just as much care and detail, making the ordinary middle school the characters inhabit feel just as magical as dungeon crawling and fighting demon lords. It’s a tricky needle to thread, one that I doubt I could have achieved as an artist, and Xanthe made it look effortless. Many scenes and plotlines were inspired by the details they brought to the characters, through their sartorial choices and body acting, and by jokes and scenes that I just really, really wanted to see Xanthe draw. It’s been an absolute joy of a collaboration.

A shoutout as well to Amelia Allore, whose coloring has made these books incredibly iconic! Her choice of tone and mood makes them shine like jewels and I have loved getting the finished books and pouring over every treasure-box of a page.

I hope you or your kids have enjoyed the story! Best,

Lee