Archer's Goon: Chapter 1
A LEGO tribute to a fun and original YA novel
Hello! If you’re looking for The Drawing Book’s usual comics, you can find them here.
During the next couple of weeks, I’m doing something different: Welcome to our LEGO re-enactment of Diana Wynne Jones’s awesome and highly original novel Archer’s Goon!
To learn more about why my eight-year-old son and I did this, take a look at this newsletter.
If you haven’t read the novel, none of this will make much sense! But, if you haven’t read the novel, you shouldn’t be here anyway - you should be heading to your local bookstore to get a copy of Archer’s Goon!
Chapter 1
(Don’t worry, I’m not going to reproduce the whole book here. I’m just going to put in some quotes that correspond to the photos we took - to show you what we were trying to do.)
The story starts like this:
The trouble started the day Howard came home from school to find the Goon sitting in the kitchen. It was Fifi who called him the Goon. Fifi was a student who lived in their house and got them tea when their parents were out. When Howard pushed Awful into the kitchen and slammed the door after them both, the first person he saw was Fifi, sitting on the edge of a chair, fidgeting nervously with her striped scarf and her striped leg warmers.
“Thank goodness you’ve come at last!” Fifi said. “We seem to have somebody’s Goon. Look.”
… He was filling most of the … kitchen with long legs and huge boots. It was a knack the Goon had. The Goon’s head was very small, and his feet were enormous. Howard’s eyes travelled up a yard or so of tight faded jeans, jerked to a stop for a second at the knife with which the Goon was cleaning the dirty nails of his vast hands, and then travelled on over an old leather jacket to the little, round fair head in the distance. The little face looked half-daft.
Catriona Sykes came in… she fell in a chair… she took a deep drink of the coffee, pushed her hair back and opened her eyes to look at the Goon.
Note: Howard and Awful’s mother Catriona only has one cup of coffee in this first scene, but we gave the LEGO Catriona two cups, because (I think) there’s a scene later where she needs two. We decorated the Sykes’ LEGO kitchen with many, many mugs because there was just so much coffee- and tea-drinking in this story.
“Set for six, Howard,” Catriona said. “I expect the Goon would like some liver and bacon, too.”
”Would!” the Goon said. He inhaled fried onions and grinned deeply.…
“Dad,” said Howard, “I think Mum’s got the wrong idea. She’s giving the Goon supper. You don’t give hired assassins supper, do you?”
When he had finished, the Goon retreated quickly to the chair he had sat in before and sat in everyone’s way again, picking his teeth with his knife and looking relieved.
To be continued…