Archer's Goon: Chapter 5
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.
Welcome to our LEGO re-enactment of Diana Wynne Jones’s awesome and highly original novel Archer’s Goon. My eight-year-old son and I did this a couple of years ago, and luckily, we took some photos! I’ve included some excerpts from the text, so you can see what our LEGO scenes are meant to be portraying.
If you haven’t read the story, none of this will make much sense. But, if you haven’t read the story, you shouldn’t be here anyway - you should be heading to your local bookstore/library to get a copy of Archer’s Goon!
If you want to start at the beginning, here’s where you can find all the chapters.
Or, read on:
Chapter 5
They went into a nice modern office room with a warm orange-red carpet. J. C. Whyte - if that was his name - had iron grey hair and a quiet, impressive manner, wrapped in a quiet, impressive striped suit. He was talking to a customer when they came in, a big young man in overalls…
Mr Whyte said, “If you’d be good enough to go with Mr Archer, Mr Sykes.”
”Oh,” said Quentin. “Yes, of course.”
The young man in overalls gave them all an amused look over his shoulder as he led the way to a door at the back of the office. It swung heavily, and when it was open, they could see it was more than a foot thick. Howard could have sworn it was the door to a safe.
Inside, he knew it was a safe. Its walls were lined with pigeonholes, so that there was only a narrow passage down the middle. He looked into some as the young man led them through. He saw black cashboxes, brown leather jewel cases, and bundles and bundles of important-looking envelopes. … But there was not much chance to look because Archer led them straight through to another, much smaller door at the back.
Beyond that they came out into a huge place. It was as big as an aircraft hangar, brightly lit by dangling electric bulbs.
They all stopped, in a huddle, and stared around. There were installations, machines, cabinets, read outs, winking lights, screens, dials, illuminated plans, displays flashing in all directions, almost as far as they could see. There were machines in the distance quietly at work running on rails, pushing more displays into place. Other machines were humming along the iron girders overhead…
One of the machines ran along the girders overhead until it stopped just above them. With a gentle humming it lowered what seemed to be a huge scoop. Quentin and Fifi backed nervously away from its shiny red underside. But when it came to floor level and stopped, they saw it was upholstered inside in cream-coloured leather, like a huge armchair or the inside of an expensive car. Archer swung himself briskly into it and settled in a cream swivel seat at one end, where there was a display screen and a control panel with banks of coloured buttons.
“Come on,” he said. “Make yourselves comfortable.”
We had a lot of fun building the scoop. I was just sorry we couldn’t get five swivel chairs to fit. And we forgot to add a few hamburgers, too.
To be continued…