Archer's Goon: Chapters 3 & 4
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:
Chapters 3 & 4
We didn’t make any LEGO versions of anything in Chapter 3, since the action of the story took place back in the Sykes’s house. But in Chapter 4, Howard, Awful and Fifi go to visit the mysterious Dillian. Maisie Potter went along, too… we seem to have forgotten to include her.
“Number 28 was like several castles melted together, with brick battlements and towers sprouting off its many corners. The way into it seemed to be through a big glass porch in front…”
They were in a vast room, where light blazed from crystal chandeliers on to an acre of shiny floor made of different woods put together in patterns. The light gleamed off the the gilding of elegant little armchairs and winked in the drops of a small fountain near the stairs. There were banks of flowers around the fountain, and here and there in the rest of the space, as if there were going to be a concert there or a visit from the queen. Golden statues held more lights at the foot of the stairs…
…
Dillian was wearing a shiny white ball gown, which she held up gracefully as she came, to show her little high-heeled silver shoes. … Dillian had long golden hair, and her face was beautiful. … She gave them a wonderful smile.
Howard smiled dreamily… the food and the scent of the flowers and the dripping of the fountain were making him feel peaceful and sleepy, and it struck him that Dillian was rather nice…
This isn’t described in the book, but since Dillian “farms law and order,” we imagined a secret portal from her lovely house into a police station. We also put what we thought looked like a surveillance device above Dillian’s front door!
To be continued…