Snowflake Challenge day 6

[sholio]

We all have a favourite piece of original canon. Maybe that's a particular episode of a show, maybe a specific scene, maybe a whole storyline. Maybe it's one of those but from a movie. Maybe a comic, and you have a favourite piece of art. Maybe it's a chapter or a character in a book, or a song from a musical. Anything goes.

Day 6: Share your favourite piece of original canon.

One? ONE??? That's very optimistic of you, Snowflake Challenge.

There are obviously about a million things I could talk about here, and I could easily get stuck with decision paralysis trying to choose between 10,000 options. I'm not really a forever-faves person; I'm a person who tends to bounce around between different flings of the moment, falling in and out of love with canons at the drop of a hat. I could easily describe one of my favorite scenes from my current loves, but I decided to make it more interesting by trying to think of something I haven't talked about here before.

And what came to mind is the novel Dragonworld by Byron Preiss, Michael Reaves, and Joe Zucker - now available in ebook, apparently! I have no idea how well it's held up, because I haven't reread it since I was probably in my teens or even younger. This is an illustrated fat fantasy novel from my very early childhood that (along with LOTR, comics, and a few other things) was a huge influence on my early writing and art.

I can't imagine I would ever have even tried to read something like this at the age that I read it - the book is 500 pages long! - except that my mom had read it to me first (she read us a lot of adult fantasy when we were very young, including LOTR) and I was also absolutely charmed by the beautiful, magical pencil illustrations. Here's a review that includes one of the illustrations; another review has a dragon image that may have influenced how I draw dragons to this day (and the cover certainly did).

The plot involves two nations going to war over a child's accidental death, and the rediscovery of dragons long thought extinct. Heavy stuff for a young kid (I was probably about 7 the first time I read it on my own, and younger than that when it was read to me) but it was full of charming and evocative details that I still remember all these years later, including magical skyships, a dragon frozen in a glacier, and a form of democracy that involves voting by throwing magical stones into a charmed lake that change the color of the water, and the eventual color determines the outcome of the vote.

As a further twist, our copy had been read to death by small children (me, I am small child) and by the time I was old enough to remember the plot in detail, the last few pages had vanished so I'm not actually sure exactly how it ends. But maybe the best fairy tales are like that.