#silverlock

Gotham Academy #11

Mision:Gotham

Olive silverlock~🥰

I brought the whole comic series a year or so ago and I still refuse to read the ending 😭😭😭 I refuse the fact that the series ended. It helped partially fill a void in me back when it came out. I finished reading a Batman comic arc and it was in my suggestions … best thing I ever stumbled across!🥰 the comic artists for this series really inspired me! Definitely helped me better my art style! I saw these characters vividly as i read this series!

It’s been a while since I did DCfanart 🤧💕 I’d share my old art but it’s CRAP💀

I can’t believe I forgot to follow them on my new account 😭

There’s a lot of artists Im trying to find again!

Book #190 of 2025:

Silverlock by John Myers Myers

This 1949 novel is a quaint picaresque adventure tale, similar in plot and spirit to a work like Gulliver’s Travels, except that the foreign land our titular protagonist visits is populated by existing characters of literature and myth. (He even encounters Gulliver’s own talking horses and domesticated wild humans at one point.) It’s fun to play spot-the-allusion, especially as certain figures don’t appear under their conventional names, but overall the book is a bit aimless and decidedly dated in its rampant misogyny.

I’m not sure the basic premise really holds up under scrutiny, either. I love the concept of a literal public domain where old stories coexist, but how is it that the important parts like Beowulf feasting at Heorot or Gawain returning to the Green Knight are always happening right when Silverlock arrives? (Do they reset and repeat? If so, are they aware of those cycles?) Why does he never give any indication that he’s heard of any of these people before — and would surely have considered some of them to be fictional — even when meeting someone as famous as Circe or Robin Hood? If he’s meant to be understood as just comically ignorant, why is he able to reference Paul Bunyan while distracting Don Quixote?

So it’s a rather odd project, and less amusing as it goes along, since the final chapters involve the hero descending into a version of the underworld to see various individuals from Raskolnikov to Hamlet being tortured for their sins. I only knew about it in the first place because the later writer Stephen R. Donaldson used lines from one of the original poems here as titles for his Mordant’s Need series (“Steeped in the vacuum of her dreams / A mirror’s empty till / A man rides through it.”), and in retrospect that probably wasn’t enough to justify the interlibrary loan request. I suppose I still like this more than I dislike it on balance, but I’m not surprised that it seems to have fallen into obscurity today.

[Content warning for racism, suicide, rape, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

​Harsh that hearing for Houston the Raven: Foes had enfeebled the fortress at Bexar, Leaving it lacking and looted the while Hordes were sweeping swift on the land, Hell-bent to crush him. The cunning old prince Did not, though, despair at danger's onrushing; Hardy with peril, he held it, perused it, Reading each rune of it. Reaching the facts, He thumbed through his thanes and thought of the one Whose guts and gray matter were grafted most neatly. "Riders!" he rasped, "to race after Bowie!" "Bowie," he barked when that bearcat of heroes Bowed to his loved prince, "Bexar must be ours Or no one must have it. So hightail, burn leather! Hold me that fortress or fire it and raze it. Do what you can or else do what you must."