The Fables of Erlking Wood
Cartoonist: Juni Ba
Letterer: Aditya Bidikar
Designer: Jeff Powell
Publisher: Goats Flying Press
Publication Date: May 2025
In a relatively short amount of time, cartoonist Juni Ba has assembled an incredibly strong body of work, establishing himself as one of the most exciting narrative voices in comics. Ba’s first book was the 2021 breakout stunner, Djeliya (which I wrote about a bit here). The follow-up was the excellently off-kilter 2022 Image Comics series, Monkey Meat. And the punctuation mark on what might be called the first phase of Ba’s career, was the 2024 DC Comics Black Label Robin series, The Boy Wonder, which landed on The Beat’s Best Comics of 2024.
There is just so much to like about Ba’s work. The aesthetic feels like a natural melding of West African folk art with the heyday of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim (I’ve used this line a few times now, but it still feels true). The boldness to the story telling (particularly in the impossible-to-predict tales of Monkey Meat) feels almost courageous within a comics market that can struggle to reward atypical storytelling sensibilities. But I think what has struck me most about Ba’s work is the sheer assuredness. Reading a Juni Ba comic, one gets the immediate sense that this cartoonist arrived fully-formed and hellbent on sharing his ample creative gifts without a shred of hesitation.
It’s a powerful thing, and while it’s been fun to see Ba bring it to bear on Big 2 work as well as within his oddball monthly anthology series, I’d been wondering when he might deliver a full book of the ambition and scale of Djeliya, which felt to me like it was born out of a sort of lost alternate world history. Well, that book arrived this year with The Fables of Erlking Wood from the (truly independent) publisher Goats Flying Press.
Erlking Wood — which also features lettering by Aditya Bidikar, design by Jeff Powell, and edits by Goats Flying mastermind Sebastian Girner — appears at first blush to be a graphic novel in stories. And technically, I suppose that’s what it is. There is an opening page that promises as much, describing the book as “like a tree.” Wherein every page is a twig and every individual story a branch grown off a shared trunk. This description is such a fun way to prep readers for Ba’s aforementioned atypical narrative sensibilities, while setting the tone with the voice that will be used throughout the proceedings.
And that description is true — but only to a point. Erlking Wood does read like a set of individual stories, particularly in its first half. Those stories are very good, and any one of them feels to me like it could stand on its own as an independent piece (with Branch 2: The Knight’s Bargain being my own personal highlight…I just love that knight’s design so much). And much like Djeliya before it, Erlking Wood and its stories feel like rediscovered folklore for some familiar-yet-unknown tradition . But as one continues through the branches, characters start to re-appear, bringing with them a set of throughlines that unite the entire thing into what feels more like one coherent, full-realized graphic novel. One that sneaks up with you, saving a great deal of poignancy for the exact right moment late in the game.
I point all this out in the context of a review because I think it speaks to the power of Erlking Wood’s overall reading experience. There’s an ineffable sort of it factor to this comic. I suppose in the parlance of this story and its world, what I’m talking about is a strong tree trunk that makes all its individual twigs and branches appear healthier. But I also just think that Ba has elevated his storytelling to a new level, one where it has another layer of narrative power beneath what was already a very strong surface. To be quite direct about it, Erlking Wood is one of my favorite books of the year.
And, of course, it’s not just Ba. Bidikar has a strong case for being the best letterer in comics. His work is truly imbued with the tough-to-find letterer quality of adding new things to the story and its pages without being even a little bit distracting. He takes risks without dinging the narrative flow. Every flourish here has earned its way in. It’s reductive because their styles are so different, but I still want to write it — Aditya Bidikar to me feels like the natural heir to the great Todd Klein. The lettering in Erlking is also varied throughout, but it’s so seamless that I didn’t even realize as much on first read.
The design by Powell also elevates the book a great deal. It’s visible in everything from the excellent spine graphics (the fox head is a gem) to the pattern that appears on the page when the book is closed. The work Powell does has made this not just a good-looking book, but one that has a set of rich design touches that fit perfectly with the story’s content. And that’s a rarity.
The Fables of Erlking Wood is a great achievement from one of comics most exciting cartoonists. What’s more is that we’re only in year four of Juni Ba being a well-known published cartoonist — it’s a very exciting thing to think about what his future may hold.
The Fables of Erlking Wood is available now via Goats Flying Press
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