Sunny, in seventh grade, finds her score on the Groovy Meter taking some wild swings as her friends’ interests move in different directions. Kibuishi gives his epic tale a hefty nudge toward its long-building climax while giving readers plenty of reasons to stick around for it. Aliens and AIs in the cast come in a variety of hues, elves are a uniform gray, and except for a brief encounter between Emily and a slightly darker lad, the (uncursed) humans default to white.

But along with emphatic sound effects, the battle and action scenes in the cleanly drawn, if sometimes cramped, panels feature huge blasts of fire or energy, intricately detailed giant robots, weirdly eyeless monsters, and wild escapades aplenty to keep the pace’s pedal to the metal. Cute animal heads on many figures (the result of a curse) and a scene with benevolent-looking trees provide at least a bit of relief from the grim expressions that all the human and humanoid elven characters almost invariably wear. Now a fiery, destructive phoenix struggling to regain control of her actions, Emily goes on to follow her brother Navin and allies as they battle invading shadows on the nearby world of Typhon, then switches back to human form for a climactic confrontation with the Elf King-in the course of which Emily rips off his mask to a chorus of “ERGH!! NO!!! GRAH! RRGH!! AAAGH!” to expose a rousingly hideous face.

The multistranded storyline picks up with Emily’s return to the world of Alledia. Stonekeeper Emily frees the elves from their monstrous masked ruler and sets out to rejoin her brother and mother in the series’ penultimate episode. Fans of Jeff Smith’s Bone will happily fret with the good guys and hiss at the baddies. The mid-sized, squared-off panels are sometimes a little small to portray action sequences clearly, but the quickly paced plot is easy enough to follow, and Kibuishi is a dab hand at portraying freaky monsters. Off to Episode Two, and the distant city of Kanalis, for a cure. Finding unexpected allies in rabbit-like Miskit, grumpy Cogsley and other robots created by their mysterious great-grandfather, the children weather attacks from huge, tentacled Rakers, a pointy eared elf prince with shark-like teeth and other adversaries to get her back-only to discover that she’s in a coma, poisoned. When a scuttling “arachnopod” sucks down their widowed parent, Emily and younger sib Navin pursue through a door in the basement and into the alternate-Earth land of Alledia. With many a SZZT! SZRAK! FWOOM! and SKREE!, young Emily learns to use an energy-bolt-shooting amulet against an array of menaces to rescue her captured Mom in this graphic-novel series opener.

The stonekeeper series