Doorway to a strange new Moon
Kevin Fraser Mutch’s The Moon Prince (Fantgraphics Books, 2025) is an exquisite and substantial tome. The 420-page epic graphic novel lands like a meteor from an alternate universe, with the confident authority of a world fully imagined. It’s “all ages,” but only in the best (and perhaps most unfashionable) sense: a brother-and-sister adventure that allows real danger, real politics, and real consequences to coexist with soaring wonder and imagination. The gorgeous artwork lives in a fertile Goldilocks zone Mutch prizes — “realistic, yet cartoony” — and the world is purposefully skewed.
We open cold, in an alternate version of New Jersey ruled by an authoritarian monarchy. Max and Molly, who are mixed-race orphans, are toiling under an abusive foreman at the Bluestone Quarry, a government forced labour camp that runs with the aid of a mind-clouding elixir called Joy Juice. The children’s whispered surname “M’Chawi” unlocks the ingredients that will power this epic tale: their mysterious lineage and even more mysterious powers, whispers of a past interplanetary empire, and a journey from servitude to adventure … on the Moon.
As science fiction goes, The Moon Prince can be charmingly unscientific. The main characters reach the moon in a massive zeppelin, where they find a breathable atmosphere and a varied geography populated by human pirates and races of Bats, Monkeys, Spiders, Dragonflies, and Fairies. At the same time, it is narratively and emotionally precise: a “picaresque” tale (Mutch’s word) whose winding design separates Max (age 12) and his younger sister Molly, and forces them into dangerous, high-stakes encounters across this landscape.
The result is an engrossing saga in which the universe keeps widening, the backstory deepening, and the stakes escalating. There’s heft, depth and complexity in this story, including mysteries aplenty to decode, and intractable social challenges with no simple answers. Mutch is best known for decidedly adult graphic novels, so this is something entirely different. When I interview Mutch at his home studio in what he describes as “the toughest part of Hamilton” Ontario, he states his ambition plainly: “I’m trying to avoid the lightness of kids’ books today. They feel to me formally light… and emotionally light.”
The making of the artist who had to make this epic
Mutch’s journey from his Winnipeg childhood to this version of the Moon is at least as improbable as that traced by Max and Molly in the story. “I’m an artist, first and foremost,” he explains – and he has the Master of Fine Arts in painting from the University of Victoria, plus the portfolio of “conceptualist art,” to prove it. But his career did not follow the path of the art gallery system that he trained for, because he found the world of fine art “a deeply compromised undertaking.”
He describes how a gallery artist creates art “for the richest people in the world… and then the richest people in the world come and buy your work and put it in a vault.” Not appealing to Mutch. Nor was he enthused by the one major alternative: government-funded patronage through grant applications. In this situation, he muses, “the art doesn’t feel critical or free or radical… It feels like it’s being captured by government funding and tamed down.”
His solution was piratical and practical: “I’m an old punk rocker. And back in the day, we were all about doing it yourself.” So Mutch became an early adopter of digital tools for art creation.They gave him independence: “a way of making work that doesn’t need a wealthy patron, or a government patron… because you could make cheap prints, or you could put it on the Internet.”
Using these tools, he paid the bills in various ways. He served as art director for ‘90s rock band Crash Test Dummies — singer Brad Roberts (of the uber-distinctive baritone voice) remains a close friend whom he meets regularly for drink and debate on “Teleological Tuesdays.” Mutch moved to the United States, where he founded a digital compositing business, created digital artwork, and launched digital and physical gallery spaces. For the 11 years leading up to 2017, he was the Lead Creative Retoucher (Photoshop artist) at a major American music company, where his job was literally “fabricating an image” for the label’s artists on album covers, posters and videos. (This period is the subject of his next adult graphic novel).
But his use of technology is more than just pragmatism or politics-by-other-means. It’s also a practical accommodation. Mutch lives with laryngeal dystonia, which strains his speech and requires regular injections to manage. He also suffers hand tremors, which as a kid required him to draw with both hands, so “the tremor in one hand could cancel out the tremor in the other”. Obsessive tendencies complete the trifecta. He had dabbled in creating comics as a youth, and his exacting standards meant that those pages accreted “a geology of layers of ink and then whiteout” before he could declare them done. He could spend literally months on a single page.
On a tablet, however, the need for two hands and a bottle of whiteout vanished — along with his blind spots. On the tablet, he could “flip and flop” images to his heart’s content, reversing them to “see problems that you could not see because of the way your mind scans.“ For Mutch, it’s incredibly effective — if deeply “humbling” — “to hold something up that you think is beautiful… then flip it and see this is childishly, awkwardly, badly composed. It keeps you on the level about what you’re doing.”
Powered by these tools, he returned to cartooning … on the side. He received a Xeric Award for his first adult graphic novel Fantastic Life, published in 2010. His second The Rough Pearl would follow a decade later in 2020. And now The Moon Prince. Digital tools made creating The Moon Prince possible, but they didn’t make the process easy or quick. It took Mutch a full decade of releasing one page per week as a web serialization — not because it reads like a webcomic (spoiler alert — it doesn’t), but as a metronome to push the story forward, steadily and consistently, alongside the corporate day job.
When Mutch had finally completed The Moon Prince, he offered the all-ages epic to Fantagraphics, the publisher of his adult works. Those graphic novels have been called “Lynchian” — as in director David Lynch: weirdly, even disturbingly compelling, and rooted in a fusion of the real and the fantastic.
As in: not for children.
They were surprisingly enthusiastic about his one-of-a-kind long-form adventure. And unlike what Mutch expected to hear from the traditional publishers of those “light” all-ages graphic novels, Fantagraphics were nonplussed by the story’s … crunchier elements. You see, Mutch’s process of flipping images to look at them backwards and forwards is not just a technological trick: it’s an ethos. In The Moon Prince, Mutch looks at everything from multiple sides – flipping human history, politics, race, conflict, literature, and even comics themselves backwards and forwards, over and over again … to create this beautiful, complex and engrossing tome.
I praise the story’s resulting depth, and comment that I find The Moon Prince refreshing for its relative lack of humour. For me, its seriousness — that immersive breadth and that expansive landscape — are a feature, not bug. But Mutch pushes back on my assessment. Having just re-read the published volume, he believes “there’s a lot of funny moments in it”. What he will grant is that, looking forward, “I’m not sure I’ve got as much humour in the sequel”.
The story beneath the story
Our back-and-forth about humour is a detour; the more revealing story is how this epic tale was created. To see that, I follow Mutch into his basement studio, where words and pictures pass the baton. (That technology he’s so good with? That comes later in the process.)
Mutch starts with a 12-page written plot outline, then moves quickly to full-size thumbnail layouts of individual pages. These are “very cartoony looking,” but — and this is rather unusual — they have “full written dialogue” because “the visual part and the textual part of it absolutely coexist for me as I write.” While he worked at his day job in the music industry, this was a practical “way that I could write it real quick, and get a sense of how I would lay out the page”. To illustrate his point, he pulls out a 5-inch thick stack of dog-eared thumbnail pages for The Moon Prince. The fidelity of the hand-printed text on these pages to that in the finished book is striking. “It’s unusual for me to change the dialogue, even by a few words,” he notes.
But as he moves on to the formal drawing, through which these scribbled thumbnails become finished pages, his verbal brain keeps working: “All of a sudden, I’ll find the language part of my mind reporting an idea to me. And I’ll think, ‘Oh, you just solved this problem that I would never have thought of!’” The problem in question might be a piece of historical or political background, an idea about one of the many Moon peoples and their language or culture, or backstory related to the mysterious interstellar Empire which once ruled the solar system.
Presented mentally with this information, he doesn’t rewrite. Instead, he creates a note … and then another note … and then another. He rummages for a moment, then locates a different stack of pages, which are all handwritten: “There’s probably 400 pages of notes here. On top of the 400 pages” of thumbnails. He smiles, “the further back you go, the notes turn out to be wrong … but some of them are good ideas. So you always look back with a little regret, if you bother to revisit the notes.”
It’s a tantalizing thought: if one day Mutch publishes an annotated version of The Moon Prince, its notes will unspool a second hidden picaresque of narrative roads taken … and not taken.
Ancestry of the adventure: Planetary romance, Barks, Kirby — and a refusal
The earliest and clearest influences shaping The Moon Prince are cheap mass-market paperbacks that Mutch devoured as a child: works by authors like Robert A. Heinlein, Andre Norton, Larry Niven, Isaac Asimov, and Lester Del Rey. The most specific precedent is the “planetary romance” — think Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars saga and its ilk — with its sleek futurism wrapped around pre-modern storytelling.
“Planetary romance novels have an embedded contradiction”, Mutch notes, “When you think about the history and evolution of the novel, planetary romance is actually a very conservative form… They weren’t modern at all!” This became painfully evident when he contemplated sharing the works of Burroughs with his then-young children. Their frequent racism and sexism were impossible to ignore. So since he couldn’t share them, he decided to make his own.
But in the process, he drew on other sources. The second major influence Mutch cites is cartoonist Carl Barks, who is the most famous and beloved writer-artist of the classic Donald Duck / Uncle Scrooge comics. Mutch says he is “pleased as Punch to be putting something out that’s, frankly, heavily influenced by Uncle Scrooge. I always talk about the planetary romance prose, but The Moon Prince is also heavily, heavily influenced by Carl Barks”. By this, he means less the ducks than the discipline: specifically, Barks’ legendary work ethic, and his intricate plotting, research, and attention to detail in the artwork.
Quite unintentionally, his third influence is legendary artist Jack Kirby, who co-created the Avengers, the Fantastic Four, the New Gods and so many other classic comics characters. In his thumbnail layouts, Mutch found that he was “really stuck on the six-panel page grid” – only to rediscover, during a re-read of Kirby’s Kamandi, that the King at the height of his powers ran on the same clear, muscular rhythm.
Lurking in the background is an equally formative negative influence: “If I’m doing a story that’s all ages”, he explains, “the last thing I want is for it to look like… all ages kids’ graphic novels in the big chain bookstores.” The problem is that “they’re always very simple drawings. They don’t have a ton of detail, and everything … has that Pixar sensibility. Everyone’s got big eyes.” Equally limiting, “the emotional palette just feels teensy-weensy.” Consciously taking the road less travelled, Mutch instead chooses size, sweep, scale, and substance.
The Moon Prince synthesizes all of these strands into a world that is both naturalistic and fantastic — classic, yet unclassifiable. Visually, Mutch favors clean, legible lines over heavy texture: a restrained palette that shifts from muted Earthside browns and greys to cooler lunar blues and greens. And that consistent, Kirbyesque six-panel grid gives his action a clear cadence and unrelenting momentum that steady the book’s picaresque sprawl. The dialogue breathes, the reveals land cleanly, and the conflicts read with crisp cause-and-effect. And this “realistic yet cartoony” approach shapes the faces, which are plastic enough for warmth and surprise, but anchored enough to make peril feel real.
Politics without slogans, and wonder without escape
“What I like about working in a more realistic vibe visually is that it allows more emotional depth if there’s a frightening situation or an adventure going on,” Mutch continues. While the art is undoubtedly exquisite, that emotional fidelity — plus the texture and nuance with which Mutch has imbued the world of The Moon Prince — prevent the reader from lapsing into simple artistic appreciation.
At one point in our wide-ranging conversation, he discusses how he dislikes conventional tourism with its hotel-hopping and sightseeing because it pays lip service to the visited, but leaves the visitor unchanged. His preference instead is “to go live somewhere… and not just for the sake of exoticism!” He and his wife Melissa effectively did that for 20 years in New York — which he characterizes as “the real deal, as opposed to visiting”. He thinks of their marriage similarly: as “a committed, long-term exposure to another culture.”
Likewise, The Moon Prince eschews story tourism and demands immersion. There’s no way to flit casually across this lunar landscape and process the plot, which is driven by the myriad cultures and conflicts of the crowded Moon’s many races. Or to accept at face value the noble pretensions of the monarchy that is mind-controlling Earth’s human population. Or to escape the tantalizing traces of the shadowy, techno-forward Empire that once existed across the galaxy … and the primal forces whispering from the glowing green stones that allow M’Chawis like Max and Molly to channel their powers.
No, when you read The Moon Prince, you live among these races, like Max and Molly do. And the principles by which his universe operates guarantee that the process of full-contact discovery is — like those 20 years Mutch spent in New York — “the real deal”.
The first principle governing this world is that there is no magic — because Mutch finds it lazy. “There’s a kind of pseudoscientific basis that I cooked up” for everything from the mind-controlling Joy Juice, to the interstellar dirigibles and the lunar atmosphere. “It’s like magic,” he grants, but it’s closer to Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth than to the spellbooks of fantasy novels with their instant and effortless reset buttons. The pseudoscience gives the world of The Moon Prince “a structure”, so that “you’re not sitting there all the time thinking that in the story, ‘it’s a little too easy to pull up another piece of magic.’”
His second principle: no moral sorting hat: “Especially in kids’ books, I hate good versus evil”, Mutch explains. “The very idea of ‘good and evil’ interferes with progress in the world, and turns everything into a power story, not an influence or change story.” This is another bone that he picks with fantasy: while he loves the Harry Potter books, “I just never got past the good and evil thing, ultimately. And you can argue that’s the problem. If that’s the filter through which I process the world, that can never be bridged, right? There are no solutions other than ‘I vanquish you.’”
So while individual characters and races in The Moon Prince villainize one another for valid historical and cultural reasons, there are almost no true “bad guys” here. (Just one, according to Mutch, and he gets killed in the story – though after a pause, Mutch notes that, if psychological treatment were available, even he might have a shot at redemption). What the book does instead is test allegiances and perspectives. Max and Molly initially side with the Bats, who are under siege by human pirates. But when they meet the monkey-like Groos, assumed (incorrectly) to be mere animals and enslaved by the Bats, they re-evaluate their assumptions and actions. The revelations and forced reassessments come fast and furious, in a complexifying daisy chain of incremental understanding.
So instead of the absolutes of good and evil, what we get is politics — engrossing, complicated inter-species politics. Everything is relative, in a reflection of the way history, self-interest, technology and power braid into real-world conflict. Mutch’s perspective on this is disarmingly simple: “By the time you’re in your late 40s, if you’re interested in politics at all… you just get to the point where you see the world as ridiculously complicated.” But a simple key unlocks that complexity: “I always like the saying ‘To understand all is to forgive all.’” In keeping with this principle, Max and especially Molly lead not with judgment but curiosity, and their questions open doors to understanding, forgiveness and reconciliation. You can think of them as a cheat code for a wondrous but conflicted world: in Mutch’s words, “you don’t stick your allegiances so tightly on one side that you’re not curious to understand another.” After all, “it turns out the pirates aren’t so bad. And the Spiders aren’t trying to kill anyone, right?”
His third principle of world-building — no escapism — elaborates the first two. The world we live in presents intractable and difficult problems that humanity needs to wrestle with: among them cruelty, racism, sexism, income inequality, and authoritarianism. In age-appropriate fashion, they’re all here in The Moon Prince. Just for starters, the mixed-parentage Max and Molly are on the receiving end of dehumanizing slurs, and are pressed into slave labour because they are “half-castes” or “swarts”. This part is personal for Mutch: “It was really, really important to me to have these kids be from a background that was meant to relate to African-American backgrounds, to be true to what I had heard over many years” — from his Black wife, her family and their friends. For them, “No justice, no peace” isn’t a slogan; it’s kitchen-table realism.
When they lived in New York in the 1990s, Mutch saw clear evidence of the growth of inequality and the squeezing out of the middle class, which “is obviously even worse now”. He baked the perilous inequality of our real world — and the potential for violence in response — into the authoritarian aristocracy governing the alt-New Jersey of The Moon Prince, and the resistance personified by the grizzled Mad Billy. Billy, Mutch admits, is “meant to sound a little shocking” to young readers. He talks of “waiting to tear down their little gilded palaces and set things right”, and suggests that he may have been involved in the “low key terrorism” of blowing up what is carefully noted to be an uninhabited boat. Likewise, the mercenary pirates, enslaved Groos, and Spiders who eat other races are examples of the horrors of the real world writ large. And just as this world offers no good / evil absolutism, there are no encompassing solutions to the problems on offer by story’s end. Instead, the story shows us Max and Molly making optimistic choices to achieve hard-negotiated, hard-fought progress – but it’s always two steps forward, then one step back.
The fourth principle bubbling under our discussion is a corollary of no escapism: it’s what I call “hope is not a strategy.” The existential reflections of a parent, a punk rocker and a pragmatist lurk in the sub-floor of the sprawling universe Mutch has created in The Moon Prince. He notes how today, “people talk about equity, as opposed to inequality: that there has to be some structure moving forward where people feel that there’s a future.” By contrast, “in the old punk rock days, we used to say the Sex Pistols slogan ‘No future… No future for me.’ We thought we didn’t have a future.”
“Well, it turned out that we did,” he continues, “as I sit here in my house in 2025 … although I knew plenty of people that wound up dead from that world, from that scene. People that couldn’t see a way forward, became addicts, and fell victim to the hopelessness of it”. He has tried to communicate the challenge and the remedy to his kids, who are now making their ways into the world. “We have to think in terms of not just a general optimism for the future — because increasingly, that seems misplaced. No, what we need is a strategy: how do we survive?” For this reason, he’s made a habit of periodically checking in with his kids about “Here’s where things are as a family” — and what they need to do about it. By way of example, he gestures to the house we’re sitting in. His thought process is “very different from how my dad saw it, when it was, ‘Get out of the house! You’re a punk rocker. Get out!’” In recognition of today’s realities, he tells his kids, ”This is the family home, and it’s going to be multigenerational.”
In The Moon Prince, Max and Molly face their own world of complex macro-economic, cultural, political and interpersonal challenge. And they don’t succeed simply by being their hopeful selves. They do the work: of building relationships, balancing pragmatism with idealism, and developing and adapting their strategy.
Kitiko: the smile that means “Pay me”
All of the principles informing his worldbuilding run directly counter to the kind of graphic novel that Mutch refused to let The Moon Prince become. But it’s more than the architecture and narrative that resist simplification. Every truly great invented world needs at least one entity that resists definition, defies domestication, and leaps from the page. In The Moon Prince, that honour goes to calico cat mercenary Kitiko, who boasts what Mutch laughingly calls “the creepiest perpetual grin”.
In a story that already disorients with its off-kilter Earth and strange lunar cultures, Kitiko crash lands like the most alien meteor of all. Mysteriously filled with arcane knowledge of the prior Republic, he is a savage fighter, a stickler for getting paid for his services (per “the code of the cats”), and an unlikely ally to Max and Molly. Or is he an ally? Inscrutable and obdurate, he leaves impact craters that accelerate, complicate, and disrupt the story.
The character arrived in Mutch’s mind full-blown, but he is happy to play the influence game: “Lewis Carroll, for sure,” he nods, pointing to Kitiko’s huge Cheshire smile. In fact, when he was much younger, Mutch once drew a cat named Carlisle as just a grinning evil face: “I always say that was the first appearance of KitiKo.” Another progenitor is the Narnia books’ mouse warrior Reepicheep and his famous chivalric code – the chief difference being that “Kitiko seems to occasionally do things that seem so mercantile.”
Finally, the character has autobiographical origins: “We’ve always had cats”, Mutch smiles, gesturing by way of evidence to the small grey one pressed against the kitchen window beside us. And based on Mutch’s lifetime of feline experience, Kitiko comes by his pecuniary motivations honestly — because “cats ARE mercenaries” who operate by one simple, primal bargain: “I’ll look after the mice, and you just look after me.’”
Family, time, and the sequel ticking in the kitchen
It should be clear by now that it’s not just Kitiko: the mythology and making of The Moon Prince are bound inextricably to Mutch’s real life.
Son Max (now 25) pops into the room in the middle of our conversation to heat up a piece of leftover pizza. He and his sister Molly posed for countless reference photographs during the first few years of the book’s creation. “Never forgiven him for it!” he smiles broadly. But given the measured pace of Mutch’s drawing, the human siblings quickly outgrew the characters. So Mutch planned ahead: “I had all the photography completed many years before I finished the drawing.” And for the sequels, the first of which he’s been thumbnailing in the notebook at his kitchen table, he will use 3D computer models as a technological replacement for his now-adult children.
The passage of time and the pesky demands of reality have more broadly re-shaped his ambitions for the fictional Max and Molly. He once planned nine books — one per planet — but as The Moon Prince ballooned from being an intended “trial book” of just 120 pages to a full-blown epic of 420 pages, he formed a new plan. The goal is now a trilogy, in which Max and Molly travel to the Moon, then Mars, and then Pluto (Before I can even ask, Mutch clarifies, “I think of Pluto as a planet”). That second volume sports the working title “The Caves of Mars”.
He is racing against time. At roughly a page a week, another 400-page saga represents eight years of drawing. But as with all aspects of his life and art, he has a strategy: “Because I work in writing, but also in visual terms, I’m trying to do all the writing first, because I think that stuff will be most vulnerable to getting old.” Language slips first, he explains, while drawing is “more lizard brain”: older and sturdier. His plan for volumes 2 and 3 is to finish the writing and layouts, then perhaps collaborate with a younger, faster artist for the finished art.
Verdict: Give this book to someone you love (then borrow it back)
The Moon Prince is planetary romance done with modern conscience and classic craft. It’s a children’s adventure that respects its readers enough to talk up to them. It’s huge because our world is vast. It’s timely and human because it refuses the polarizing illusion of “good versus evil.” And it helpfully complicates the beauty of its pages by refracting the stubborn real-world challenges that we all, young and old, need to wrestle with. Its weighty influences (Carl Barks, Jack Kirby, the pulps, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis) are all present and accounted for — but the voice is uniquely that of Mutch the artist, Mutch the punk, Mutch the parent.
All of this makes The Moon Prince a gift of imagination that feels certain to defeat casual horizontal skimming, and to coax — no, demand — an extended vertical plunge. So buy it for a kid, then read it yourself. Luxuriate in its beauty. And talk about it: why the Bats aren’t villains and the pirates aren’t heroes, and why seeking to understand — not vanquishing — is the book’s radical act.
If we all read more stories like this, perhaps we’d raise a generation that expects politics to be complicated, questions to be necessary, and solutions to be provisional — and is braver for it. For ultimately, The Moon Prince argues that curiosity isn’t soft. It’s a discipline and a strategy. And one quarter of the way through a hard century, that might be the most grown-up lesson an all-ages graphic novel could possibly teach.
Two final thoughts: 1) In 2025, the world of book distribution experienced some upheaval, which has made it challenging to locate copies of The Moon Prince in Canada. However, if you’re in the Toronto area, The Beguiling at 319 College Street currently has signed copies of the book for sale. Get one while you can! 2) When you’re done reading and sharing and talking about The Moon Prince … think about dropping Mutch a note. During our conversation, I was touched by an offhanded lament he voiced for the vanishing world of comics journalism, and his observation that the “monastic life of a comic book creator” yields too little direct feedback. You’ve got the power to fix this, if you’ll just take a few minutes to do it!
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine, 2026
