Mark Daley’s hometown is full of secrets, and he’s one of them! Starting his sophomore year at Woodvale High, he’s ready for a change, and new friends the SK Crew – a group of five ridiculous juniors – might be able to give it to him. But his old friend Lyle isn’t ready to let him go, and he’ll drag Mark back to their shared past on Woodvale’s dark fringes even if he has to start a schoolwide riot to do it.
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There have been so many versions of this book it’s kind of insane. The first was actually an early draft of Night of the Crimson Twig from junior high; I wrote what turned out to be the initial Children of Woodvale incarnation much later, when I was supposed to be taking notes in my 12th grade English class. An edited version of that story saw print for the first time in late 2003, through the subsidiary publisher iUniverse, only to be followed by a deluxe edition with more edits and a better-drawn cover in late 2006, when I switched to Lulu. More edits to that edition would follow until I did a fourth release under the new, more distinctive title “Donovan’s Gauntlet” in 2013; by then, I’d also posted the deluxe edition to my old blog one chapter at a time as part of a serialization experiment, making the print version temporarily unavailable so I could rerelease it when the serialization finished. I gave Donovan’s Gauntlet a third cartoon cover in 2016, only to immediately start on yet another edit in 2017 that included a black-and-white line art cover made by tracing over a photograph (which was intended to be the first of a batch of similar covers as I took my first stab at standardizing formats throughout the series). However, I pulled all of Children of Woodvale off the market temporarily before that edit was even completed and started combining everything from Donovan’s Gauntlet, Blood and Brotherhood, The Arc of Time, Whys and Becauses, and the theretofore-unseen Bite of Chaos into one huge volume, which now contains an even newer edit of the Donovan’s Gauntlet content that I like much better than the previous one I never finished. Whew!
Anyway, in the fullness of time, Donovan’s Gauntlet has crystallized to me as a breakup story. Once I carved away and let go of all the winking real-life references I’d forced over top of it (from back when I still wanted to show off to my classmates) and let the characters reveal their own, true selves to me, I found that I sympathized with Mark, Flint, and Lyle as they all tried to adapt to an ongoing shift in their social situation that was never going to shake out easily. From there, the central questions became what these people’s points of disagreement would be, and how they’d react when they came to an impasse. The last version of the story surprised me many times and tied back into the earliest lore of the Woodvale Universe to reveal a conflict that only these alumni of Barkley Elementary could have.