In "Reason to Get Excited," I spotlight things from modern comics that I think are worth getting excited about. I mean stuff more specific than "this comic is good," ya know? More like a specific bit from a writer or artist that impressed me.

Today, I talk about how the new Boom! fantasy series, Folklords, shows that pursuit of knowledge is one of the most noble quests that exist.

Folklords just launched recently, but it has been a nice hit for Boom!, with it being in its third or fortieth or whatever printing. It is written by Matt Kindt, with art by Matt Smith and Chris O'Halloran and letters by Jim Campbell.

The series stars a young man named Ansel, who lives in a fairly traditional fairy tale like village, except there is one thing that stands out - Ansel himself. See how he dresses? Weird, right?

It is because he has visions of a whole other magical world, one where buildings tower in the sky, where people fly through the sky in metal machines and where they, you know, wear clothes like this...

This has caused Ansel to be curious about the rest of the world and makes him want to choose his graduation quest to be to find the mysterious Folklords. This freaks out all of his friends, who are all more interested in fairly traditional quests, like finding a golden goose or whatever (there are certain parallels to Fables that I appreciated).

When it comes time to reveal his quest, though, Ansel's friend Archer actually steals Ansel's quest and things go poorly...

Now, each of the teens are assigned quests and the quests are really nothing more than glorified spying for the authorities. This leads to Ansel to decide that he (and Archer) will go on their original quest. They will break free from the town and find the truth.

In a modern world where we seem almost post-facts, where it doesn't seem to matter what the truth is and when there is a heavy bent of anti-intellectualism out there, Kindt, Smith and O'Halloran instead give us a world where there is a hero who is not willing to take "knowledge is bad" as an answer.

Folklords ends with their quest just beginning, but there is so much optimism in just the first issue that I was really beaming after reading it. I'm looking forward to a lot more from this series.

Okay, this feature is a bit less of a reader-interactive one, as I'm just spotlight stuff in modern comics that specifically impressed ME, but heck, if you'd like to send in some suggestions anyways, maybe you and I have the same taste! It's certainly not improbably that something you found cool would be something that I found cool, too, so feel free to send ideas to me at brianc@cbr.com!