Kate’s Review: “The Ballad of Nod (#1): Waking Up From Nightmares”

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Book: “The Ballad of Nod (#1): Waking Up From Nightmares” by James Burton and Kira Burton

Publishing Info: Scattered Comics, May 2025

Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eBook from the author.

Where You Can Get This Book: This first issue has not been published yet, but when it does it will be available at James Burton’s website Angry Brain Artworks when it comes out sometime in May.

Book Description: The Ballad of Nod is the story of a young girl named Fey who is grieving the loss of her Father to cancer. The regrets, fear and pain is attracting the nightmares of the dream world to invade her reality every night. The only thing stopping them is the courage of her Guardian, a Teddy Bear named Patches, who each night fights back the darkness. That is until the worst of the worst a night prince called the Phobetor drags him into the dark. Now Fey must choose to find her courage to go in and save him or hide and loose someone else she loves.

Review: Thank you to James Burton for sending me an eBook of this comic!

I am one of those adults who just couldn’t part ways with a couple of my childhood stuffed animals. There are two in particular that I felt a need to hold on to, the first being Carmichael the Cat, the second being Bump the Bear. Both of them now officially belong to my five year old and reside in her room, but every once in awhile when I’m feeing deeply anxious or down I will bring Bump to my room to hang out for a few days before returning him. So I absolutely understand a bond a child has with a beloved childhood toy. And in “The Ballad of Nod (#1): Waking Up From Nightmares” by siblings James and Kira Burton, we get a really good dark fantasy tale that not only captures the security of a childhood toy, but also the deep grief of mourning a parent who has passed away long before their time.

Judging by the cover of this first issue, you can immediately tell that this is going to be a horror story, with a monstrous face being front an center. But then there is this adorable and quite determined looking silhouette of a teddy bear, and that is part of the real crux of this story: the bond between a girl and the guardian teddy that protects her from monsters and beasts every night as she sleeps. Fey is a little girl whose father died of cancer, and has found comfort in a bear named Patches, so named because when she wakes up in the morning he has rips and tears that need to be mended. I love this concept on its own, feeling like a dreamy dark fantasy that also has some very real human elements. I’ll start with the horror first, and I can say right off the bat it worked well for me. I love the idea of a security toy actively fighting off the monsters under the bed or in the closets, as these toys are so loved and so ingrained in childhood as a way to fight anxiety (I mean hello, I still use the aforementioned Bump to help quell my ADULT anxieties!), so the metaphor worked very, very well for me. And then to flip the concept and to have Fey have to be the one to take the first steps to rescue Patches and to face her fears to do so is also a great twist on the expected plot. We only have issue one that has a fair amount of set up, but the monsters that we saw were effective and intimidating, and it has a lot of promise to be VERY creepy for the audience as the story goes on.

But the other huge theme of this comic is the deeply emotional story about Fey losing her father to cancer, and having to navigate her grief and the trauma around it. This story feels personal, and is very well explored and had me tearing up during certain moments. Our first issue has a lot of exposition to set up Fey’s history and her emotional state, and I thought that it did it very well with flashbacks to her father’s hospitalization, implied times right after his passing, and also seeing how Patches came into her life as a buoy during a very dark and difficult time. It makes Patches’s mission feel all the more poignant, and then Fey’s own mission to be the one to save him feel all the more powerful. The dreamy earnestness of it all reminded me of something similar to the likes of “Locke and Key”.

And finally, the artwork. I thought it was well matched to the tone, and it has the ability to be both unsettling and scary as well as adorable (Patches is ADORABLE).

I definitely want to read more to see how this goes. “The Ballad of Nod: Waking Up From Nightmares” is a stellar start to what promises to be an emotional and heartfelt (and scary) series.

Rating 8: Emotional, creepy, and heartfelt to the core, “The Ballad of Nod (#1): Waking Up From Nightmares” is a promising start to a new dark fantasy comic series.

Reader’s Advisory:

“The Ballad of Nod (#1): Waking From Nightmares” isn’t on any Goodreads lists as of yet, but it gives me serious Joe Hill vibes.