Cheshire Crossing
by Andy Weir and Sarah Andersen
Tapas, serialized from 2017 to 2019
Ten Speed Press, collected 2019
Long, long ago -- specifically from 2006 to 2008 -- Andy Weir drew a terrible comic called Cheshire Crossing (site). To be clear, it was the drawing that was terrible; the story was actually pretty good. Drawing was hard, and he did not like it, so he wrote The Martian and became famous. Enter money-grubbing publishers, who thought they could maybe make a profit off the Cheshire project if they could find someone who could draw.
Enter Sarah Andersen, best known for her web-comic Sarah's Scribbles (site). This is a good comic, but not actually a great example of her artistic ability. Arguably, Cheshire Crossing is the best example, although her Behance site might beg to differ. Anyway, the money-grubbing publishers were right, and a most excellent book was born.
Cheshire Crossing follows the adventures of Dorothy Gale, Wendy Darling, and Alice Liddell sometime after their more famous adventures in Oz, Neverland, and Wonderland. The mundane world does not believe in such nonsense, and the girls have spent their later childhood in a series of mental institutions, never spending long in any one place, as they have easy means of escaping. They are brought together at a very targeted boarding school, where they will be researched not as mental patients, but as powerful magic users. It takes exactly zero days for this to go horribly wrong.
While avoiding spoilers, I think it's safe to say that the protagonists immediately start jumping across worlds, and the respective bad guys of those worlds quickly pick up on the fact that there are other worlds to plunder, and that they would really like to do this. Mistakes are made, new wrinkles to powers discovered, and old comrades are revisited.
I would consider this to fall under the general heading of rational fiction -- smart people munchkining rules in interesting ways -- and both the bad guys and the good guys show some clever planning and quick thinking. It is hardly lighthearted, and only occasionally comic, but it is fun. Be warned, it is targeted more towards adults than children, although there's nothing that's likely to scar the average pre-teen. Unfortunately, it is also only the first installment, with more adventures clearly foreshadowed but, as far as I can find, not actually planned. There is, however, a planned film adaptation, which might perhaps spur the artists to extend their work.