Chad Sell’s The Cardboard Kingdom (2018) is a middle-grade graphic novel about a group of neighborhood friends who creatively use cardboard to transform their world into a fantastical kingdom of adventure. Sell wrote The Cardboard Kingdom in collaboration with a team of other writers who drew on their own childhood experiences as inspiration for their contributions. Although the novel is divided into 15 chapters that function as stand-alone stories with distinct narrative arcs, each chapter works with the others to explore overlapping themes and provide a more intricate picture of the children’s summer holidays. Once certain characters and settings have been introduced, it is common for them to reappear in later chapters. As the children navigate the difficulties associated with growing up, The Cardboard Kingdom celebrates diversity, explores The Transformative Power of Play, and stresses The Importance of Parental and Guardian Support. Upon its release, the novel was nominated for an Eisner award and won the Dwayne McDuffie Award for Children’s Comics—an award that focuses on quality, timelessness, originality, diversity, and inclusion.

This guide refers to the 2018 paperback edition published by Knopf Books for Young Readers.

Plot Summary

The opening chapters focus on a series of different children who are designing their costumes and alter egos for the Cardboard Kingdom. Jack is dressed as the Sorceress, and his younger sister, Sam, is dressed as a goblin. Together, they pretend to perform all sorts of evil in their backyard. Their neighbor watches from over the fence and laughs at Jack’s costume, distracting him and causing him to fall over. Jack runs off upset but later returns to improve his costume. The neighbor, who feels bad about upsetting Jack, comes to join in their game, but she is annoyed when she is cast as a princess, so she leaves to create her own costume. She soon returns dressed as the Knight, and the three friends enjoy an afternoon of epic battles. Meanwhile, in a nearby household, Shikha uses play to control her energetic and troublesome brother, Vijay, while their mom works a late shift. Vijay adopts the persona of the Beast, and Shikha becomes the Huntress. Their game eventually leads them next door, where they join up with Jack, Sam, and their neighbor (the Knight) and join opposing sides.

Meanwhile, a boisterous girl named Sophie deals with pressure to conform to her grandmother’s outdated social expectations but finds a way to express her true self through her cardboard alter ego, the Big Banshee. In another neighborhood escapade, Miguel and his friends engage in a role-swapping until everyone is satisfied with their characters; they then reenact The Prince and the Pea, the movie they have just watched.

As the summer progresses, two girls in the neighborhood start businesses and end up competing for everyone’s money and attention. Alice opens a lemonade stand that sells magic “potions,” while Becky opens a blacksmith shop that sells enchanted weapons and armor. In their efforts to one-up each another, the girls end up hurting other children. Recognizing that their competition is bad for business, Alice suggests that they team up, and together, they open the Dragon Head Inn. It is a huge success and becomes the main hangout for the rest of the summer.

However, not everyone is skilled at making friends and fitting in. Egon (Professor Everything) struggles to fit in with everyone because his love and knowledge of science conflicts with the imaginative and scientifically impossible games of the children. Even Egon’s self-help book on making friends does not help him, and in the end, he realizes that he just needs to be himself and find the right person to play with. Meanwhile, Roy, who is adjusting to living with his Nanna and being separated from his mom, also has difficulty making friends. After some teenagers bully him, he takes out his frustrations by destroying Megalopolis, the cardboard city of a boy named Peter. Rather than becoming dismayed or angry with Roy, Peter invents a way to better defend the city the next time Roy returns. The ensuing battle creates a bond between the two, which is later solidified when they team up to fight off the teenage bullies.

As the children engage in many joint adventures over the summer, their stories explore The Importance of Parental and Guardian Support. Connie is a young girl who dresses and acts like a robot to deal with the emotional difficulties of growing up and making friends. Her dad encourages her to invite the neighborhood children to a birthday party, and despite Connie’s eccentricities, they all show up and have a great time. Amanda likes to dress up as a mad scientist and perform all kinds of experiments on her friends, but her dad gets upset when he realizes that her costume involves a mustache. His disapproval devastates Amanda, for she just wants to be more like her dad, and he soon realizes his cultural biases and apologizes.

In “The Army of Evil,” Jack’s mom grows frustrated with his Sorceress alter ego and bans him from doing any evil in the house. When one of his pranks goes wrong, his friends also become frustrated with his constant “evil,” and it becomes clear that Jack feels lonely. Jack’s mom attempts to talk to him about the Sorceress and what she means to Jack, and she reassures him that she loves him no matter what. The chapter ends with Jack reevaluating how he treats others and creating an army of evil companions rather than minions.

Seth has a much less positive experience with his parents. While his mom attempts to support him through her separation with his dad, his dad routinely shows up at the house, uninvited, angry, and aggressive. Seth has difficulty sleeping and feels the need to keep watch over the house, which leads to him to adopt the alter ego of “the Gargoyle.” One night, while Seth sits on the roof outside his bedroom window, his dad shows up to collect some things, but Seth confronts him and compels him to leave. At first Seth appears satisfied, but his smile soon gives way to a look of sadness.

The summer ends with one big final adventure. Becky laments that while she has enjoyed running the Dragon’s Head Inn for everyone, she wishes she could have gone on an adventure of her own. Jack overhears this and concocts a plan to steal the dragon’s head from the Dragon’s Head Inn, using the Army of Evil. Becky gets her wish, and with the other heroes of the Cardboard Kingdom, she embarks on a quest to recover the lost head. The next week, everyone goes back to school. On the bus ride, everyone reminisces about the summer’s adventures, and when they get off the bus and walk toward the school, their shadows are all shaped like their cardboard alter egos.