Incredible art, intriguing story and such a frustrating cliffhanger! I need to know more about the fog - what is it? where did it come from? What is this new mysterious city? Is Pig's dad alive? So many questions!

This is a perfect storm of a graphic novel: hauntingly beautiful artwork, relatable characters, an intriguing and mysterious plot, and, oh, the atmosphere! Everything is so well done, and the images match and accentuate the text, which is very well written, perfectly. The scary bits are scary, the funny bits are funny, and the sad bits? They’ll make you misty.

Dam Keeper tells the tale of school-aged Pig, who is charged with maintaining the dam/windmill that protects his town from the deadly fog surrounding it. It’s a position he’s inherited from his missing/vanished-presumed-dead parents and a legacy he takes very seriously -- to the detriment of his social standing. He’s the only one that seems to realize that the fog is beginning to behave erratically, and when Pig, along his best friend, Fox, and not-so-best-friend, Hippo, finds himself lost on the other side of the dam, he may just begin to unravel the fog’s mysteries.

The story ends abruptly, as so many middle-grad graphic novels are want to do, so expect many an enthralled patron to come in anxious search of the next installment. A good pick for fans of the Amulet series, I think.

While the idea of the plot was interesting and had a lot of potential, I was taken aback by the cutesy illustrations. I didn't feel they matched the dark tone of the story. It was still an enjoyable read, just a tad confusing.

This was a fun and quick Graphic Novel Read! It was an interesting take on a post apocalyptic world lived in by anthropomorphic animals. Can't wait to see where the story continues from here!

I love this graphic novel. Great story line and beautiful artwork. I'll definitely get this for our library.

The Dam Keeper is a sad and devastating story in so many ways. The perfect counterpart to this is that our main characters are kids, a pig, hippo and fox. The hollow ghostly feeling is distressing and beautiful at the same time. The pig is following his dad in protecting the city from a dark nasty fog by setting the windmills to work. His dad lost himself to madness and now even the fog is acting weirdly so that our friends get lost only to find other places like their home. The melancholia is suffocating and the kids are awesome. The fox is friends with both, but the pig and hippo don't like each other. The tension is interesting as it shifts their power balance. The ending bothered me though, it felt like this ended too abruptly and what was the point really? Especially with the way the fog looked. So many awesome things were now left unsaid in a way that it's even hard to try to analyse this. I so wished something crushing and bittersweet. Somehow this reminded me of Lowry's The Giver.

The art is basically flawless and beautiful. Everything is dark, grim and sandy and then our characters are pastel-colored animals like cute stuffed toys. It's so odd that it's really perfect. Kondo moves the story with ease and the panels are their own story within a story. The Dam Keeper comic is oddly cute and depressing, which made me basically cry. A proper ending would've earned this five stars easily, now it kind of lacked unless there's continuation? I hope there is.