Lilith

Begun as a webcomic and funded into print via Kickstarter, Charles Dowd’s “Lilith Dark and the Beastie Tree” is a labor of love, and it shows. The first six chapters, collected here, are cute, spirited and a little rough around the edges. They follow the adventures of Lilith Dark, a little girl whose overactive imagination comes in handy when it turns out that the beasties from her games are real. Though the story suffers from problems common to all-ages comics, there’s a catching zeal here that makes them forgivable. Lilith is a likeably stubborn heroine, with a wide, square face that Dowd deftly transforms from childish pouts to determined scowls. She’s a fun character to follow through the world, and her family dynamic will be familiar to any child who’s watched a cartoon. Her sister, Becky, is responsible and a little high-strung; her brother, Dewey, is a Harry Potter doppelganger who draws geeky monster designs in his notebook. However, the first third of the book feels like s