Ladies of the Knight-Review
- Ben Crane
- 6 hours ago
- 5 min read
Title: Ladies of the Knight
Written and Illustrated by: Fiona Marchbank
Lettered by: Thomas Long
Publisher: Oni Press
$19.99 | 256 PGS. | FC | ON SALE JULY 8, 2026
Solicit:
In a land where glamorous knights compete in showy tournaments for fame and fortune, George wants to be the best. Being small and untrained means no knight will give her a coveted spot as their squire, but George won’t give up on her dreams so easily.
Serafina is the best knight around, no question. She’s so good that she’s getting bored and reckless in her jousts. It doesn’t help that everyone is mesmerized by Aethelberg, her sparkling rival, who is much better at playing to the crowd, while Serafina would rather keep to herself and practice her swordplay. When Serafina’s wife and patroness insists on her taking plucky George as a squire, Serafina suddenly finds herself in the position she never wanted—a mentor. Their partnership is going to be even harder than it looks, considering George can barely hold a sword without giving herself a black eye and Serafina is even pricklier than the lance she wields. But if either of them are going to take the league of knights by storm, they’ll have to learn that neither of them can do it alone.
In her author-illustrator debut, step into Fiona Marchbank’s (Fairest Of All: A Villains Graphic Novel, Of Her Own Design) colorful, medieval world for fans of Squire and Ella Enchanted and follow George on a quest to be the greatest knight in all the land
Reviewed by Ben Crane
Ladies of the Knight is a medieval, YA sports drama following the brilliant but prickly knight Lady Serafina and her new, indefatigably bubbly squire George. From a relatively rote premise, Marchbank weaves a truly beautiful and moving story of intergenerational friendship, found family, and kindness, elevated by pitch-perfect artwork.
Lady Serafina is a tournament knight and one of the best in the land. She fights exclusively for sport—competing in the joust, polearm, and sword—in a world very loosely based on late medieval Europe. Serafina and her fellow competitors are modern sports stars, complete with adoring fans, publicity tours, and sponsorship deals, but Serafina hates all the trappings of her world. She fights purely for the win and nothing else, accepting her wife Minerva’s successful mercantile business as her sole sponsor. And she is furious when Minerva brings on the young, relentlessly positive George as her new squire.
George is the daughter of Minerva’s stablemaster, and while she has boundless energy and a preternatural talent with horses, she has little strength and less training in the martial arts. But Minerva is the only person in the world who can tell Serafina what to do, and she tells Serafina to train George, so train George she will.
The story that follows doesn’t break any new narrative ground. It unfolds almost exactly as expected, with George’s brightness slowly breaking through Serafina’s armor as her pluckiness carries her through training that others were sure would shatter her. Where Ladies of the Knight truly shines isn’t in the story, but in the smaller details, the surrounding world, and all of the things it is doing in the background. This tropey sports journey is just the frame to hold up and deliver Marchbank’s underlying message of assertive inclusiveness.
Ladies of the Knight has been marketed as a queer story. This makes sense. One of the core relationships is a sapphic marriage. There are multiple gender-non-conforming characters. Pronouns abound in this medieval fantasy world. Yet I would argue this is no more a queer story than A Knight’s Tale was a straight one. The characters’ queerness is no more a central part of the narrative than their hair color or their height. It informs the story. It does not define it.
Instead, I would say that Ladies of the Knight is an inclusive story. It allows its characters to be who they are without question, and in that it presents a radical model for a far happier society. George’s friend and fellow squire Floriant is nonbinary, and their pronouns simply are. It is never a topic of discussion. A few times characters call George by her birth name, “Georgina.” She corrects them gently and without anger, and then everyone moves on. Characters have a variety of skin colors and cultural backgrounds. Minerva wraps her hair to indicate that she is married. None of this is ever commented on. It just is. This world is accepting and open, and every single person in it is happier for that. That is the queerness on offer here.
That diverse array of secondary characters is wonderful, demonstrating a breadth and complexity that the narrative doesn’t demand, but which is left all the richer for it. Æthelburg is the standout here. Established as Serafina’s rival, we are primed to hate her from the jump. She is set up as a flouncy, limelight-loving diva, more interested her fans’ adoration and the trappings of celebrity than the thrill and challenge of the sport. She is arrogant and effortlessly talented and just infuriatingly perfect. Until George gets to know her and sees that she is… not.
Æthelburg works every moment of every day to be as good as she is. She throws herself into the pageantry surrounding the sport because otherwise, she would be unable to support herself or her squire. She is full of doubt and worry, and she thinks deeply and hard about how she can best uplift everyone around her. She would have been perfectly serviceable as a vacuous villain, but that isn’t the story Marchbank wants to tell.
The traditional, archetypal quality of George and Serafina’s characters is not, it turns out, a failing, but a trap, luring us into a sense of confidence that we know who these other people are—the same trap that George and Serafina themselves fall into—only to reveal their true complexity and depth. Ladies of the Knight doesn’t need a mustache-twirling villain because the antagonist isn’t a person, but that simplistic attitude that reduces others to flat caricatures. That is what Serafina must overcome.
If I must offer a criticism, it is that the volume shows its webcomic origins in two ways that leave it not perfectly suited to the printed format. The first is that the book is constructed from single pages, not from spreads. While each page on its own is wonderful, the page turns frequently fall in awkward places, and the full horizontal space of the book is never utilized. The second is that while the book does end at the end of an arc, it still feels rather arbitrary. This is more Fellowship than Return. The eternal story engine of the webcomic drives ever onward, so the book just sort of ends when it reaches the length a book is supposed to be, rather than after reaching a particularly resounding conclusion.
Do not, though, let those minor quibbles keep you from this joyful wonder of a tome. Ladies of the Knight is a powerful celebration of community, inclusiveness, individuality, and joy, and easily one of my favorite books of the year.
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