Squire and Knight

by Scott Chantler

In Scott Chantler’s fantasy graphic novel, a boastful knight and his thoughtful, underappreciated squire arrive in a troubled town where a dragon seems to be the obvious enemy. While the knight pursues a heroic confrontation, the squire investigates what is really happening, revealing the value of observation, curiosity, and questioning appearances.

Big Idea

True heroism depends on understanding a problem, not simply charging toward it. Chantler’s words and pictures invite readers to question reputations, notice overlooked evidence, and recognize intelligence as a form of courage.

Discussion Questions

1.How do the knight and the squire define being heroic? Which moments challenge their ideas—and yours?
2.When do the pictures help you notice something that a character overlooks? How does that affect your understanding of the mystery?
3.How do assumptions about knights, squires, and dragons influence what characters expect? What changes when those expectations are questioned?
4.How does the squire respond to being underestimated? What can we learn from his choices without suggesting that anyone should accept being treated unfairly?
5.Where does Chantler slow the story down, and where does he speed it up? How do these changes shape the humor, suspense, or importance of a discovery?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 50 minutes📦 Copies of the book, paper or comic-panel templates, pencils, erasers, colored pencils or crayons, sticky notes, and a board or chart paper

Learning Goals

Support an interpretation of the knight or squire with evidence from dialogue and illustrations.
Explain how panel sequence, visual detail, and dialogue influence a graphic novel’s pacing.
Distinguish an assumption from evidence when interpreting a story problem.
Create and revise a short comic that uses a deliberate pause to develop suspense, humor, or understanding.

Activity Steps

1.Read or revisit a short sequence that contrasts the knight’s confidence with the squire’s observations. Identify what each character says, notices, and assumes.
2.Discuss the sequence’s pace: count panels, locate silent moments, and consider where readers linger. Record evidence under two headings: 'Rush to act' and 'Pause to understand.'
3.Invent a new, clearly labeled extension scene: for example, townspeople blame a frightening noise on a monster, but an overlooked detail suggests another explanation. Plan an initial assumption, a clue, and a discovery.
4.Draw a three-panel version that races from problem to action. Then draw a six-panel version of the same event that includes a silent observation panel and a question before anyone acts.
5.Exchange comics with a partner. Ask the partner to mark the fastest moment, the strongest pause, and the clue that changes their understanding; revise one panel using this feedback.
6.Share selected comics and write a brief reflection explaining how the slower version changes the reader’s judgment about heroism.

Standards Connections

ELA: CCSS RL.3.3 / RL.4.3 / RL.5.3 — Describe and compare characters, motivations, and responses using story details.
ELA: CCSS RL.6.3 / RL.7.3 — Analyze how plot develops and how story elements interact.
ELA: CCSS W.3.3–W.7.3 — Develop narratives using effective sequencing, dialogue, description, and pacing appropriate to grade level.
ELA: CCSS SL.3.1–SL.7.1 — Participate in collaborative discussions, building on others’ ideas and supporting interpretations.
Visual literacy and SEL — Interpret sequential images, distinguish evidence from assumptions, and consider perspectives that receive less attention.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

Scott Chantler’s Squire and Knight makes pacing visible. Readers move through a fantasy adventure shaped by the contrast between a knight eager to act and a squire willing to look more closely. That contrast offers a useful writing lesson: a story does not become exciting simply because events happen quickly. A pause to examine a clue, register a reaction, or question an explanation can make the next action more meaningful. In a Pace-Write-Read study, students first notice how Chantler distributes action, dialogue, and visual information across panels. They then borrow a craft move—not the author’s wording—to create and read their own short comics. Younger students can explain how a silent panel changes a scene; older students can analyze how readers’ knowledge differs from characters’ assumptions. Throughout the workshop, return to one question: When does slowing down help us see what matters?

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a sequence driven by the knight’s action with one centered on the squire’s investigation. Ask how panel count, dialogue, and the amount of visual information change the speed of reading.
2. Plot	Track how the apparent dragon problem leads into a broader investigation. Distinguish events that merely move characters from place to place from discoveries that change their understanding.
3. Prosody	Read a brief exchange between knight and squire aloud, trying different stresses and pauses. Use facial expressions, lettering, and punctuation as evidence for delivery rather than assuming one correct performance.
4. Word	Select a word from the knight’s speech and one from the squire’s that reveal contrasting attitudes. Test how replacing each with a neutral word changes characterization and reading speed.
5. Concept	Explore the story’s reversal of the familiar heroic-knight adventure: the supposedly lesser companion supplies essential understanding. Have students express that concept as a question their own comic could investigate.
6. Voice & Worldview	Compare the knight’s confident way of speaking with the squire’s more questioning approach. Discuss how their language reveals different beliefs about power, danger, and problem-solving.
7. Point of View	Ask whose actions and discoveries guide readers through a selected sequence, then distinguish that focus from a first-person narrator. Notice when the images let readers recognize something a character has not understood.
8. Setting & Place	Study how the troubled town and the surrounding fantasy environment establish expectations of danger. Identify background details that communicate conditions without requiring explanatory dialogue.
9. Original Characters	Explain how the knight and squire become distinctive through their contrasting behavior rather than their familiar fantasy roles alone. Students can invent a new towns-person with a specific want and a mistaken assumption.
10. Dialogue	Choose an exchange in which the knight asserts and the squire questions or responds. Examine how the number and placement of speech balloons guide reading order and control the timing of the exchange.
11. Details	During an investigative sequence, separate details that establish atmosphere from details that could support an inference. Require students to explain why a particular visual detail matters rather than calling every background object a clue.
12. Descriptions	Ask students to describe a setting panel in prose, then compare their sentences with the original image. Discuss what the art communicates at a glance and what requires a longer look.
13. Firsts	Revisit the first appearances of the knight and squire. Identify which initial impressions the story later confirms, complicates, or overturns.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Find a panel that places readers close to an action or reaction. Compare its effect with a wider view, considering how distance changes urgency and access to information.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Map a stretch of the journey and investigation, distinguishing fully developed exchanges from transitions that move events along. Discuss why an important discovery deserves more panel time than a routine movement.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Track what readers expect when the dragon is treated as the obvious threat. Notice how unanswered questions and new evidence complicate that expectation before an explanation arrives.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Check whether a selected passage actually shifts time or simply provides information about the past; do not assume all three devices appear. As an extension, students can turn an unresolved moment from the investigation into a cliffhanger.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Inspect the final panel before a page turn and the first panel after it. Ask whether the turn delays an answer, reveals a surprise, changes location, or simply continues an action; examine chapter breaks only where present.
19. Pace & Creativity	Redraw a short observation moment using fewer or more panels without changing its essential event. Compare how the new pacing changes readers’ opportunity to notice what the squire notices.
20. Play	Explore how Chantler plays with expectations about heroic knights and frightening dragons. Students can create a small reversal in which a seemingly unimportant helper understands the situation best.
21. Performance	Perform a short knight-and-squire exchange using a narrator only for essential visual actions. Hold a silent beat for a reaction panel and discuss what is lost if performers rush past it.
22. Personality	Compare posture, expression, and speech across panels featuring the two leads. Explain how repeated choices establish the knight’s self-assurance and the squire’s attentiveness.
23. Humor	Look for a mismatch between the knight’s self-image and what the pictures reveal. Analyze how a response or reaction panel gives readers time to recognize the joke.
24. Pause	Locate a silent or low-dialogue moment and linger over the characters’ faces and surroundings. Ask what readers can infer during that pause that a line of explanation might make less effective.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Treat this as a prose graphic novel rather than assuming it contains verse. Investigate contrast and visual imagery, especially the contrast between outward heroic appearance and thoughtful action.
26. Repetition	Track recurring patterns in the knight’s confident responses and the squire’s observations. Discuss when repetition reinforces characterization and when a departure from the pattern becomes important.
27. Rhythm	Read a sequence as a pattern of action, speech, and reaction. Tap once for each panel, then explain why equal taps do not necessarily represent equal amounts of story time or reading time.
28. Punctuation	Examine how punctuation works with expressions and balloon shapes in a selected exchange. Read a question as a statement, or remove an exclamation mark, to test how the character’s attitude changes.
29. Questions	Keep a question chart as the squire investigates the town’s trouble. Separate questions the story has answered from questions readers must still hold open.
30. Compare-Contrast	Build a knight-and-squire comparison using evidence about methods, treatment by others, and responses to uncertainty. Connect these contrasts to the different speeds at which the characters make decisions.
31. Objects	Examine the knight’s equipment and other visible objects in a chosen scene. Distinguish objects that signal status or setting from those that actually affect an action or interpretation.
32. Threes	Test a three-beat adaptation of a book-inspired moment: confident claim, overlooked evidence, revealing reaction. Present this as a writing experiment, not a claim that Chantler consistently uses a rule of three.
33. Lists	Have students list what the knight assumes and what the squire can support with evidence at a chosen stopping point. Use the difference to identify what the investigation still needs to establish.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine gutters between panels and open areas within the art. Discuss how readers infer unseen movement across gutters and how an uncluttered image can focus attention on a small reaction.
35. Art & Graphics	Study how Chantler’s expressive cartooning communicates confidence, doubt, and surprise. Ask students to explain one inference supported by the art rather than by dialogue.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Turn a rereading into an evidence hunt: partners identify an assumption, a supporting detail, and a question that remains unresolved. This is a classroom adaptation, not a claim that the book includes game features.
37. Placement	Notice where the knight and squire appear within a panel and where balloons direct the eye. Ask whether visual prominence matches whose contribution is most useful.
38. Form	Discuss why sequential art suits a story about appearances and overlooked understanding. Compare a panel sequence with a prose retelling to see how pictures can reveal more than a character says.
39. Dummy	Make a rough folded-paper comic mock-up before drawing finished panels. Place a book-inspired question before a turn and its revealing visual detail afterward, then test the timing with a partner.
40. Passion	Ask which story concern students care about most: being underestimated, questioning blame, or redefining courage. Let that choice shape an original scene while distinguishing their interpretation from claims about Chantler’s personal intentions.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute Pace-Write-It! task — The Squire’s Extra Beat. Minutes 0–3: Revisit a short sequence in which the squire observes or questions while the knight pushes toward action; identify one contrast supported by the page. Minutes 3–5: Introduce an invented extension—not an event from the book—in which a crash behind a town gate makes the knight assume a monster is attacking. Minutes 5–11: Students draft a five-panel comic: the crash, the knight’s confident assumption, a silent panel of the squire noticing a clue, the squire’s question, and a nonviolent explanation of the noise. Minutes 11–15: Partners read the comic and point to the moment that slowed them down; writers revise the clue’s visibility, balloon placement, or panel size. Minutes 15–18: Read again while deliberately allowing time for the silent panel. Minutes 18–20: Students complete an exit statement: 'My pause changes the scene because ____. Like the squire, my character learns by ____.' For grades 3–4, offer a panel template and oral rehearsal; for grades 5–7, require a brief explanation of how the reader’s knowledge differs from the knight’s.

Classroom Activities

Pause Before the Sword

Students create a two-version comic inspired by the contrast between the knight’s rush toward battle and the squire’s careful investigation. Both versions present the same original problem in the book’s fantasy world: one races toward an assumption, while the other pauses to notice evidence and ask a question. Students use panel size, silent images, dialogue, and page-turn placement to make the difference in pacing visible.

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