A Summary of Treehouse
The comic begins on a rainy night. Suddenly we see a young woman, who sprints through the rain, carrying her baby in her protecting arms. Her face reflects pure terror, and it seems like she is fleeing from something terrible. She reaches her final destination– probably an old friend’s or a family member’s house– and knocks on the door. The young man who opens the door recognizes her as ‘Diana’, and he is seemingly surprised to see her. Diana passes him the baby and mentions, that a mysterious he is chasing her. When she has made the young man promise that he won’t ever tell her son anything and that he will take care of him, Diana runs away without further explanation. She leaves her baby to be raised by the young man, Jerry.
We spring forward in time, and now Diana’s baby is a fully grown teenager, presented as the protagonist of the comic. His name is Max, and he is several times referred to as a ‘troublemaker’. He lives with his ‘so-called’ uncle. Whether he is a real uncle or not, is unknown, but considering the short prequel about the mother handing away little baby-Max to Jerry, Jerry might just as well be a friend of the mother, calling himself Max’s uncle as a kind of an alibi. But under all circumstances, Jerry was the one who raised Max, and now they live together like a small family. Max and Jerry move around a lot. They never stay for a long time at one place, and Max is really fed up with that – he would probably rather just stay at one place, go to one school, make some friends and live like any other ordinary teenager.
The story itself starts with Max and his uncle arriving to their new home. While Max helps Jerry with carrying the moving boxes, a tree in their new garden catches his attention– he might have a hunch that there is something wrong with it. Though his premonition he moves on ignoring the tree. When he gets inside their new house for the very first time, he is rather surprised; it is not a house they were used to live in, but more like a mansion. Max asks his uncle how they can afford a house like that, and finds out, that there lays an ugly truth beyond the house’s great walls and affordable price: the previous owner of the mansion died in there. And to make it all worse, he did not even die in any random room, but –and here it comes, a typical horror story element– in Max’s new bedroom.
Max chooses to ignore his room’s past, and as soon as the moving van arrives, he furnishes the room with his few furniture and belongings. As soon as he is finished, he crawls out the window to explore the odd tree in the garden. He climbs up the tree and looks into the tree crown. What he sees takes him by surprise, but he cannot explore further– his uncle interrupts him, knocking on the door to tell him that the dinner is ready.
While eating dinner, Max and Jerry come into an argument. Max is really mad at Jerry because he does not only make them move around once in every few months, he also wants Max to go to school. Not so surprisingly, going to school is not Max’s greatest wish; when they have to move around all the time, he is probably really tired of adjusting to new teachers and students. And to make it all worse, Jerry says Max is the reason that they always have to move, because he always manages to get in trouble sooner or later.
After the dinner when Jerry has fallen asleep, Max sneaks out to continue his exploration of the mystical tree. He climbs up to the tree crown, and finally we see what has caught his attention from the start: the tree trunk is completely hollow on the inside and looks like a slide leading down to a bottomless hole. Max decides to take a chance and glides down. But the slide is not bottomless at all; suddenly he lands on the ground, and when he looks around he sees that he is inside a kind of underground treehouse. He decides to keep the existence of the treehouse a secret, and to not ever tell his uncle about it. He would not understand anyways, and would surely just fill it in. Max cannot let that happen.