Writer: Darcy Van Poelgeest / Penciller: Ian Bertram / Colour Artist: Matt Hollingsworth / Letterer: Aditya Bidikar Designer: Ben Didier / Collects Little Bird #1-#5 / Image Comics
Buy Image comics here and support The Comic Crush.
25th May 2020 (Released: 13th November 2019)
The Pitch: The story of a young resistance fighter, Little Bird, battling against an oppressive American Empire while searching for her own identity in a world on fire.
This story is one of oppression. It suppurates through every page of each issue. Like the masks some of the characters wear for disguise or survival, the oppression is stifling, borne out of theocratic and all-powerful America. An America whose moral fervour and religious fire are burning the first citizens of Canada out of their homes, converting them to God-fearing folk. The more things change…
BERTRAM'S HYPER-DETAILED ART LOOKS LIKE IT WAS CREATED IN A FEVER-STATE
True, it's a story and archetype we've seen before, but Little Bird's trappings and fetishes make it new. Ian Bertram's hyper-detailed art looks like it was created in a fever state. It's obsessive and stunning. Darcy Van Poelgeest brilliantly articulates the endless, hopeless attempts of Little Bird to break free of the doomsday society that binds her nation. His writing is unafraid to dash your hopes in each issue, making every first page a corner into which he's painted his characters and from which there's seemingly no possibility of fighting their way out. Aditya Bidikar's letters tell the tales in broken voices, in some places cracked with emotion and in others, chilling without it. Matt Hollingsworth paints all this in mincemeat reds and the magical realist glow of underground societies, lit by fire. If any sufficiently advanced technology seems like magic, so too must the worlds of the past. The land that Little bird travels is old, hand-made, built by the blood of native people, the true sons and daughters of a country they now find themselves being driven out of. All of this is held together by Ben Didier’s intricate design. Van Poelgeest is a filmmaker by trade and a very good one at that. He’s written a limitless world, where you feel like the horizon will always stay distant. A world without end or beginning where there are hidden histories waiting to be discovered. With Bertram, he has created a living, breathing organic society where the technology has grown beyond the comprehension of the people it oppresses. The scope of this book is that of a drifting continent, floating at sea, adding other legends and masses to it, growing. It pulsates and screams.
LITTLE BIRD IS LIKE FRANK HERBERT'S DUNE FILTERED THROUGH THE IMAGINATION OF DAVID CRONENBERG
Little Bird is like Frank Herbert's Dune filtered through the imagination of David Cronenberg. Reading it is like seeing a lost epic unfold, the way archaeologists must have felt, uncovering pyramids for the first time. Its story is told with monstrous scope. A tale of the future, wrapped in animal skins and technology bridging gaps of thousands of years. There's nothing else like it, nothing that fuses its genres in quite the same way. There's a shocking amount of violence in this book, perpetrated by both sides of the war. You feel the righteousness of revenge as Little Bird fights her way across Canada and through the labyrinth of her own dreams, again making us believe in the magic that ancient civilisations have flowing through them. You can buy Little Bird – You should buy it. But you might only read it once. The images will sit in your brain for years to come, feeding the dark corners of your imagination, like the vessels of blood feeding the comics' theocratic priest in his bath, pulsating with evil intent. Little Bird lives.
Buy Image comics here and support The Comic Crush. You can see more of Darcy Van Poelgeest’s work on his website. Purchase artwork by Ian Bertram here. Read Aditya Bidikar’s blog and check out Matt Hollingsworth’s website. Find Ben Didier’s website here. You can buy Little Bird Volume 1 Hardcover from Gosh!, where you can also buy the softcover.