The Step By Bloody Step duos’ latest debuts in April!
29th January 2025
Article by Paul Dunne
Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara like to keep their head in the clouds.
They’re building a legacy of great fantasy work whenever they team up. Together, they’ve created CODA, The Spire, Step By Bloody Step…
And now A Mischief Of Magpies.
The book arrives at your comic shop in April and is the story of Mar, a teenager who finds himself inexplicably transported to an extraordinary city, endlessly sailing a shoreless ocean. The city is built around a vast machine of two distinct halves: the bright, bustling spires above the waves, and the beast-haunted twilight halls below. Between them, playing on the beach, a troupe of anarchic magpies seems to have all the answers... but none of the questions.
Mar must navigate the dual extremes of this city-ship and the riddles posed by its bird-brained mediators, all while solving the true mystery: exactly why is he switching between his mundane life and this fantastical realm of dazzle and darkness?
Bergara’s Main Cover for #1
Spurrier and Bergara specialise in enigmatic otherworlds, as proven with stunning, wordless Step By Bloody Step, whose beguiling narrative was beautifully played out but still left you with a myriad of questions. But even having created such indelible works before, Spurrier makes bold promises for this piece: “A Mischief Of Magpies marks the highest tide-line in my partnership with Matías. This is a singularly layered fantasy, as thrilling and spectacular as it is soul-shaking, digging deep into a youngster's troubled heart and his struggles to understand how he fits into our world. Or indeed any world. A unique story deserves unique storytelling, and with this book, we're aiming for nothing less than a paradigm shift in the possibilities of the comic-book form.”
Cover B by Fabio Moon
Bergara has high hopes for the project: “This is one of the most ambitious projects I’ve ever embarked on, which is saying something given Si's and my creative trajectory. The oversized format also gave this expansive world so much more room to unfold—I can’t wait for readers to hold it in their hands.”
Their narratives and sequential storytelling are always full of scope, and experimental sequential storytelling, bridging the gap between prose, illustration and the point where those things meet in comics. It’s this ability that has seen them become the recipients of the Angoulême Sélection Officielle, a GLAAD Award, and multiple Eisner nominations.
Cover D by Bilquils Evely and Matheus Lopes
The book has already gotten praise from Bilquis Evely, the incredible artist who drew DC’s hit Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow and Helen of Wyndhorn, and who has created a variant cover for Mischief of Magpies: “Matheus Lopes and I had the pleasure of working on this variant for the brilliant new series of my genius friends Matías Bergara and Si Spurrier! I already saw issue one and it’s out of this world – some of the most beautiful pages I’ve ever seen,” the artist wrote on her social media.
Cover C by Bergara
“Si and Matías have crafted something extraordinary and, once again, elevated the form,” says DSTLRY Co-Founder & CCO Chip Mosher. “It’s a rare work that both challenges the formalism of its genre while telling a gut punch of an emotional story.”
“A Mischief Of Magpies is the kind of ambitious story we strive to tell at DSTLRY,” continues DSTLRY Co-Founder & CCO David Steinberger.
A Mischief of Magpies will resonate with fans of The NeverEnding Story, Arcane, and The Boy and the Heron, featuring a relatable protagonist journeying into the unknown.
A Mischief Of Magpies is released on 16th April at your local comic book shop. Pre-order your copy now!
