Crowbound #1
Recap
Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid’s Tale meets Cormac McCarthy's The Road with echoes of Kill Bill and Pan's Labyrinth when a noncompliant mother makes a dark pact with an ancient, violent Scarecrow Queen to stop a totalitarian government from taking her daughter.
Rose isn't special. She works in the Factory just like everyone else — a dark, sprawling monolithic structure that runs along the coast and cuts the world in two. All that's left now are desolate settlements that exist in its shadow, made up of submerged villages, derelict woods, and deadly swamps. No one knows what's left of the world on the other side...
But when Rose's young daughter Ava is violently taken from their shanty town home a year before she is meant to join the work force, Rose will come face-to-face with the surreal, harrowing forces outside the Factory's walls — including a terrifying figure called the Scarecrow Queen, who has an offer: one last chance to save her daughter, in exchange for her soul.
Review
Rose Lee is just doing her best to get by. Stuck behind the walls with the rest of humanity and forced to work to survive, the only thing in this existence that has any meaning to her is her daughter Eva. When Eva is taken away by the powers that be, Rose will go deep into the darkness to get her back.
Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyne are something of a powerhouse duo in the comic book space. Each collaborative effort between the pair results in some of the most challenging, compelling, terrifying, and bold comics in recent memory. Titles like: Descender, Ascender, Little Monsters, and Robin & Batman showcase the chemistry these two have as a creative duo and Crowbound looks to bring more of the same energy.
Lemire crafts another sci-fi dystopia similar to Descender, but for now focuses on main character Rose and her relationship with her daughter Eva. Families are a recurring theme in a lot of Lemire’s work so that’s no real surprise, but Crowbound gives the atmosphere around it more grit and supernatural elements with ancient monsters and horrors juxtaposed against cold steel and metal structures of the city.
Dustin Nguyen’s sketchy, storybook-like illustrations help tell how different this world is from our own, but the details come when they are needed. The colors also help give the world a more lived in feeling with dull grays and blues forming the city backgrounds and the main splashes of color coming from Rose’s dreams.
Final Thoughts
Crowbound #1 looks to be a promising start to another collaboration from this creative team. Fans of their past works might also wanna check this one out.
Crowbound #1: A Mother’s Love
- Writing - 7.5/107.5/10
- Storyline - 7.5/107.5/10
- Art - 8/108/10
- Color - 8/108/10
- Cover Art - 8.5/108.5/10