First Look: Image Comics’ Dark Fantasy ‘Crowbound’
Image Comics shared a first look at Crowbound, a new ongoing series from the Descender, Ascender, and Little Monsters team of Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, launching in September. The series was first teased at NYCC last year.
Crowbound #1 is on sale September 2nd. Check out the covers and interior pages below!
Rose is nobody special. She works in the Factory alongside everyone else, a vast, dark structure that stretches along the coast and splits the world in two. What remains around it are bleak settlements living in its shadow: flooded villages, rotting woods, and lethal swamps, with no one certain what survives on the other side. When Rose's young daughter Ava is torn from their shantytown home a year before she's due to enter the workforce, Rose is forced out beyond the Factory's walls and into the strange, terrifying forces waiting there.
Image describes the book as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale meeting Cormac McCarthy's The Road, with echoes of Kill Bill and Pan's Labyrinth, as a defiant mother strikes a dark bargain with an ancient, violent Scarecrow Queen to keep a totalitarian government from taking her child.
"Crowbound is the darkest book Dustin and I have done together but still filled with heart and hope," said Lemire. "It's been rewarding building the expansive southern gothic sci-fi world of Crowbound and we can't wait to unleash it on readers."
"I'm very excited to explore this new world and new ways to tell a story with Jeff again, it's always a great time when we get together like this," said Nguyen. "Hope everyone joins us for the adventures as they did on Descender and Little Monsters."
Image Publisher and Chief Creative Officer Eric Stephenson praised the debut. "One of the great privileges of my position is that I get to read a lot of great comics before they come out, and let me tell you, 'great' doesn't even do this one justice," said Stephenson. "As anyone familiar with their past collaborations knows, Jeff and Dustin never disappoint, but Crowbound is on another level. The first issue is one of most darkly beguiling series debuts I've had the pleasure to read and the really good news is that it's just the beginning of a storytelling journey that gets better with each issue."
