Simon Spurrier and Matías Bergara, the inimitable team behind Coda and Step by Bloody Step, are back with another fantasy comic aiming to really blast your eyeballs out of the back of your head. Courtesy of Dstlry, Polygon can reveal A Mischief of Magpies, a new series from Spurrier and Bergara inspired by classic “portal fantasy,” set on a floating city in an endless ocean.
“Mar has a secret,” reads Dstlry’s summary. “Sometimes, without warning, he falls out of the world. This would be an inconvenience if his life wasn’t already such a drag. When he’s gone, he finds himself in an extraordinary city. A city which is also a machine, endlessly crossing a shoreless ocean. A city of two halves: the bright, bustling spires above the waves, and the beast-haunted twilight halls below. And between, clowning along the rusting beach, a troupe of anarchic magpies with all the answers but none of the questions.”
While two rather different projects, Coda and Step by Bloody Step came at fantasy worldbuilding by direct routes. Coda, and its sequel, were rather self-aware stories, hovering between epic celebration and parody. Step by Bloody Step, on the other hand, was a wordless, almost fable-like exploration of one character’s strange journey through a fantastical setting. Mischief seems like it just might bridge those modes.
“A Mischief of Magpies is a story of many layers,“ Spurrier told Polygon via email. “On the one hand it’s a recognisable portal fantasy, much like Labyrinth or NeverEnding Story. A troubled youngster stumbles out of his rational reality into an extraordinary, unique realm. But there’s so much more going on here. Wonders and weirdnesses that loop back onto themselves, deepening our hero’s understanding of who he is and his place in the real world. At the core of it all is an astonishing dualistic otherworld, a city-machine, whose tallest towers are the preserve of dazzling firebirds and progressive science, and whose subaquatic underside is a haunting abyss of poetic magic and loss. Imagine all of that rendered by Matias’s god-tier hand, seething with monsters and eccentrics, and you begin to have the tiniest hint of where this book tilts its lance.”
Dstlry was able to share five preview pages from the first issue of the series, which you can see below:
“Matias and me have gained a reputation for using the fantasy genre to push comics as far as they’ll go,” said Spurrier. “With Step By Bloody Step we used silence to tell a tale beyond language. Now, with A Mischief of Magpies, we use words — bittersweet, joyous, painful; flowing like a dark tide from a young man’s heart through his diary — to weave a unique blend of sequentials, prose and illustration. It’s the sort of effortless, organic fusion of storytelling styles you might expect from a writer-artist working alone, and it’s testament to the incredible team we’ve built that every element — story, art, text, design — not only sits symbiotically beside the rest, but collectively makes this project so much more than the sum of its parts.”
A Mischief of Magpies #1 hits shelves in April, with three double-sized (48 page) issues to start, with the potential for more. Check below to see the book’s four wraparound covers, from Bergara (first and third), Fabio Moon (second) and Bilquis Evely (fourth).
