‘Little Monsters #1’ Review

Writer: Jeff Lemire / Artist: Dustin Nguyen / Image At the start of every week, I peruse a list of upcoming comics to scout out anything I might want to add to my list. Part of this ritual is taking a gander at any first issue releases. This week, I saw Little Monsters as a line item from Image’s line up and wondered what the premise of the work would be. Perhaps some cute, idyllic series that plays with monster tropes. And then I saw that Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen were the creators, and I quickly realize that while it would definitely play with tropes, it would almost certainly not be idyllic in any conceivable fashion. From the creative team that brought us the speculative fiction epic Descender and its sequel, Ascender, comes a new world that shares some commonalities but is an entirely different beast. Little Monsters #1 starts with an ominous unidentified narrator stating, “These are the children,” set to the backdrop of the desolate ruins of a city before introducing us to several different children going about their lives. The pages are predominantly black and white with eerie splashes of color that are as striking as they are unsettling. By all appearances, the children are surviving on their own devices in squalor, and then the blood red shows up around their mouths and you realize that the last remaining children on Earth aren’t exactly human.

Little Monsters #1 is an atmospheric book first and foremost. Nguyen’s artistry alongside the lettering and design o…