The Autumn Kingdom #1 is out this week, blending horror and fantasy into a different kind of comic series. As its writer Cullen Bunn told AIPT, “Let’s face it. The fae world would be terrifying for the average person.” It’s a first issue with a unique spin on familiar elements, including a story within the story, the untapped potential of Sweden’s secrets, and two sisters who love fantasy until it’s all too real.
The Autumn Kingdom #1 opens in the prose of a book, but you don’t know that right off the bat. Straight out of something like The Lord of the Rings, we see a woman cutting through a hoard. Captions read like prose out of a novel, and soon, we see they literally are words being read from one. A young girl named Sommer is reading them from her father’s book and is driving to a vacation destination in the woods of Sweden.
Bunn and artist Christopher Mitten expertly set up the family over a few pages of them driving and arriving at a cool remote house. This family loves each other, and the daughters are adventure-seeking kiddos, so much so that they run into the forest only to find impressive statues in the middle of nowhere.
Mitten’s rendering of the forest around the children really reveals the fantasy of the series. The use of shadow and light peeking through the trees creates a sense of awe, and the statues clearly invoke fantasy tropes like Rogers and knights.
That sword is pretty dang cool.
Credit: Oni Press
Bunn uses the narrative trope of reading from a book to add extraordinary fantasy scenes, well rendered by Mitten. Your imagination will run rampant as you try to figure out if the story matters to what is happening in the forest around the main characters. The two worlds seem to blend, or more smash, into each other closer to the end of the issue. Maybe it’s because Mitten’s worked with Hellboy so much, but this book feels right out of a Mike Mignola fantasy adventure.
Mitten gets to do some fun character design, including a flying beast reminiscent of the Hell Hawks from Lord of the Rings. The swords in the novel and in the real world are also designed well looking not like anything you’ve seen before. Props should go to the design of the sisters as they feel quite real and well realized.
Distinct and captivating, The Autumn Kingdom draws your attention to an imaginative fantasy world you won’t want to miss. Oni Press continues to offer some of the most interesting stories today, and this is no different. Fans of Percy Jackson and The Lord of the Rings are going to love The Autumn Kingdom.
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