Warning: contains an exclusive preview of Step By Bloody Step #1!
Screen Rant is excited to share an exclusive preview and creator commentary for Image Comics' upcoming series, Step By Bloody Step. This comic contains no words, relying entirely on its beautiful artwork and compelling story to enchant readers.
Step By Bloody Step has the creative team of Simon Spurrier, Matías Bergara, and Matheus Lopes. The multiple-Eisner nominee team has numerous comic credits to their names. Si Spurrier and Matías Bergara worked together on Coda. Matheus Lopes is a colorist who has worked with Marvel Comics, Image Comics, and DC Comics, among other comic companies.
Step By Bloody Step is a four-issue series from Image Comics focusing on the story of a child and the armored giant that protects her. The two share no language, but the connection they have with one another is undeniable and requires no words to express. Check out this exclusive preview of three sequences from the first issue, as well as creator commentary on each sequence here:
Regarding this opening sequence, Simon Spurrier - the series' writer - says:
'A girl wakes. She knows nothing. She remembers nothing. She has nothing. Nothing... except a giant.' That's how Step By Bloody Step (SBBS) first crystallized, as an idea. In this first sequence of the opening issue you can see that simple kernel coming to life, being clothed in pace and atmosphere and beauty. And all without a single word spoken.
SBBS is a story about a journey through a savage fantasy world, with a driving mystery and all the monstrous action you'd expect. But at its root it's about the relationship between the child and her protector. It was critical that that be front and center from the outset. The tenderness, the love, the curiosity. In these pages, Matías and Matheus have captured that spirit delightfully.
Matías Bergara - the artist of this Image Comics’ series - adds:
The story starts off quite abruptly - we had discussed doing some extra pages to expand the Warrior's arrival at the scene minutes before our actual page 1 - the big hand picking up the Girl for the first time - but somehow it just felt like a better, stronger choice to have this very moment as the centerpiece of the very first page. No contextual scaffolding built around it unnecessarily. This sequence was quite a challenge to draw and color, since it's happening during a snowstorm at night and the balance between obscurity and readability had to be carefully decided in each panel. Chaos and confusion - as in every birth - were key here.
This secondary sequence may be a single spread, but it is no less important. Regarding pacing, comic writer Si Spurrier says:
With SBBS we set ourselves the challenge of telling a compelling, emotionally rich and characterful story - with zero dialogue. We wanted to show that sequential storytelling transcends language. That comics are the most accessible and most miraculous medium.
One of the biggest surprises we encountered along the way was the discovery that when you read a silent comic, it's by no means quicker or less engaging than one full of text. Quite the opposite. The eye is constantly roving, exploring, inhabiting. The unconscious mind is absorbing detail in a frenzy. Once that momentum is established it can be breathtakingly beautiful - and surprisingly intense. So we learned to incorporate moments like this. Vistas of stillness and silence, which not only break up chapters of the story but act like sighs of serenity, giving the reader's mind a chance to breathe.
Bergara expanded upon Spurrier's observation of pacing within comics, saying:
Simon points out something that is quite meaningful, which is the flexibility of time as perceived in the unique form of narrative that is comics. It's visual like a film or animation but you can actually stop, delay the passage of time, go backwards or forward or move in circles during the process of reading a page of comics. This is probably the most remarkable feature of comics as a language when compared to other forms of visual storytelling as we know them. The whole of our book is silent but these DPS sequences offer our personal invitation to really stop jumping from panel to panel and observe a sort of "intermezzo" where you can actually perceive things that are essential to the setting, the space that is the home to our story. My main goal, visually, was to provide a large spatial - and alien - scenery for the eye to explore and bring more questions to the table than answers.
This last sequence within the preview highlights the monsters within the Image Comics' series. Regarding them, Spurrier compliments Matías Bergara's artistic abilities:
A little taste here of what happens when you give Matías Bergara the freedom to design monsters and choreograph their actions. In a silent comic, panels can shrink right down without surrendering importance (in defiance of the dead space we normally leave for balloons) or expand to impose stillness. ALL comics are ultimately about the art of controlling time via space, but that's especially true when there's no textual metronome setting the speed of events. And never moreso than when the artist is a genius.
There's also a hint of how we approach the act of communication between other humans in our story. The child and giant have no language of their own. When other people try to speak to them what they hear is nonsense. We've tried to emulate that in a visual way. It's a trick we've used sparingly, but it's become fascinating how much meaning and emotion can be communicated via a set of completely invented symbols. The apt analogy being that you don't have to understand someone's word to intuit their meaning, nor to feel their humanity.
Matías Bergara shared his thoughts regarding drawing comic creatures, saying:
We absolutely love crazy action and creatures - it was one of our driving forces during the making of Coda and beyond - and this is one of such opportunities for us to have some good old action fun. I'm a big fan of ugly mammals, specially bats and underground rodents, so this giant unnamed thing is a mixture of fleshy, hairy warm-blooded horror mixed up with the typical creepy anatomy of spiders. There is something very appealing to me about fantasy worlds that look superficially similar to ours but are governed by biological and evolutionary rules completely different to ours.
In closing, comic artist Matías Bergara says:
Drawing SBBS has been quite a challenge in all fronts - undoubtedly the most difficult and ambitious task I've ever faced as an artist, considering how complex and tridimensional the story is at all times and the fact that everything has to be understood immediately without the use of words, directions, symbols or even sound effects typical of comic book communication. Now that we're getting to our last issue - number 4 - I feel like I've established quite a strong silent game of storytelling with my ally Matheus on colors.
Step By Bloody Step is a beautiful visual journey that emphasizes the strengths of storytelling within the comic medium. This new epic will capture readers' hearts without ever providing a true word, showcasing the incredible skill and abilities of the creative team. Comic book fans can check out Image Comics' Step By Bloody Step #1 when it releases February 23.
