Les Petits Soldats #1

The cover of this 2011 Vents d'Ouest album sets a wonderfully eerie fairy-tale tone: a vast, painted face with rosy cheeks and closed eyes dominates the foreground, crowned by a golden-haired figure with delicate wings and a red-clad acrobat, while a small white creature stands watch and a dark army stretches across a brooding, castle-lit horizon. Krassinsky and Delval have crafted something visually rich and unsettling — part puppet theatre, part battlefield epic — that immediately signals Le Pigeon Voyageur is not your ordinary children's fantasy. This first of two volumes promises a story with real imagination behind it.