A 4-issue mini-series from 2022 about an armored giant who guides a young girl on a circuit of the world. It's a silent mini-series, because while there are sporadic dialogue balloons, they're filled with pictographs, and there's no translation. Bergara's art is expressive and clear enough that the reader can grasp the notion of what's going on.
The silence also keeps the page free for Bergara's beautifully detailed landscapes. The variety sells just how far the duo are traveling. Sometimes we see a gradual transition, the snowy forest thinning into a vast plain. At others, they reach a cliff and things have simply changed. The plain overlooks a wide stretch of narrow pools and swamps, or they've reached the ocean.
With no dialogue or expository captions, the only sense of how long all this takes is via the changes we see in the girl's appearance. From a scrawny, awkward child to a sullen teenager, to a determined, clever young woman. The giant is silent and stern, always pushing her forward, but not unfeeling. It won't let her go back, not one step, but it will go back and pluck a flower for her.
But with no explanation for why any of this is happening, we see distance grow between the two. At the same time, other powers have become aware of the giant with incredible destructive power and the young girl with blood that promotes incredible plant growth it escorts. There is a war of some sort going on, the clean human-looking types spending at least some of their time in vast airship city-castles, while the green, goblin or orc creatures live on the ground below. The precise causes or motives are unclear, beyond the airship-dwellers are quite content to use others to destroy their enemies.
Lopes' colors are more subdued than what Bergara used for his work on Coda. Still rich and varied, but no searingly bright neon bursts of magic or force. While there is certainly something magic about the girl and the giant, this is otherwise not a world of that sort of thing. The people here aren't scrabbling for the last shreds of a once-commonplace power.
The threats the giant defends the girl from are often simply animals that are hungry and see easy prey, illustrated in a wide variety by Bergara. Were-creatures, flame spitting mollusks, giant bugs. Or it's the cold, the rain, the danger of crossing the ocean. The general/prince that attempts to use the girl may recognize there is power there, but his motives are more simple and base. If he didn't have the girl, he would just use guns and the lives of those he can command or coerce.
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