We lie to each other all the time.
We lie to ourselves too, for that matter. It’s kind of astonishing as to how much artifice is baked into our society when you think about it. There are the little white lies we tell every day just to navigate social situations. The response of “I’m fine” to someone who asks us how we are, treating the interaction more just as a way to say hello than any sort of inquiry to how we’re actually doing.
There are also possibly more foundational lies that we tell that keep everything running. About systemic failures and unfairness just to keep on going. It might be one of the reasons why we tend to paper over the smaller things, to not break the facade of “fineness”. To stop things from falling apart under the weight of the truth.
But what happens when the truth does come out? What change gets put in motion to break the stillness of the lie?
“These are the children. And for longer than they could remember, they’d been all alone.”
Little Monsters from Jeff Lemire, Dustin Nguyen, and Steve Wands is an odd little post-apocalyptic tale of a small group of vampire children. To the best of their knowledge, they’re the last of their kind, waiting for their elders to return and living by strict rules that keep them confined to their home. Doing ordinary childlike things and living off of the blood of ordinary, non-human mammals.
Through the eyes of the children, we see a world that has moved on, emptied, and is in a kind of holding pattern as the last vestiges of decay set in. The story leads us through the conversion of the lonely children into vampires, but we don’t see much context for why until much later. And a few surviving humans that act as a catalyst for change from just treading water. There’s a bit of an application here of the concept of “ignorance is bliss”, making you wonder if their unchanged life is better than knowing the truth. A fitting irony that the one character who knows the truth, Romie, is mute.
The child-like vampires here have a kind of interesting arrested development, a counterpoint to someone like Golden Gail in Lemire’s own Black Hammer. There’s no maturation of the children mentally. They still act and think like children, giving the outlook to the world as a kind of stasis. An old world trapped in amber. How you reconcile that with what’s in a way a dead world can do your head in.
This dead, almost empty world, is reflected in the approach Dustin Nguyen seems to take with the artwork. Almost everything is in black and white. Spot colours of red blood and the pastels of Romie’s artwork are all that we get outside of the shades of grey. It’s gives the story a very haunting and haunted feel. When we see the children first taste human blood, the stark red is an incredible strike of violence. Steve Wands’ letters anchoring the tale in a straightforward standard approach.
“Everything changes, Yui. Eventually. But we’ll be okay.”
You can make an argument that it’s easier to live in ignorance, to believe in the big lie, and have a relatively uncomplicated existence. But things like Little Monsters by Lemire, Nguyen, and Wands makes you wonder whether or not that’s actually true. Is knowing a hard truth preferable to believing an easy lie?
Only you, and maybe a mute vampire child, can really answer that question.
Little Monsters
Writer: Jeff Lemire
Artist: Dustin Nguyen
Letterer: Steve Wands
Background Assistant: Shirley Wu
Publisher: Image Comics
Release Date: March 9 2022 – May 17 2023
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