Review: ‘Our Soot Stained Heart’ #1 Is More Than A Comic, It’s An Experience

Welcome to the table,

“So we must write our own stories.”

As someone who is known as The Storyteller, that passage immediately spoke to my very core and let me know the book I was reading was evolving as I turned the pages. It was transforming from a beautifully drawn story of a factory worker turned prisoner turned wanderer turned would-be folk figure, to something that, much the the story, transcended the humble beginnings of the story and has the potential to become a classic fantasy story for ages to come.

Let’s get into it.

Mad Cave Studios’ Our Soot Stained Heart is one of those comics I look forward to, even before I know it exists. From writer Joni Hägg and artist Stipan Morian, with dreamy, magical colors by Ropemann and letters from Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, Our Soot Stained Heart has all the hallmarks of a fantasy series that will become a timeless classic as soon as enough of you get a chance to read it.

The book lives in that low fantasy, steampunk, and folklore space, and focuses on a young factory worker turned makeshift revolutionary by the name of Peggy Stones. Peggy is trapped in this very frost-punk capitalist hellscapes where the ruling class lives in luxury while the working class toils for scraps as they break their bodies and grind themselves down to serve those who only grow fatter on the backs of their labor.

As is the nature of such stories, a conflict erupts that has Peggy cast from the life she knows and into the “wandering hero” space, where she finds herself in a glacial wasteland trying to survive the elements while recalling moments from her past.

The strength of Our Soot Stained Heart is two-fold.

The first strength is that Stipan Morian’s art is magical. It feels like something out of a lucid dream with panels that breathe and bleed into each other in ways that defy traditional comic rules. Coupled with Ropemann’s colors, the art is something so transcendent that it’s difficult to put into words. I was on a trip to Europe in my early 20s and left a bunch of clothes in a hotel room so I could stuff my suitcase full of French comics that had the same kind of artistry and flair to them. This book would have cost me a pair of jeans and a button-up easily, and I would have been all the better for it.

The second equal strength is that Joni Hägg captures a multitude of stories within stories. There are moments that find themselves rooted in the emotions and reflections of echoes from the past. We don’t need to know if the stories are true, because we know that to the characters telling them, what we are reading is their truth, and that holds weight and carries the emotional momentum of the storytelling in a way I have seen few do before.

The first book ends in a really cool cliffhanger that feels like whatever is coming next is going to continue to delight in every conceivable way.

Our Soot Stained Heart is the kind of comic that proves why this medium is truly an art form. From cover to cover, it makes you feel, drawing you in to its dreamlike visuals and lived-in narrative as it crafts a world not in front of you, but around you, where rumor and lore, thought and emotion, shift beneath you and change both the reader and the characters as the story progresses. This is more than a comic; this is an experience.

Until next time, Our Soot Stained Heart #1 drops December 10, 2025. Go find it and experience something really rad.