The Great North Wood

Bird’s longest work since his British Comic Award–winning Grey Area is a breathlessly romanticized depiction of London’s once great forest, the Great North Wood. Though much has been destroyed to make way for industrialization, Bird sees evidence and echoes of his ancestral forest everywhere. Speaking through a wandering fox, Bird ushers readers on a tour of London past and present, noting where vague traces of the Wood still linger in borough boundaries, place names—and, in the case of Sydenham Hill Woods, where “nature took back the land, and the magic started to return.” The deceptively simple cartoons belie a rich, lovingly doodled set of landscapes and vignettes that effortlessly reflect the folklore Bird references. But although his visual storytelling is a delight, Bird fumbles with how to handle the Romani people in his narrative of Gipsy Hill—reprinting long-used racial slurs (a character calling themselves “gypsy”) without analysis, ignoring the historically adversarial relationship between the English and the Romani, and erasing that identity from the folktale “The Story of Ned Righteous.” Despite evocative visuals and an obvious passion for the material, Bird’s rose-colored glasses limit the accuracy of his work, giving it a dated, quaint, feel. (June.)