Mike Mignola has slowly built an empire out of Hellboy, to the point where it’s more or less Dark Horse’s superhero universe with books in various points of the Hellboy timeline arriving every week. Witchfinder: City of the Dead (Dark Horse) is technically a part of that, following Sir Edward Grey who, at the pleasure of the Queen, investigates supposed supernatural phenomena. And it’s Grey who makes this book stand out in a universe full of stone-handed demons and melancholy fish-men.
Grey, you see, often discovers that “supernatural” events are often just what people use to justify more earthly, but uglier, problems. The issue opens with an exhausted Grey returning from capturing a monstrous, but very human, threat, and the issue lingers on how ground down Grey is. He’s more of a noir detective than a Victorian pulp hero, a man constantly disappointed both by the failure of the supernatural to exist and the failure of humanity to live up to basic decency. It’s a surprisingly effective pairing with the old-fashioned “zombies attacking London” plot that Grey unravels, with his deadpan reactions to even utter horror making for some nice comedy.
Ben Stenbeck’s moody art helps matters considerably. Stenbeck has an eye for period detail without going overboard and a restrain with the story’s gore that makes it more effective. It sometimes has the feel of a court drawing, which is arguably perfect considering our hero, and the layouts have a nice flow that drives the story in subtle ways. In all, Witchfinder could easily have felt like a dozen other pieces of work, but thanks to a unique character and smart artwork, it becomes a fresh take on an old idea.
Suicide Squad: War Crimes, DC Comics
John Ostrander returns to the team that’s been a huge hit at the multiplex recently, to remind everybody grousing about how mean-spirited the movie was that it was just staying true to the dark tone of his originals. That it happens to be a tight, nasty little geopolitical thriller with an unpleasant moral about how doing the right thing and doing the smart thing rarely align in diplomacy is just a bonus, really. Gus Vasquez and Carlos Rodriguez deliver crisp, fun art with an especially good eye for action sequences, making this one-shot a nice, nasty dose of classic Squad.
World of Tanks #1, Dark Horse
Yes, the silly free game where you drive around in a tank shooting at other tanks has a comic book, a comic book written by Garth Ennis of Preacher fame, no less. But, if you know Ennis’ love of war comics at all, then you know that the title is little more than a slim pretext for Ennis to tell a story, this time of working men with an ugly, violent job to do, and not everybody comes out whole in the doing of it.
Carlos Ezquerra offers straightforward, engaging art, inspired a bit by Steve Dillon, albeit the inking is unusually thick and sometimes detracts a bit from the reading. Still, if you’re a fan of war comics, or just curious to see what Ennis can do with a silly video game, it’s worth picking up.
Art Ops #11, DC Comics
There’s a clear pop cultural ancestor to this one-shot story starring the Art Ops team of cultural police, but revealing it would ruin the central twist. Suffice to say that Shaun Simon and guest artist Rob Davis riff on a classic story about what art depicts, and the supernatural meaning it can have, in a clever short story perfect for picking up DC’s brilliantly strange action book about art theory.
Han Solo #3, Marvel
Marjorie Liu and Mark Brooks’ take on the roguish smuggler has a clever conceit that they’ve just layered more complications onto. It turns out that Han, participating in a major space race as cover, has to rescue three different Rebel informants. The problem: One of them has sold out to the Empire, and nobody is entirely sure just who. And, it turns out, some of them have grudges that need to be settled, although we’ll leave discovering that to the reading. It’s a zippy, funny, twisty bit of business that will make longtime Star Wars fans smile, and entertain even casual fans.
Jupiter’s Legacy 2 #3, Image Comics: Mark Millar and Frank Quitely take a slight breather from the dramatic action of last issue, to delve more deeply into the cast of rogues fighting superheroes gone mad.
James Bond #9, Dynamite: Warren Ellis and Jason Masters continue to update Bond for the twenty-first century better than his own movies.
Bloodshot Reborn #16, Valiant: Jeff Lemire and Mico Suayan have a fun action story with a strong emotional core that continues to make Bloodshot so much better than his original ’90s silliness.
Silver Surfer #6, Marvel: Dan Slott and Michael Allred deliver the 200th issue of Silver Surfer with their usual style and panache, but beneath Norrin Radd fighting shapeshifting squids, there’s a genuinely heartbreaking story as Dan Slott gives the “long-lost relative” tale a painful dose of reality.
Gotham Academy Annual, DC Comics: Becky Cloonan and Brenden Fletcher, with the help of a few artists, break up their team to tell a story of vampires, ghouls, and time travel that neatly ties itself to other parts of the DCU while not making it essential to read eight other books to understand the plot.
This Week’s Best Collected Editions
Scalped Deluxe Edition, Vol. 5, DC Comics (Hardcover, $30): Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera’s brilliant noir, set on a Native American reservation, is one of the great unheralded crime series from Vertigo, and this final volume rounds off the series. Pick up the whole thing if you’re new to it: It’s every bit as thrilling as the best crime stories on Peak TV.
Walt Disney’s Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck: The Don Rosa Duck Library Volume 5: The Richest Duck in the World, Fantagraphics (Hardcover, $30): The title is a mouthful, but Don Rosa’s work on the Disney comics, as strange as it sounds, pushed the medium in ways you wouldn’t expect from a story about a talking duck finding gold in the Klondike. And at $30, and packed with extra art, behind the scenes information, and most importantly in chronological order and in full color, this is the cheapest you’ll find such comics history.
Secret Wars Too, Marvel (Softcover, $18): Marvel is usually at its best when it’s mocking its own proclivity for plot twists and melodrama, and this book gleefully takes a maul to the cheese surrounding the House of Ideas’ attempt to crib Crisis on Infinite Earths from DC without anybody noticing.
