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While the primary focus of the Big Two's current attention cycle seems to be some "up yours" business machinations and announcements about some products they'll be releasing in a few months, real serial comics fans know what 2010 is all about.
"The comic book event seven years in the making begins here as every major Marvel character gets involved in the greatest assembly of heroes and villains you've ever seen!" -
Somebody at Marvel talking about something called Siege
I'll admit, I was both confused and excited by this press release. There
is a gigantic event going down with some of my most-favorite heroes and villains, the first issue totally came out on January 6, and it was one hell of an opener. But it didn't have anything to do with Marvel.
BPRD: Hollow Earth came out back in 2002. The following panel is from the sixteenth page.
BPRD King Of Fear #1 came out a few weeks ago. This is the twelfth page.
2002 to 2010? Brother, that's eight years in the making. Take that, Siege!
"King of Fear" is the final act in a trilogy of BPRD stories, a conclusion that John Arcudi
described to Comic Book Resources like this: "We've been referring to 'King of Fear' as the 'reset button' for the book and that does not mean we're going
back to square one. We're going to a brand spanking new square one."
Statements regarding reboots and reset buttons are so common in serialized comic book marketing that it begs the question of whether comic book creators and publishers are aware of how rarely they have new readers who have never heard that crap before. And while those sorts of statements are universally accompanied by some version of the phrase "this time, it's for real!", it's hard not be a little enthused by the potential in Arcudi's statement. Full of references and call-backs to previous stories that act as accelerants to the plot, not as inside jokes and "did you get it" graffiti, "King of Fear" # 1 is also the first time since "The Black Goddess" that Guy Davis has drawn Abe Sapian, Johann, Lobster Johnson, Kate & Liz. Although quite a few other talented artists have graced the BPRD--that initial set of panels above is the work of Ryan Sook, and other stories have been graced by the work of Fabio Moon, Gabriel Ba, Paul Azaceta, John Severin--Guy Davis and the colorist Dave Thomas have steered the artistic ship since the "Plague of Frogs" mini-series.
This set of panels is from the second issue of "Plague of Frogs". That story, released in 2004, expanded on the threat that the team, and their world, was facing. Frog-like creatures, swarming in hives, spreading, evolving. Throughout the BPRD series that followed, the spread of frogs was continually met with force by the various members of the BPRD team and their military liaisons, and while the team could be described as "winning" those battles, Mignola and Arcudi always made it clear: the frogs were still spreading, and their tide of numbers showed no sign of abatement.
In "The Warning", the first part of the trilogy that "King of Fear" will end, the frogs were revealed to have joined forces with the same race of subterreanean dwellers that first appeared back in that 2002 "Hollow Earth" story arc. It's not been made clear exactly what the two groups want--the only source for information was a Ra's Al Ghul-type character who met his end in "The Warning," and none of the BPRD characters ever expressed much faith in his words or motives--but Davis has depicted a swarming, apocalyptic future that holds little attraction to those who might not wish to join the frogs.
They aren't evil, per se, or at least--they aren't comic book evil. There's a passing interest in ruling the world, but the language that Mignola and Arcudi write often describes it in more evolutionary terms: the frogs and the subterranean are servants of monolithic gods, gods that have no use for human beings beyond what they might become. They don't want everyone to die, so much as they have no use for us, and wish to see us replaced. Human extinction is merely a byproduct of what they wish the world to become, the world they wish to create. The stories provide a brief glimpse of that world, and Mignola and Arcudi don't even attempt to use words.
"Now you see, don't you?", a character later asks.
"The enormity of it."
The attraction to the storylines of the BPRD is tangled up in a lot of things, but most of those fall under a pretty general heading: this, as they say, is how it should be. Serialized adventure, horror, action--those aren't the only stories that comics can create, but they do make for some of the best. The pulpy reading experience of a slab of 20-odd pages, the tangle of expectation and excitement that awaits the upcoming installment, the sense of "checking in" on a story upon its arrival--it's something that regular books can't share, that a six month period of trade-waiting ultimately lessens. It's the sort of thing that the BPRD (and its more intermittent parent, the Mignola/Fegredo Hellboy series) has provided on a consistent basis for multiple years running. The books may not sell as well as their DC/Marvel competitors, but ask around: few of their readers won't recall what followed the line "He won't."
Death, of course. The BPRD has had its fair share of it, but despite the occult-ish nature of many of the stories, there's never been a hint of resurrection. Unlike the ambivalent "this stunt doesn't work anymore" response with which Batman's expiration date was met with after last year's Final Crisis, Roger's passing is one that is still keenly felt in the series. His loss--one that came married with the sense that it happened both through his own horrible luck as well as the generally bad state of affairs his teammates were in at the time--is one that remains a high-water mark for the series.
It's not in the least bit unfair to contrast much of what the BPRD does well with its Big Two competitors. Many of
BPRD's arcs and twists lack what a more demanding reader might call "innovation"--a story that reveals the untold secret origin of a member, a surprise betrayal by the group's mysterious asshole, a shocking death, the pointless bickering among the team cast against the emotional cruelty of the outside world's reactions towards them--the BPRD stories do them all. They're the X-Men, the Doom Patrol, another frightening and unhappy Justice League that stands with humanity in the path of ultimate destruction, and yet the stories never read as retreads, they never feel like repetitions. A massive part of that is due to the writing team--Mignola's early career concerns about "whether he could pull it off" now seem farcical--and a massive part of that is due to the ease with which the BPRD is an "ownable" universe. It's easy to keep up with, it's easy to catch up with, and its various spin-off stories (of which there are few) are ultimately unneccessary if story comprehension is the goal. Seven years of BPRD stories adds up to less than seventy comic books, and even if the Hellboy franchise is thrown into the mix, the numbers stay underneath something like "Dark Reign" or "Infinite Crisis." Everything is in, and it's a unified artistic and creative vision, a story that stands with the entirety of the last decade as its foundation--still changing, still developing.
"This, as they say, is how it should be." Let me take that back.
It already is.
Tucker Stone's writing can be found in print from time to time. He currently blogs about comics at The Factual Opinion and Savage Critics.
This Ship Is Totally Sinking is © Tucker Stone, 2010
