Dark Horse Previews Picks: September 2021

Above-the-Board Recommendation:

Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.:  1957 — Family Ties

While there’s never a round of these solicitations that doesn’t feature the Mignolaverse in some way, one part of it has been feeling neglected as of late.  That would be the “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.” series-of-miniseries that creator Mike Mignola has been doing with writer Chris Roberson.  The last collection, “1956,” came out in the Before Times of September 2019 and the plot threads it left dangling have been doing just that ever since.

Not anymore.  Mignola and Roberson are working to bring this mini-epic to a conclusion over a series of five one-shots which will wrap up the B.P.R.D.’s conflict with its opposite number in Russia.  Joining them for this one-shot is veteran “B.P.R.D.” artist Laurence Campbell, who gives us a very “Exorcist”-looking cover as Hellboy and Agent Susan Xiang have to help out a housewife with her supernatural crisis before they can get their hands on a copy of Gustav Strobl’s “Witchcraft and Demonology.”  Sounds like just another Tuesday in the Bureau, and a good time for us readers as well.

Beasts of Burden:  Occupied Territory HC:  I finally got around to picking up the first volume of this series about the dogs (and a couple cats) who live in the town of Burden Hill and protect it from supernatural threats.  It was delightful and convinced me that I needed to add the rest of the series to my library.  This is the latest volume from writers Evan Dorkin and Sara Dyer, with art from the very talented Benjamin Dewey, and it takes us back to the post-WWII era where a member of the Wise Dogs has to deal with an army of disembodied heads.  Tanuki feature into the story too.  It sounds weird enough to have come right from the Mignolaverse, which is very much a good thing.  Though, I think I can wait to pick this up after I’ve collected the other volumes in this series.  It should have received a paperback edition by then.

Black Hammer:  Visions #8 (of 8):  Scott Snyder and David Rubin close out this anthology series with a tale from two eras:  The 1880’s origin of the Horseless Rider and a rest home in the southwest from the 1950’s.  Seeing two creators who I like and who have never worked together before should make for a strong ending to this series.  Shame about the fact that it’s not getting an all-in-one collection and is instead being split between two $20 hardcovers.  It might be a while before I’ll be able to find them on sale, or they’re collected in one volume.  This isn’t a problem because regardless of the talent involved, it’s still “Black Hammer” and I really don’t feel the need to keep up with everything relating to this series anymore.

Garbage Man:  Huh, I just wrote about how Aaron Lopresti delivered generally competent art on the “Justice League” story that Simon Spurrier wrote, last week.  Now Dark Horse is reprinting Lopresti’s “Garbage Man” series from a decade back.  It’s about an ambitious lawyer who finds out that a pharmaceutical company is up to no good.  Before he can expose them, he’s kidnapped by the company’s operatives, experimented on, and destroyed in a lab explosion which actually causes his remains to merge with the soil and emerge as the revenge-minded hero Garbage Man.  Which is a long way of saying that Lopresti is doing his own spin on “Swamp Thing.”  Hmmmmm… I think I may know why this series has been out of print for the past ten years…

Halo:  Legacy Collection:  It’s a tale as old as time.  Marvel gets the license to make comics based on something, then they lose the license and Dark Horse picks it up to make their own comics based on it, at which point Marvel will get the license back and then start publishing Dark Horse’s comics as their own.  That last bit hasn’t happened yet, but the three stories collected here were originally published by Marvel, so it’s only a matter of time.  The stories included here are “Uprising” from Bendis and Alex Maleev, “Helljumpers,” from Peter David and Eric Canete, and “Bloodline” from Fred Van Lente and Francis Portela.  I own “Uprising” and remember it being pretty decent, with Maleev’s art being the star of the show.  That said, it’s kind of telling that you can look at the creative teams involved in these titles and see Marvel’s interest with the franchise diminish with each subsequent miniseries.

Hellboy Universe Essentials:  B.P.R.D.:  Collecting the first proper “B.P.R.D.” miniseries “Plague of Frogs” which kicked off a very long-running storyline through the Mignolaverse and finally gave us the origin of Abe Sapien.  While a lot of people loved this miniseries, longtime readers will know that “B.P.R.D.” didn’t click for me until the next volume, “The Dead,” which saw John Arcudi join the series and bring his own uniquely weird talents to the ongoing series-of-miniseries.

Last Flight Out #1 (of 6):  Arrowverse and Marvel Comics veteran Marc Guggenheim writes this new series with Eduardo Ferigato providing the art.  As a veteran superhero comics writer, Guggenhim knows that one way to get an audience to care about your grounded human drama is if you put it against a fantastic backdrop.  Which is why this series is about a man trying to find his estranged and missing daughter and the man is the designer of the Arks which are set to take humanity away from a dying Earth and they’re leaving TODAY!  This could be good; however, my abiding memory of Guggenheim as a writer is the “Civil War” tie-in arc of “Wolverine” he did almost 20 years ago.  It was fun, but if that’s the only comic that I can really connect him with, what does that say about everything he’s done in the years since?

Mazebook #1 (of 5):  Jeff Lemire is back with another high-concept miniseries.  This time the hook is that a building inspector is contacted by his daughter who has recently passed on.  She needs him to come find her, and using one of her unfinished puzzles and a map of the city, the inspector is prepared to find a way out of our reality to do just that.  While I know to expect nothing more than general competence from Lemire as a writer these days, he’s teaming with his “Old Man Wolverine” and “Gideon Falls” partner Andrea Sorrentino for this one.  Sorrentino does great, imaginative work and he’s the main reason their last series still has a place on my bookshelf.  Seeing him go at a series all about mazes sounds like a recipe for a visually interesting comic that might actually drag the quality of its story up a couple notches.

Rewild:  The solicitation text bills this as “Fables” meets “The Fisher King” and… yeah that sounds about right.  Poe is a homeless woman who also claims that she’s a fairy changeling.  It’s how she knows that there are a lot of mythical creatures out there who have been displaced by climate change and are angry with humanity as a result.  Poe believes that building a giant park in the middle of a city will pacify them, and she’s convinced that ambitious yet troubled engineer Demond is the man for the job.  Now all she needs to do is convince him that this plan is crazy enough to work instead of just plain crazy.  It’s a cute premise, and it’s something that I want to be excited about, even if its creative team, writer Devin Grayson and artist Yana Adamovic don’t move the needle of my opinion one way or the other.