Abe Sapien vol. 4: The Shape of Things to Come
With a title like that you’d think that we’d be in for some grade-A foreshadowing and setup for future volumes, right? Unfortunately, as “B.P.R.D.’s” main failing is that it can sometimes be too preoccupied in setting up stories to come that it forgets to tell interesting stories in the here and now, that appears to be the problem with “Abe Sapien” as well. It’s actually more pronounced here as there’s usually some burst of action or even minor payoff in “B.P.R.D.” In the two stories told here, they just feel like slow burns that don’t really go anywhere interesting.
The title story has Abe meeting up with some Mexican drifters in the Arizona desert. Not only is he warmly received by them, the fishman gets to hear some interesting creation stories from Elena, one of the women among them. Then some monsters show up, which leads to a clash with some of the lookouts for the Phoenix Spring Steel Guard, and a resolution where we find out that Elena’s crazy father who wandered out into the desert may not have been so crazy after all. The creation myths seem to be the main takeaway from this story as they hint at the current challenges facing the world in this series. Beyond then, the story lacks form and momentum as the monster attack feels like it was tacked on to give the story something resembling these things. At least the art from Sebastian Fiumara has an appealing grittiness to it that suits the location and the contents of the story quite well.
“To The Last Man,” is a three-issue arc and it doesn’t really benefit that much from being the longer of the two stories being told here. In this case, Abe wanders into another Arizona town that has managed to struggle on in this “Hell on Earth.” They’ve still got a store and a restaurant going, and the first person Abe meets is its local police officer. However, while Abe helps out with disposing of some weird egg growths on a few dead cattle, there’s a community of young people outside of town who are up to no good. There’s a sense of vague horror from the zombies that pop up through the story as Abe wanders through the town, tries to help out, gets in some arguments with the community and the sheriff, but the whole arc generally feels as directionless as its main character. Sebastian’s brother Max takes over for the art here and I still have yet to be won over by his style. He can do creepy monsters as well as any other artist in this series, but he also has a tendency to make the human characters look just as strange with the little angled slits he gives them for eyes.
There is also the ongoing subplot involving evil occultist Gustav Strobl and B.P.R.D. Agent Vaughan who has been resurrected and enslaved by the man. Normally the adventures of a guy who likes to stand around making proclamations regarding his own power and vague statements about the fate of the world should be intolerable by any standard. Yet it feels like there’s more direction to these scenes than the main story. Strobl knows where he wants to go, gets there, and sets up a new goal after that. However, the best part is that this guy is clearly not the all-powerful master planner that so many “B.P.R.D.” antagonists are set up as. As we see in his confrontation with Antonis Kouvelis, Strobl doesn’t have all the angles as covered as he thinks he does and ultimately needs to rely on Vaughan’s help to prevail in the end. He’s a villain who has to struggle for his success, and that makes his pomposity easier to take. It also adds some drama to any upcoming battles he finds himself in as it’s clear that they’re not all going to be easy wins for him.
It’s been evident for a while that Mike Mignola likes to play the long game with his works, and that it can take a while for elements set up in one story to pay off completely. When they do, as we saw in “B.P.R.D.: Vampire,” the results can excuse a lot of dull and somewhat confusing setup. With “Abe Sapien,” everything here feels like setup and the burn is so slow that it threatens to fizzle out before things get going. Mignola has said that he lets his co-writers have as much latitude as possible, and I’m wondering if that’s such a good thing based on what we’re seeing from Scott Allie here. At this time, I find Abe’s adventures to be more trying on my patience and faith in its creators than anything else.