Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb
The reasoning behind which Mignolaverse titles get the hardcover treatment becomes easier to identify if this volume is any indication. All spinoff titles that don’t have Mignola’s direct involvement or aren’t part of an ongoing storyline arrive in softcover. Everything else gets the hardcover treatment. Why? My guess is that it’s down to declining sales and leveraging of the interest of a dedicated audience. Which is weird because this latest volume of short stories is the best Mignolaverse title I’ve read in a while, and one that I wouldn’t have minded (too much) to read in hardcover.
It should also be noted that this is the first volume of these stories in a while to be written entirely by Mike Mignola himself. No disrespect to the multiple co-writers who have collaborated with him over the years, but “The Return of Effie Kolb and Others” is a good reminder of how the man managed to spawn an entire fictional universe bearing his name. Starting with the title story.
“The Return of Effie Kolb” is actually a sequel to “The Crooked Man” as Hellboy returns to the Appalachian setting of that story after he’s called by Tom, one of its survivors. Tom got in touch with Hellboy because a girl who has been staying with him has said something bad is coming. This girl, Sarah Blackburn, was thrown out by her family for fear that she was a witch because of her powers of foresight. Something like that doesn’t bother Hellboy any, so they head out into the forest to find out what this bad thing may be.
What they find is some actual witchcraft and the start of another spinoff series for the Mignolaverse. It’s also refreshing to see Hellboy’s no-nonsense approach to all of the supernatural mayhem which erupts here. He’s someone who has no problems telling a demon dog to “SIT!” while punching it with his stone hand or smashing a giant witch with a nearby tree. Lots of other writers have managed a reasonable approximation of the big guy’s tone, but it feels just right when Mignola does it.
As for the art, though the late, great Richard Corben isn’t around to illustrate this sequel, Zach Howard still does a hell of a job with it. While his intricate detail and thick linework are the things that strike you the most about his style at first, there’s an unexpected element of caricature to his characters that’s also welcome. It allows for them to be expressive, and weird when the story demands it with the man’s intricate style allowing for surprising flexibility when things shift into a high-action supernatural mode. He’s a great addition to this universe and I’d love to see him return.
Speaking of returns, one of Mignola’s most obvious stylistic disciples, Matt Smith, returns to illustrate “Long Night at Goloski Station.” While Smith may have started out his career trying to slavishly copy the man himself, his style has evolved into something rounder, and warmer and easy to appreciate on its own terms. Especially when those terms involve Hellboy fighting the agents of a Russian warlock alongside Yad Tovich from “The Silver Lantern Club.” This may be a short story, but Mignola packs in a lot of detail regarding the character’s history, his interactions with Hellboy, and their fight against demonic forces here. Tovich’s introduction was a highlight of that miniseries, and this story proves that he’s got depth beyond “Drunken Russian Werewolf Hunter.”
“Her Fatal Hour” is next and features art from Tiernen Trevallion who has an appealingly loose, angular style reminiscent of artist Duncan Fegredo. In addition to his extensive work on the main “Hellboy” saga, Fegredo also illustrated “The Beast of Vargu” to which this story serves as a follow-up to. It’s pretty straightforward as the daughter of the gypsy who saved Hellboy in that story calls in that debt to have him save her from being married to a demon. It’s not a very surprising story, but the big guy’s deadpan one-liners help enliven it. As does Trvallion’s artwork which is great at rendering big, bad demons who need to get their heads chopped off.
Trevallion also illustrates the following short, “The Sending,” which taps into a bit of weird Icelandic lore. It starts off with Hellboy investigating the ransacking of a late Englishman’s library by some kind of mummified creature and ends with it being confronted in the man’s secret, more evil, library. We used to get these kinds of short stories on a more regular basis back in the early days of “Hellboy” via backups in one-shots and the pages of “Dark Horse Presents.” While not surprising, it’s still an intriguing bit of weirdness that also sports some appreciable dry humor and lively art.
The volume closes out with “The Seven Wives Club” which sees Mignola re-teaming with “Krampusnacht” artist Adam Hughes. Though Hughes is an artist whose style trends towards the photorealistic, it’s still loose enough to allow for credible supernatural action as Hellboy and B.P.R.D. agent Pauline Raskin investigate a girl’s claim that it was the ghost of a man with seven girlfriends who burned them and himself alive that caused her to shoot her boyfriend. In fact, the art is the real star of the story here as we get a credibly spooky old school for Hellboy and Pauline to explore before things explode into some well-executed ghostbusting.
The short of it is that there’s not a bad story here and each of them has something to recommend it from either excellent art, or clever writing with some memorable humor. In fact, the quality level is high enough to remind me of the old days when we’d get anthologies of Hellboy stories written, and illustrated, by Mignola that were arguably better than the extended miniseries he was writing about the character. While Hellboy’s story may be done and over with now, “The Return of Effie Kolb and Others” shows that the creator still has it as far as his writing is concerned and I’m glad he’s not making me pay a hardcover premium to enjoy it.