Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club

The titular organization is made up of some familiar faces to the Mignolaverse, Sir Edward Gray and Sarah Jewell chief among them, who met in a London pub late in the 19th Century to discuss supernatural goings-on around town.  It’s these adventures that Simon Bruttenholm has decided to educate his nephew Trevor and his adopted son Hellboy about when they show up to help him investigate a haunting at the Old Bailey.  The haunting of an early radio transmitter.  A series of horse murders tying into the disappearance of a missing gem.  A demonic spirit haunting the streets of London.  An old Russian werewolf hunter who shows up to do what he does best – and drink!  All of these and more are just some of the cases the Silver Lantern Club tackled, while also dealing with Grey’s insistence that the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra was behind every one of them.

While I’m not too keen on the shift to putting out most Mignolaverse titles in hardcover, I will say that this one is pretty enjoyable if you’re willing to shell out for it.  Co-written with Chris Roberson, this is one of the writer’s better recent efforts as it’s essentially an anthology of short stories that perfectly illustrate why I keep coming back to this particular fictional universe.  Which is to say that they’re all weird stories with enough twists to keep me interested, and there’s not a bad one among them.  Though, the introduction of hard-drinking werewolf hunter Yad in the fourth story is easily the highlight of the volume.  Throw in some spot-on art from Christoper Mitten (flashbacks) and Ben Stenbeck (present-day sequences) and you’ve got a collection that hardcore fans and completists will be able to enjoy for cover price, or whatever discount they’ve managed to find for themselves.