1 out of 5

Dang, this is like the most fill-inny fill-in issue ever.  Guest artist?  Nigel Dobbyn in for John McCrea: check.  Story that adds no new information or moves the characters forward in any way?  A P.I. spies on Jason Blood performing a ritual: check.  No really concrete references to recent events?  Check.

From Hell is certainly tolerable – Dobbyn’s artwork is a good fit for the noir-brush of the P.I. framing narrative, and Stu Chaifetz applies a lighter color palette to his stuff than McCrea’s, giving it a further unique look, while Ennis has Blood bumble about his apartment with and moves things along – but a couple of really sloppy scripting moments, and the general sense that none of this matters, are enough to sink it, along with a waaay tonally off ending.  Detective Joe Gunn types up a letter to someone, thus narrating our issue, telling us about how he spotted the oddest thing – The Thing That Never Dies, as a matter of fact – and followed it back to what ends up being the apartment of Mr. J.B. hisself.  Blood is prepping a spy to check out what Etrigan is up to in Hell, while Thing and Harry the pillow have a lazy heart-to-heart that tries to gloss over the as-of-now abandoned Glenda angle.  Gunn, just as scriptily lazy, watches all this stuff through a window and gawks, and then comes in brandishing a gun and demanding money, a character quirk that hardly seems justified.  Regardless, a mix-up occurs, and Gunn is sent to Hell in lieu of the spy, and some stuff happens.

And then the ending is ridiculously bleak, but just sort of nails home how unimportant this character and issue is, as well as how hackneyed the “writing a letter and narrating” frame is.