4 out of 5

Sprinkle a little Arcudi on there, and things improve right away…

Abe Sapien was a personality-less presence in The Drowning, his in-universe first solo case, with the writing caught up in too many Hellboy-adjacent style tics and story references to make the tale stand on his own.   A short while later on Abe’s timeline, he’s dispatched to investigate a haunting in suburbia; a low-stakes case that’s to be a nice distraction from paperwork.

While you can follow the thread of the ‘proving ground’ of The Drowning to a more resigned Abe in Haunted Boy, I charitably account his more fleshed out, zen persona to Arcudi’s shaping, but probably keep the story boiled down to a mini supernatural detective joint was to its benefit as well.

Patric Reynolds, who offered us some rather stiff Joe Golem books later on, is rather danged fantastic here, really loose and emotive and capturing the action surprisingly well for his thick pencil / ink style.  The emotional fallout for the parents and friends of the titular boy feels rather underwritten, but Abe comes across as a legit character this time, on his way to becoming the thoughtful man-of-action of later B.P.R.D. stories.