3 out of 5

Such is my excellent memory regarding Hellboy and b.p.r.d. that I can’t, for the life of me, remember reading Cameron Stewart’s previous Ashley Strode stories.  Something about the way the narrative and characters have been loosely strung together over the years has just never gelled with ma’ thinkin’ brain.  _But_, this exposes what I felt one of the great strengths of the Mignolaverse was – its ability to be inherently readable _despite_ that – and also sort of underlines how a lot of the magic (for me) has filtered out since they switched over to a more plot-tightened, ongoing format.  So despite this story being pretty hokily written over all, I enjoyed that it felt like (tonally) one of those classic, self-contained arcs.  This is probably due to Stewart wanting to do the story and it not being able to be fit in post Hell On Earth (which concludes soon) – so just a timing issue, and then we’re back to the ongoing stuff – but that’s fine.  I’ll take the happy accident.

Though, ironically, if this was based around Stewart (and since he’d developed the character previously, that seems to be a safe assumption), he was unavailable for the first issue, requiring new BPRD-guy Chris Roberson to take over, and it’s thus further possible that he set the style for the issues.  Which ain’t a great sign.  Because there are two problems with “Exorcist”: first, that the ghost house-lite tale essentially repeats the events of the second issue in the third issue, just with a different ghost, second, that Strode is apparently in the Hellboy class of unshakeable, and seems to have spirit-world superpowers that pretty much make any threat zero challenge, and third – most notably – she has an odd habit of narrating _everything_ out loud.  Every – god – damned – thing that Mike Norton draws – and Norton is a pleasant fit for the series, like more emotive and energetic Ben Stenbeck – “Strode” (i.e. whoever scripted this) says it out loud.  It achieves something moderately campy at points, like an Archie book, but when the story tries to divert into serious ghostin’, it comes across as pretty cheese.

The summary comes down to Ashley traveling the land and exorcising whatever, exchanging text messages with the BPRD to pretend like this story is part of continuity.  She arrives in a town with a bunch of missing children – and the lead-in to this, exploring the house wherein the kids have disappeared, is absolutely the best part of the issues – and investigates, then wields a sword and walks into the sunset.

It’s certainly nothing major, and, as mentioned, there are big narrational / structure problems, but the art is buoyant and the fairly isolated nature of the story was a pleasantly nostalgic refresher compared to the continuity heavy writing of the last few years.