3 out of 5

As we tick toward when B.P.R.D. started using sequential numbering, some of the first signs of how the Mignolaverse crew were going to start getting a little greedy within their own market cropped up here: two concurrent B.P.R.D. series, with the internal numbering alternating, encouraging a ‘collect ’em all’ mentality.  And while the events in The Pickens County Horror aren’t completely isolated – they tie in to the vampire lore loosely dotted in to the other series – it’s also a fairly pointless story, without much impact, without characters you see elsewhere, and without any reason for it to have been published at the time it was.  You could see it as being similar to any given Hellboy one- or two-shot, as Mike often took HB on little sidequests along the way, but those stories at least felt like they were adding to the character’s mythology; part of the DNA of Hellboy is how he bounces from fable to fable.  But taking some faceless B.P.R.D. agents and having them get stuck in a swamp for some background on early vamps doesn’t have that same feel; it’s world-building, sure, but it has nothing to do with character.  Artist Jason Latour’s loose style brings icky charm to the tale, as plague-infested fog assails a cabin in which one of our agents is holed up, and despite my grousing, it’s not that it’s necessarily written poorly or uninterestingly, I just had zero clue why it was released as it was, and rereading it now, I still don’t.

B.P.R.D. would do this side-story business for a bit, as well as this alternate numbering business.  Pickens County is entertaining horror comics fare on its own terms, but didn’t have to be a Mignolaverse book – even with its light vamp lore – and was the first time, while I was picking up the titles as they were released, that I was made to feel like I must’ve missed some previous issue to explain why we’d derailed so far from any main storyline…