2 out of 5

Hot christ, that was some straight up b.s., baby.  A lame wrap up to some of the preceding wait-and-see nonsense of The Warning, and a disapointingly whimpering  followup to The Black Goddess.  Sure, you’ve cleared the slate of references littered throughout previous B.P.R.D. and Hellboy stories, and added a Gotcha to the frog storyline, but… really?  Let’s all wait in a tunnel while the bad guy explains it all and then repeat a deus ex machina explosion for the Nth time?

Some okay moments happen throughout.  Abe’s banter with the baddie is coolly terse and snarky, and reminds me of how much more I like John’s take on Abe versus other writers.  The Lobster Johnson conclusion is wonderful, but it very much should’ve been a one shot, as it is otherwise an oddball distraction here that makes LoJo’s cliffhanger appearance beforehand pretty misleading.  And the jump-ahead post-script of issue five is well-handled – we’ve been shown enough city-destroying events that to walk through it again would be rather mundane, so dropping us into the UN interview with Manning and Kate and Johann, in which we see the results of their latest monster scuffle is effective, and satisfying.  But that leaves 3-ish issues that feel incredibly besides the point for a miniseries named ‘King of Fear,’ and the LoJo focus that, again, would rank higher if it had come on its own, and an eye-rollingly repetitive way of ‘resetting’ things for the upcoming ‘Hell On Earth’ issues, which is doubly eye-rolling in that it doesn’t really reset or conclude things very much at all.