3 out of 5

While a very important tale in BPRD’s history – both in adding more myth to the long-standing frog creature foes, and serving as the initial appearance of Guy Davis as the ongoing artist – Plague of Frogs is pretty baseline.  Abe, Kate, Liz, Johan, and Roger investigate a church linked to some supernatural business, and get exploded by frog people attacks.  There’s a lot of Noise going on – notes on Abe’s background; zombie attacks; further linking to the over-arching Rasputin / spaceworms business – but Mignola hadn’t yet found his rhythm as a writer whens scripting for someone else, resulting in a somewhat underwhelming vibe.  That’s not a direct knock on Guy Davis, who proves himself capable of clearly rendering just about anything, but he has a sort of open-ended sense of focus in his panels (like an observer) that doesn’t vibe with Mignola’s inherent punchier pacing.  So the creative team hasn’t settled yet.  (Arcudi would appear next series.)

In retrospect we can say how important this story is, but at the time it felt like a bumpy attempt to expand the HB universe to encompass… something.  But what that something was wasn’t quite clear, making Plauge of Frogs just sort of an average adventure tale.