5 out of 5

PROPERLY INSANE.  All is right with the world.

I read one of the first few Hellboy trades around the time the first movie came out and didn’t think much of it.  Later, when a Guillermo del Toro fetish had me loving Hellboy II and rewatching the original flick, I decided to leverage that appreciation into checking out the comics again, and the B.P.R.D. Acudi / Davis era was in full swing.  When I started reading those, I loved them.

My opinion retconned, as I was gobbling up the new books, I filled in my library with the old ones, and read them as quickly as I could, meaning I wasn’t really, like, actually absorbing them.

Revisiting the entire series now, I get where my initial opinion came from, as the first few HB books and first few B.P.R.D. collections are pretty uneven.  When it’s solo Mike, there are some peak moments, but his reliance on “remember this one line reference from eighteen books ago?” and excessive amount of names that turn out to be names you should’ve committed to memory gets pretty unwieldy, and his initial team-ups with other artists are herky-jerky mash-ups of pacing and storytelling quirks.  When Arcudi joined on The Dead, there’s a jolt of forward momentum, and with this volume – The Black Flame – all traces of Mignola side-story indulgence are gone, allowing for the first truly MASSIVE feeling tale since, I dunno, some of the bits and pieces of Seed of Destruction or Wake the Devil.

A brief reference to the eponymous character in the last arc blossomed into this tale: one of the heads of Zinco is tracking the Frog Plague, and has constructed a suit – which looks like ol’ Flamey – in order to harness the froggy power and do typical bad guy things with it.  Just as The Dead kind of humorously sidestepped the Plague, this volume throttles past it: we join the BPRD crew fully enmeshed in wiping out nests of the critters, and it’s the perfect jump start to a story which continues to one-up itself.  Everything just keeps getting worse and worse for the team (and us pithy normals, as well), in a glorious state of frenzy that truly leaves you feeling like there’s on escape.  Guy Davis, operating via mostly larger panels, does this sensibility much justice; sequences that are overrun with baddies are sweats-inducing madness.

Amongst this, we also get the emotional resonance of a death in the family, which is effected even in-arc – meaning you don’t have to have read all the previous stuff to get the impact – thanks to the way Arcudi and Mike quickly sketch out the solid dynamic between BPRD members.  (Excepting Liz, who hates everyone.)

Welcome to the fold, John Arcudi.  You were clearly what the Mignolaverse needed.