2 out of 5

I don’t think that everything in the Mignolaverse is gold.  I mean, I justified dropping Abe Sapien because I felt the lead writer there – Scott Allie – didn’t write to my tastes.  But there have been Mignola-penned books that don’t do much for me.  At the very least, though, they offer a sense of promise, or something that makes me want to stick around.  And Frankenstein Underground is unique in that it pretty much never achieved that.  Would I buy a second series if it appeared?  Yes, it’s true, I would.  Although I think I’d be going into it with a pre-formed opinion at that point, which ain’t fair.

Picking up on a chuckly character from a Hellboy one-shot, Frank – perhaps due to its after-the-fact creation – never feels like its own thing.  We’re dropped in the middle of things with our lead – who’s written like a less one-liner inclined Hellboy – wandering into some altar-y place where he’s given a history lesson by an old witch.  Starting in the middle of events certainly isn’t unusual in the massive Hellboy world, but the issue simply offered no context whatsoever: no reason to get into the character, no reason to care about high plight beyond that “From the Pages of Hellboy” banner that runs across all the books.  But when Frank falls into a subterranean cavern populated by beasties, I sorta thought, okay, this is an extension of that HB one-shot in that it’s going to give Mignola a chance to trot out some more fun pulp tropes and give them his gothic twist, the kind of fun the forever evolving main HB storylines don’t often allow.  Alas, what gets trotted out instead is like the briefest of summaries of various Hellboy lore, rather hurriedly shuffled into frame to bring Frankenstein into the fold.  …So is it a book strictly for fan service, perhaps?  Maybe.  It felt like a vacation for Mike, maybe a chance to write something simple and relatively isolated (if they choose to leave the series as a standalone) and with a newish character with no real expectation.  As a reader, it just felt like a story without a center, and without any real anchor.

Ben Stenbeck’s art is quality, but if I can be a continually critical git, I feel like he crossed a line where he got too polished, to the extent that his art doesn’t move anymore.  This did happen at some point during Baltimore.  Early series had an energy that the later series lacked, although his compositional skills absolutely got tighter.

So hatred all around.  I was excited for a new entry into the Hellboy world, but found myself uninvolved from the first issue onward.  But who knows: when I do inevitably pick up that second series, maybe / hopefully I’ll be eating my words.