3 out of 5

Spoilers, if, for some reason, you’ve deigned to read my reviews instead of better ones, or instead of reading the comics first.

The Fury is… a big fight.  It’s what we’ve been building to, but it doesn’t amount to much more than that, and sure, I’ve already established that I’m a pretttty lame Hellboy ‘fan’ because I’ve fallen out over the mythology, but the grand ol’ end to Ogdru Hem sort of typifies the why.

While the tail end of HB’s Earth-bound saga took an interesting swerve through Arthurian lore, that it inevitably brought along – for a single scene – apocalypse horsemen feels like this twist was forced atop just to deny that inevitability, just as it turns out that our original Big Bad was the current Big Bad all along.  While such a ‘reveal’ might be lauded as long-term plotting, and HB fans have seemed to adore the random callbacks to previous series (random because, in my reading, they’re not so much rewardingly woven in as they are “remember this name from ten years ago?” references), the cosmic wonderment that’s found in early Mignolaverse world-building got bloated with extras as his character exploded into a larger, and I’d guess unexpected, world of characters and events.  And so Mike got indulge his love of folklore from around the globe, mixing it with Hellboy, and meanwhile getting further and further away from a core storyline.  When this resulted in standalone issues / series, I was really happy: Mike is an amazing visual storyteller, and HB can be a great one-size-fits-all type to shove into the middle of anarchy.  But when we would be (again, in my reading) retrofitting things to fit a mixed up timeline, it never did much for me.

And The Fury, besides it’s Lovecraftian-dragon smashing, has a lot of that.  It’s an attempt to jam a whole bunch of “I told you it was all related!” nods into three issues, including tying us into Hell On Earth B.P.R.D. in a supremely immersion-breaking set of cutaways that suggests that this final battle has destroyed a big chunk of London as well; prior to that point, this all felt very isolated to castles and woods, and then suddenly we’re seeing crowded populaces and buildings blowing up, shorthand for “shit just got real.”

But it’s just a big fight.  Of a type that HB has fought time and again.

It’s amazingly arted from Duncan Fegredo, with gorgeous, striking colours from Dave Stewart and a precise use of lettering from Clem Robins.  It’s a fun read, and, at moments, reminds me of some of the most thrilling and awe-inspiring bits from HB’s past.  Although I’ve complained about the city scenes above, the wind-down from events has a more quiet pan over these locations, and it’s rather stirring – a ‘zoom out’ that more effectively shows the ripple effect of what just happened versus shoving it in our faces.

I read The Fury when it came out.  I was reading Hellboy in floppies starting from about The Wild Hunt, reading the trades at the same time, so I had a sense of the history while getting the kinda-sorta monthly fill of the Fegredo era.  Rereading everything together without publishing delays makes it easier to keep track of some of the minor bits and pieces, but I think it’s telling – for my reading sensibilities – that the only stories I really remembered from my first readthrough were those from the first couple trades, and that the big deal that was The Fury didn’t leave much of an impression at all, even if it looks fantastic and reads pretty slickly at the moment.