3 out of 5

Mignola: The Dream Weaver.

Arcudi: The World Builder

Allie: The Poet

Roberson: The World Builder (understudy)

Golden: Ol’ Reliable

The Hellboy Universe – and its semi-related offshoots – stretch far and wide.  Mignola’s name appears as a guiding hand on everything, but once you’ve done your tours, you recognize the flavors of the various scripters these books employ, and I’m sure I’m not alone in discovering preferences for one over the other.

Out of the current pack, Christopher Golden is one of the most consistent: Logically paced stories, a key kooky motivating idea, and well-rounded characterizations.  In other words: pretty predictable.  He reliably turns in – for all intents and purposes – solid stories, but they’re rarely surprising,  or boast any character archetypes that step off a well-beaten path.  His dialogue is also of the Marvel / DC caliber of “no one really talks like this in real life but I’m going to explain myself to you, mostly via cliches.” But hey, there are vampires or zombies, so whatever.

Joe Golem continues with its paranormal investigator shtick, Joe assisting the local PD and running into some Lovecraft stuff, which is depressingly similar to Hellboy’s Ogdru Jahad concept….  In between these scenes, Joe flashes back to his golem days, and artist Patric Reynolds inks everything to death, and mamages to make characters look wildly different from page to page.

The general vibe of his muddy art matches the drowned NY setting, but his art is just too static and empty to work sequentially.  His scene setting, doused in Stewart’s water colors, is great though.

No harm no foul, but I don’t yet see anything that really makes Joe stand out from the other similarly stoic, haunted past figures in the Mignola books.