4 out of 5

Lobster Johnson – or LoJo, to those of us who’ve gotten to know the man – was a wonderfully quirky oddity from the early Hellboy books, vibing with Mike’s madly enigmatic blend of pulp and myth-usurping world-building to create a character who was almost instantly like a surprise celebrity cameo. Who was this guy? What was with his hilarious lobster claw-branding shtick? And as the references were dotted in here and there, and his actual relevance in the HB / B.P.R.D. lore grew (Mignola and crew mindful to never spoil much about the guy’s identity or background), so did LoJo’s general awesomeness and appeal. You could claim a mixture of fan service and wish fulfillment that eventual brought him into his own miniseries – The Iron Prometheus – but Mignola is also exhaustive with his creations in that nothing is truly ever extraneous: while I’ve been sort of annoyed at different points at the extent of this – with one-line characters or events ‘suddenly’ incredibly important details – the way LoJo eventually fit in to things (and the way Iron Prometheus flows into B.P.R.D. stories which would follow pretty closely after) was immensely satisfying. He earned this mini-series.

Still, there are some growing pains. It’d been a while, at this point in time, since Mike had written a series in the punchier vein of Johnson; the narrative of the Mignolaverse had gotten much more complex and dense, leaving this kind of stuff for one-shots and minis. A five issue book with a character who’d otherwise only even been an there-and-gone reference makes the opening issues feel like they’re trying a bit too hard, just checking off pulp cliches and going for broke on the tone. It’s fun – and Jason Armstrong’s art is perfect, his line a bit more loosey-goosey than Mike’s and Armstrong not afraid to let his own streamlined designed inclinations overtake / inform Guy Davis’ or Mike’s influences – and satisfies on the stoic vigilante front, but it reads like it’s in a blindfolded sprint: you start running without really knowing where you’re going.

Past the midway point, though, Mike and Jason hit a nice equilibrium: characters are established, and we’ve got Nazis questing after occult power sources which a brain-in-a-jar was working on… and then later on you get Nazi submarines and the whole thing has found a pretty fantastic rhythm. As with B.P.R.D., John Arcudi would come along to build better things off of this foundation, but this time, Mike had set the stage pretty effectively, just taking a couple of issues in-series to get his sea legs back on the top-down style of hijinks a character like LoJo needs.