4 out of 5

This was a wonderfully sad issue, and a much better representation of how to mix emotion into the antics as compared to the obvious melodrama found in Abe Sapien (which I apparently find continually satisfying to bash).

‘Grind’ is a slice of life tale about one man’s – Aaron’s – existence in a monster-ridden town.  He asks ‘why’ but its in the post-trauma sense, where we realize life is going on but we still have no answers.  And so he crosses bodies with tumorous growths and wrecked portions of the town to get to his job at the coffee shop, because, dammit, people still want coffee.  And in a delightfully humanizing touch, the B.P.R.D. team, visiting to put down a large creature still lurking about, has that same need and want for java.  Aaron has a paycheck; Aaron has menial tasks.  He gets the opportunity to explain something of what he’s seen in town to Johann, who notes it as something of an oddity and agrees to meet Aaron tomorrow to talk about it.  Unfortunately, things don’t get to turn out that way.  And it’s not an explosion or splash page that prevents it from being so, it’s the off-panel tragedy, underlining the too-recognizable ‘random’ nature of reality as we continue through our daily, yup, grind.

This is an amazing job of bringing a huge-ass story like B.P.R.D. down to a human level.

The one misstep is that Arcudi includes some, presumably, seeds for another tale when Johann and Liz dispatch the monster.  The last two B.P.R.D. arcs did something awesome where we only saw the relevant information from story B in story A, and then waited to add details to story B once A completed.  The same could’ve been done here, leaving the monster business almost fully in the background so that we never felt like we had to step too far away from Aaron.  It’s a slight disruption in the narrative, without which this could’ve been an even more affecting tale.