4 out of 5

After the over-stuffed last arc, it’s nice to have Ben Stenbeck’s talents reaffirmed in ‘Chapel of Bones.’  He’s fully capable of handling complicated sequences in terms of positioning and setting, but his stark style feels most confident when we can narrow the focus – get the camera up close, right next to the characters doing their thing.  The second issue of this 2-parter is mostly a battle, with skeleton goons and bat things raging all around an ablaze studio while the vamp who’s been at the end of Baltimore’s quest stands by and watches, but it’s not so important to keep as many moving pieces in mind as our last fight sequence – which had vamps and an army and Duvic and Baltimore that all had their parts to play, so Stenback had to keep all of this in frame and, to me, it made the rest of the book suffer, characters looking slightly rushed and the generally ominously contrasting Dave Stewart-colored backgrounds felt empty.  All that’s fixed.  The only real letdown, visually, is when the battle is over.  There’s an important painting of ‘The Red King’ which, I believe, is supposed to slowly fade in color, which would’ve been a wonderful transition out of the fight, but it just doesn’t come across.

Story-wise, book one has three Baltimore associates meeting up, then getting suckered into being bait for our lead.  Thankfully if you’re friends with Baltimore, you’ve probably been in a few scuffles, so the trio put up a good fight before a great final shot in book one of Balt’s arrival in a flaming doorway.  And book 2 successfully caps the whole experience with some haunting final concepts that – props to our writers – perfectly balance the somewhat anti-climactic ending of the vampire whom our hero has been hunting.  The entire world of Hellboy books suffers fairly often from a lack of epilogue after a build-up, but for as compressed as it is, ‘Chapel of Bones’ manages to get all the steps of a conclusion right – proper build-up, enough glory shots to satisfy, and a proper cool-down with impacting parting thoughts.

However, I will say that this is the first time I felt like I needed to read the Baltimore book to get the full effect.  I guess it was inevitable – the series have meant to fill in a gap in the book, but all the minis up ’til now have felt open enough that I didn’t need the external text.  ‘Chapel’ suddenly brings in direct references to the book, and there’s the sense that, even though the moments read well in the comic, they would be even more fulfilling with some extra history.