3 out of 5

Yeah, this is sort of what I’ve been afraid of.  Lately – since the Mignolaverse bloated into like ninety books a month and switched over to an ongoing format – I’ve felt the high quality of their many titles begin to slip.  It’s somewhat inevitable, like any expansion – you get more, but what you get is likely to be homogenized to some degree.  From afar it doesn’t seem like this change should matter; whether you number 5-part storylines individually or incrementally, what’s the difference if they’re all intended to be part of the same universe?  And sure, that follows.  But what’s the reason for the change in format?  Because all of these books are shifting toward the horse and carrot setup, where a ‘conclusion’ isn’t that so much as a lead-in to the next book.  Wait for next season; wait for the next arc; wait until you see What’s Next.  Now I would say that out of any ‘universe,’ the Hellboy world has certainly earned this, having built a massive history and lineup of characters over years of more self-contained tales, but it’s still saddened me that I have to start questioning, when several story chunks have passed and I haven’t felt myself too involved, if I’m buying out of legitimate interest or just habit.

Baltimore hasn’t switched over to the new format, and that’s been wonderfully suited to the slowburn trek of our titular soldier on his forever hunt for the vamp who ruined his life.  But ‘the Infernal Train’ removes the slowburn.  While another review I read was in favor of this sudden uptick in action, to me, it highlighted the heavy-handed flaws in Christopher Golden’s writing (flashbacks to an Archaia series he did with a similar sense of overwrought ‘literary’ seriousness as this mini… where we trade Bible and Nietzsche quotes as conversation) and rendered Stenbeck’s generally stoic, haunting art into something closer to modern day Cameron Stewart.  Not a bad thing, it just felt simplified for the sake of capturing the action and lacked the weight of previous Balty books.

The three parter is something of a pause in the story, Baltimore forcing a confrontation with Duvic, during which he inadvertently stumbles into a clue from a previous story that he follows into what will be the next story arc.  As Baltimore has been somewhat single-minded in his pusuit, only stopping when – along his travels – propriety demands, this divergence to justify what turns into a massive battle feels exactly like that description.  I didn’t really get the point to structuring the tale this way, and the fortunate plot thread that Balty picks up is a particularly silly way to connect things.  How this ties into my fears: the lack of necessity; extending the story only to leave us on a ‘cliffhanger’ that really hasn’t advanced or changed things much.  Thankfully to this last point, the book manages to somewhat redeem itself, the Duvic storyline morphing in an unexpected way.  But I still maintain that that could’ve been plotted in without the rerouting.

Some other bits bring the reading experience up to average: a pretty good comedic moment in book two; Duvic’s appearance is properly built up to; and though the battle seems to explode from out of nowhere, it has a properly frenetic feel to it.

With Abe Sapien and B.P.R.D. as ongoings, I hope they either wrap up Baltimore with the next arc and thus keep it fairly intact or at least keep it isolated into one shots and truly self-contained minis.