3 out of 5

I had given up on volume 2 due to the investment being hard to commit to – 8 bucks for generally one or two interesting stories and several meh ones.  This is part of any anthology, that mix, but getting a good price ratio can make or break it, and it broke me.  Dark Horse has realized this, though, it seems, as the ending of this volume at issue 36 will lead to a new slimmer and less-expensive format.  Anyhow, I wanted to pick these up for the the Usagi Yojimbo tale… which, of course, ended up getting reprinted in the color special, but that’s cool, I also got a good Witchfinder story out of it.  The overall batch of tales is as mixed as ever, though I’ll hand it to editor Mike Richardson for getting together an impressive group for the final issue.

S.H.O.O.T. First and Bad Biology both conclude in these issues.  The former concerns some future specialist group who target ‘outside actors,’ which actually seems like some interesting take on spirituality versus energy.  It ends on an interestingly dark note, though the art (Nicolás Daniel Selma) is a bit static for my taste and writer Justin Aclin gives us the story via a pretty heavy-handed narrator.  The latter is about some government research group that gets caught up in the midst of a horrible virus isolated to an island and a small tribe.  Christopher Sebela’s writing is rather wordy, and doesn’t do a great job of connecting some vague VO statements to the actual plot, but, surprisingly, Brian Churilla’s art is really solid – it doesn’t have the rushed look of a lot of his features – and thus makes me wonder if he can deliver when the amount of material isn’t 22 pages worth.

I was also pretty excited to see some Brendan McCarthy work (‘The Deleted’, which concludes in issue 35), but the story – something something virtual reality – is a lot less wacky than the tales with which I’d normally associate him, and the art is surprisingly dry, Brendan’s usual psychedelic color schemes seeming mismatched to the talking head format.

The Usagi tale is wonderfully concise; if you’ve read any Usagi, you know Sakai is pretty much a master of compressed story-telling, and his two-parter – while not featuring any classic characters beyond the ronin rabbit – matches Stan’s consistent quality.

Davey Jones and the Mystery of the Monocle Men by Dennis Culver is super cheeky fun; I see he has some other published work I’ll have to check out.  Jason Alexander contributes some short and crass pieces to #36 and they’re hilarious.  And I’ve found a new source of Johnny Ryan-esque humor to turn to on the web for my glees.  Mike Richardson’s ‘The Secret Order of the Teddy Bears’ bears (womp) the creator’s solid writing style that gets positive ticks for a fun idea of an underground teddy bear army… alas, it says “to be continued” in issue 36 and then wasn’t.

The Witchfinder tale in book 36 is classic Mignola, the kind of quick and dashed-off blending of action, monsters and humor that the currently more serious Hellboy world doesn’t allow for.

This doesn’t cover everything in the two issues, just some highlights.  But should give you a good idea of the mixed bag nature.  Still, I appreciate that they turned the final book into something of an event (Mignola!  Jaime Hernandez!) even though the series will return.