4 out of 5

You had me at… the last few pages actually.  Up until then, I was a little iffy.  BUT – ‘Lightning War’ is definitely an improvement over the first arc; as predicted, they had to get a sort of clumsy origin out of the way, but without revealing too much, giving us a sort of fractured setup.  This picks up immediately after the previous series, with Bruttenholm and Helena discussing the man in the suit, who’s not been talking or eating or sleeping for weeks but, as we saw at the end of the previous issue, has referred to himself as “Redding” and not the “Fields” who originally inhabited ol’ Sledgey.  There’s some psychic stuff happening in the mind of Redding, who is, in some form, inhabiting that shell, and maybe this ties into some greater Hellboy thing I should know about, I don’t really know.  What’s important is that the machine gets motivated to move again, and is off on a secret machine to rescue a captured pilot of a secret American plane.  …He runs afoul of a German flaming skull fighter dude (same guy in Lobster Johnson?  I don’t know how this Mignolaverse really work) who can kick his patoot with flying and lightning, but SH has vril energy so one of them ends up dead and the other one has more comics to come.

And thus my pat little telling reveals a fairly pat little tale – we don’t really care about Sledgehammer yet, despite Arcudi and Mignola’s attempts are personalizing him by showing us visualizations of Redding’s thoughts, but its the same problem with the opening issues, in that there’s just not enough meat there to really get into it.  But: Sledge’s reinvigoration to duty by Helena brought in a nice sense of Hellboy-world grounding, and though hearing the man/machine speak was a little off-putting at first, since we’d been viewing him as a silent avenger, it was satisfying watching the character slowly get his voice during the issues, which is somewhere shy of Hellboy’s confidence but with much more bravado than the somber Lobster or driven Edward Grey or Baltimore.  The battle was appropriately dramatic, and we get a good sense of the destructive uncontrollable nature of the vril energy.

While the ghost of christmas whatever coda was unnecessary, the moments before that – Brut and Helena examining the seemingly once-again “dead” Sledgehammer shell post the issues’ events – added more potentially interesting aspects to how this character isn’t just black and white.

Laurence Campbell’s sketchy art is pretty excellent – moreso for handling the odd than the human, though, and he wisely stays away from shots that emphasize movement, as his work is more suited to “bursts” of energy in static panels.  Dave Stewart’s colors atop these pencils are some of his best work I’ve ever seen; Campbell’s use of shadow and atmosphere leaves more room than some of the other HB artists to play around with the palette, and the range and beauty of the colors we get, even for small scenes, is fine evidence of the dude’s years of efforts paying off.

So admittedly there’s nothing major to bump this to four stars, but at three issues, it’s exactly what it needs to be: s a fun little slice of world-building pulp, with dots of unique moments that actually make me excited for more, something the previous 2-parter didn’t accomplish.