Hellboy and The BPRD 1952

Hellboy and The BPRD 1952
Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi
Artist: Alex Maleev
FC, 144 pgs, $19.99 US

In Hellboy and the BPRD 1952, members of the BPRD are sent to a Brazilian village to investigate a series of grisly, unexplained murders. Accompanying them is Hellboy. It’s his first mission.

I’ve been watching Hellboy beat the tar out of monsters for 25 years or more so it was refreshing to see him ask a seasoned agent, “Archie, you’ve been doing this a while. Is this…normal? I mean for what you guys do.” He and Archie– a kind solider that took a shine to young Hellboy when the demon was locked away in a U.S. Air Base– are walking through a cavernous room in the dark bowels of an old prison. The room is full of dead bodies in glass tubes filled with liquid. That kind of personal touch in dialogue is sprinkled throughout this miniseries, like when it is remarked that Bruttenholm did not say good-bye to Hellboy and Bruttenholm curtly replies that Hellboy did not say farewell either. “He hates it here, Margaret,” says Bruttenholm. “We’ve tried to make it a home for him, but he hates it.”

When Hellboy first encounters a dead body in the Brazilian village, he hangs back as the human members of the BPRD team investigate. Hellboy just does not know what to do.

The day before I started this miniseries I had finished BPRD: The Devil You Know volume 3: Ragnarok, the end of the BPRD / Hellboy saga started more than 25 years ago. That volume and everything preceding it makes BPRD / Hellboy one of the greatest achievements in modern comics. As soon as I finished that volume I dug out my Hellboy collections with the intent to start reading the saga all over again. But I remembered I had Hellboy and the BPRD trade paperbacks I had not yet read. 1952, 1953, 1954, 1955, and 1956 going back to the early days of Hellboy’s career in the BPRD. New adventures populated with familiar faces from other Mignolaverse stories, including Bruttenholm and Varvara, one of the great “partnerships” in comics. “Because the professor is being my favorite. My favorite human of all.” (Chad Boudreau)

Spider-Woman #1

Spider-Woman #1
Marvel Comics
Brian Michael Bendis
(a) Alex Maleev
FC 32 pgs w/ ads $3.99 US / Higher in Canada

After a few false starts and a lot of talk, Bendis finally has his Spider-Woman comic book. I’ve been waiting for this title since Bendis and the Luna Brothers retold Spider-Woman’s origin in the appropriately named Spider-Woman: Origin mini-series. That was way back in 2005. The ongoing was suppose to follow shortly. Then Secret Invasion came around and everything changed. Spider-Woman was revealed to be the Skrull Queen in charge of the invasion of Earth. The war ended and the real Spider-Woman came back. That was in October of 2008. Here we are almost a full year later and now this fabled ongoing is before me.

Top 10: Daredevil Stories

This time around, the Man Without Fear: Daredevil. DD has always been one of my favourite characters, and his stories have always been among my favourite reads. Having said that, I never got into the Ann Nocenti / John Romita Jr. run or that wacky Daredevil in armour period, where he tried to pretend that Matt Murdock was dead and he was someone else. I just didn’t care for Nocenti’s take on the character and dropped it quickly. I DID pick up quite a bit of the “armour” run but STILL found it unreadable. Those two eras spanned roughly #250 to #380– almost thirteen solid years where one of my favourite books was ransacked.

A note on the Frank Miller run. No doubt this was the best era for the character, and while it is represented here with a few issues, the strength of the Miller run is in the totality and not the individual parts. While to me, not a lot of individual issues were good enough to make the list, you put all those issues together and it comprises one of the greatest runs by a creator on a character ever.

And now, this Blind Man Shall Lead…

1. Fantastic Four #39-40 & Daredevil #37-38
This is what I call the “Doctor Doom Saga”. The story began in Fantastic Four #39-40, where Daredevil assists the Fantastic Four in defeating Doom, who had taken over the Baxter Building and turned Reed’s inventions against them.

For his part in the latest defeat, Daredevil was marked by Doom for special attention, and when the right moment came, Daredevil would be used as a weapon to destroy the Fantastic Four. The right moment came in Daredevil #37-38 when, following a taxing battle with the Trapster, DD is handily beaten by Doom and gets to trade bodies with him as a boobie prize. DD turns the tables, gets his body back and has the Fantastic Four on his tail as a reward. With the help of Spider-Man and Thor, the Fantastic Four is held to a standstill. One of my favourite story sequences of all-time.

Great work by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Gene Colan.