I know it’s a little early to begin getting excited about the release of HELLBOY II in July, but dammit, I’m getting itchy. To calm the jitters, I took a look at a recent five-issue story arc in one of HELLBOY’s companion comics, Mike Mignola’s B.P.R.D.: BUREAU OF PARANORMAL RESEARCH AND DEFENSE. This is the übersecret government department to which Hellboy belonged before he recently quit. His team was assigned to monster-killing duty.

This story arc is called B.P.R.D.: KILLING GROUND – a depressingly generic title and not a good sign. It was written by Mignola and John Arcudi, with art by Guy Davis.

The only two members of the team of monster hunters with whom you will be acquainted – if your only introduction to the Hellboy universe is the 2004 movie – are Abe Sapien, a fish-man whose appearance is modeled on that of the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and Liz Sherman, a young woman who can start fires with her mind, but doesn’t want to. The rest of the group in the comics are Capt. Benjamin Damio, Dr. Kate Corrigan and Johann Kraus, who is the most interesting, as he has no corporeal body and so has to find something material in which to reside. In this tale, they are being joined by Panya, a woman in a hospital bed who tells Liz about her life in ancient Egypt.

KILLING GROUND is set mostly within the B.P.R.D. compound, and this time, instead of the team going after monsters, the monsters are coming after them. They have a wendigo in a cage and suddenly a South American wild cat creature begins ripping expendable guards to pieces.

This is one of those stories you come across occasionally in comics series, when most of the action slows to a crawl and human relationships among the characters take center stage. Maybe you like that sort of thing if you are a longtime fan of the series, but these gab-fests can be trying for the casual reader.

Book One seems to be the beginning of a slow buildup of suspense. Colors are bleached out and the pages are dull until the wendigo strikes and suddenly, the panels are soaked in blood. In Book Two, the action picks up, but none of the questions you’ll have are answered, assuming this is your first exposure to Mignola’s world.

Davis’ art is dull and the writers don’t give him much to work with, as the entire story will be raggedy paced due to the several scenes of Liz unloading her ongoing and dreary angst on Panya.

By Book Four, almost the entire contents are given over to monster-whacking and a plot twist that makes the backstory even less comprehendible to newbies than it had been. In Book Five, most of our questions are answered in a lengthy flashback – which means that we weren’t given in Books 1-4 the information we needed to have any chance to catch up; if we had been, there’d be no need for a flashback, and yet, there’s still no conclusion, as the fate of the monsters is still up in the air.

The crowning debit is that all five of the books’ covers are lousy, with dull colors, uninteresting pictures and no action. You’d have to be a fanatic collector of either horror comics or Mignola’s work to need to add this one to your “to be read” pile. –Doug Bentin

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