Then I finally found a new job. After six months of unemployment, this was indeed a welcome development! However, I’m still getting used to waking up at six o’clock in the morning. So I haven’t been in too much of a mindset to write reviews in the last couple of weeks. Here’s hoping that I can get back of the swing of things soon enough.
This time around, I’ll be reviewing a couple of recently published miniseries from Dark Horse Comics. As always, be on the alert for spoilers.
BPRD: Hollow Earth #s 1-3, $2.99 US each, published by Dark Horse Comics
Writers: Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, and Tom Sniegoski; Pencils: Ryan Sook; Inks: Sook and Curtis Arnold; Covers: Mignola
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
The BPRD is the abbreviation for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, the investigative government agency featured in the various Hellboy stories by Mike Mignola. In the last miniseries, Conqueror Worm, Hellboy grew disenchanted with the Bureau. His main frustration with the BPRD was their decision to put a bomb inside their latest member, a centuries old homunculus nicknamed Roger. Fearing that Roger might become dangerous, the Bureau had the bomb inserted as a safety measure. Hellboy was furious at this breach of trust. He also began wondering if the Bureau might one day regard him in a similar light, as a potential menace who had to be constantly kept under watch. At the end of the mission, Hellboy quit the BPRD and headed for parts unknown.
Hollow Earth deals with the fallout of Hellboy’s resignation, as the organization and its various members reconsider the events that prompted his departure, and recall Hellboy’s influence on each of them. Hellboy’s closest friend, the amphibian Abe Sapian, is considering departing as well. He inevitably finds his thought patterns following those of Hellboy’s. Kate Corrigan, Field Director for the BPRD, finds herself desperately attempting to hold the rest of the team together. The Bureau’s head, Tom Manning, now finds that the paranormal members of his organization no longer trust him. He also realizes that the departure of Hellboy, the BPRD’s most high-profile member, may lead to a drop in federal funding. And as for Roger the homunculus, he simply finds himself bewildered.
As the Bureau deals with this upheaval, it finds itself with a new member: Johann Krause, a psychic medium whose physical body was destroyed, and who now exists in a containment suit constructed by the Bureau. Kraus arrives amidst concerns that the very organization he has just joined is on the verge of falling apart.
Before any decisions as to his future can be made by Abe Sapian, he receives a psychic cry of distress from another former team member, Liz Sherman. A pyrokinetic, Liz left the team two years before and traveled to Agartha, a legendary monastery in the Arctic Circle, in the hopes of learning to control her volatile powers. Having received her flaming SOS, Abe rallies the troops. Accompanied by Roger, Kraus, and Kate, he rushes to Agartha to rescue Liz from an unknown danger.
I was pleasantly surprised when I heard that Mike Mignola and his collaborators would be putting out a miniseries spotlighting the BPRD. In the past, Hellboy has typically taken the spotlight. So it was nice to see the other members of the Bureau get some exposure. Of course, Mignola & Co. do focus mostly on the more unusual members of the Bureau, namely Abe Sapien, Roger, and Krause. After all, his original impetus for creating the character of Hellboy was that he wanted to be able to have an ongoing character that was fun to draw. Likewise, the trio of strange Bureau agents make for more interesting protagonists than most of the normal, human agents, who tend to be rather indistinguishable from one another.
Actually, in the past I’ve noted that when human BPRD agents are used, it’s usually in a capacity similar to the crew members in red shirts from Star Trek, who typically show up only to get killed by the menace of the week. Well, at least we get a few normal-looking BPRD staff, such as Liz Sherman, Kate Corrigan, and Tom Manning. Of course, Sherman and Corrigan are both good-looking women, so they’re not the type to typically get killed off in these sort of stories. And Dr. Manning spends the entire story at the Bureau’s headquarters in Fairfield, CT. No doubt he realizes that he fits the profile of most BPRD fatalities, and wisely decided to stay well out of the line of fire!
On a side note, I’m amused that the BPRD is located in Fairfield, as my parents moved there a few years ago. Having visited them various times, I can tell you that Fairfield is the last place you would expect to find the home office of a paranormal investigative organization. Apparently the Fairfield locale is due to town resident John Byrne, who scripted the first Hellboy miniseries. Well, it’s a change from the usual New York or Washington DC locale, that’s for sure.
Getting back to the miniseries itself, I did feel that the action in the story was something of a letdown. The first two issues build up the menace of the King of Fear and his subterranean army to a supposed threat of global proportions. Yet the villains seemed to be all too easily defeated by Abe, Roger, and Kraus in the concluding chapter. I guess that this has been something of a failing in all the Hellboy-related series. The Bureau are supposed to be paranormal investigators. As such, I keep expecting them to come up with a slightly more cerebral solution to the crisis than just punching the bad guys’ lights out!
Instead, Hollow Earth is at its best when focusing on the members of the Bureau. Through several well-written flashbacks, and the BPRD’s interactions with Kraus, we see just how much of an influence Hellboy has had on everyone’s lives, and the impact of his departure. This is well done characterization, a nice change of pace from merely seeing the good guys slugging it out with a bunch of bizarre monsters. So we have a balance between the dynamic action and the in-depth characterization, the later of which I felt was missing from some of Mignola’s prior stories.
I think the collaboration here between Mignola and two other writers (Golden and Sniegoski) has resulted in a much stronger story. Mignola is primarily an artist. I felt the first two Hellboy stories he did in the mid-1990s, Seed of Destruction and Wake The Devil, were somewhat weak in the writing department. Mignola has definitely developed over the years, though. Last year’s Conqueror Wormmini series was well scripted. So the strengths of Hollow Earth may be as much due to Mignola’s ever-improving skills as his working with Golden and Sniegoski.
A note about Kraus: it’s nice to finally see a German character who is not a Nazi. The Third Reich has figured prominently in a good many of Hellboy’s adventures. Yes, Nazis do make great villains, simply because their actions were so infamous and vile in real life. But after a while it starts to be lazy characterization to simply slap a swastika on a bad guy, rather than actually working to develop him as a believable villain. That, and Germany is a very different nation than it was sixty years ago. It’s grossly unfair to characterize all Germans as Nazis. That’s something I think many comic books do, perhaps inadvertently. So having a German protagonist appear in Hollow Earth was a pleasant departure from the typical genre conventions.
Ryan Sook’s artwork on Hollow Earth is, as usual, very much influenced by Mignola. When he first debuted, I couldn’t find too much fault with Soak for trying to emulate the feel of Mignola's own art, rather than utilizing a more unique style. However, Sook has been working as a professional artist for several years now. It would be nice if he attempted to develop a somewhat more individual look to his art. Not that there was anything wrong with Sook’s work in this miniseries. On the contrary, it looks good. But I would prefer to see something more distinctive and individual. Why copy another artist, when you can go off in your own creative direction?
Star Wars: Qui-Gon & Obi-Wan The Aurorient Express #s 1-2, $2.99 US each, published by Dark Horse Comics
Writer: Mike Kennedy; Pencils: Lucas Marangon; Inks: Howard Shum
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Now, you may be thinking to yourself “What sort of title is The Aurorient Express?” Well, an aurora is an atmospheric phenomenon. And Murder On The Orient Express is a famous Agatha Christie mystery. Put them together, and what have you got? The Aurorient Express! Ha ha ha… okay, it’s not actually funny. But someone at Dark Horse must have thought they were being clever.
In the past, I bemoaned the fact that the majority of Dark Horse’s Star Wars titles are too damn serious. And those that are funny are usually over-the-top, complete farces. Most of the time the Dark Horse releases fluctuate between these extremes. Which they need not do. After all, the old series from Marvel Comics back in the early 1980s had some well-written stories, but also a good amount of humor. It was a nice balance, much like the actual films themselves. Take the most recent, Attack of the Clones. It had a very serious plot, but George Lucas wisely sprinkled in generous moments of humor to help offset the tension and make it a more enjoyable story.
Well, in The Aurorient Express, Dark Horse does seem to be working towards a more well-rounded narrative such as this. They don’t quite succeed, though. As a rough estimate, I’d say the story is 40% drama, and 60% comedy, when those numbers really ought to be reversed.
The Aurorient Express is set several years before the film The Phantom Menace, and so we see Qui-Gon Jin before his death, teaching a teenage Obi-Wan Kenobi the ways of the Jedi. The two are sent on a mission to the Aurorient Express, a luxury space cruise liner. The Express is mysteriously sinking into the atmosphere of the gas planet Yorn Skot, and isn’t is not answering any communications from the authorities. The legal status of Yorn Skot is somewhat murky, leaving the issue of jurisdiction in question. This prevents an official rescue mission from being launched. So Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon are dispatched to save the Express without ruffling any feathers.
Arriving on the Express, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon find the hull guarded by a swarm of four-legged Trade Federation battle droids. Fighting them off, the two Jedi make a rather explosive entrance onto the Express. The pair learn that the ship’s crew & passengers are seemingly unaware of the dangerous altitude they are sinking towards, much less the battle droids which are crawling all over the vessel. Investigating, the Jedi encounter a motley assortment of eccentric individuals engaged in various schemes. Each group thinks they are in control of the situation. But as events spin further out of control, it’s apparent that no one knows the full story. And so we see three separate groups of schemers tripping over each other’s feet. All the while Obi-Wan and Qui Gon frantically work to salvage the situation, and discover what their loopy suspects are really up to.
The story is quite a comedy of errors, as the various plots and counterplots being enacted on the Express become entangled with one another. Which somewhat complicates the task of sorting out what plot of the story really is. At the end of the miniseries, I was still scratching my head, trying to figure out exactly what everyone had been up to. In an effort to make The Aurorient Express extremely humorous and present various silly situations, Mike Kennedy seems to have sacrificed some space needed to fully explain the plot. This miniseries ought to have run an extra issue, so that he could have fit both the humor and the necessary story development.
Silly story title aside, at least Kennedy does succeed in his efforts at humor. Some of it is more groan-inducing than laughter-causing, but it’s the sort of cornball comedy that works in spite of its level of sillyness. And Kennedy does have an ear for the dialogue. Reading the miniseries, I could well imagine the voices of Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor speaking the lines.
I’m unfamiliar with Lucas Marangon, but I recall Howard Shum from his inking on Aquaman. Their art for The Aurorient Express is very good. It has a dynamic quality to it, with a lot of detail, but it also contains rather goofy elements. So it works to depict both the action and the comedy of the story.
What I actually found most interesting about the whole story was the scene on the first page of issue #1. While preparing for their mission, Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan are having a philosophical discussion on action and intent. As Obi-Wan asks Qui-Gon, “which is more acceptable: a noble act committed for despicable purposes, or a despicable act committed for noble purposes?”
This debate is one famously addressed by the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant held an absolutist view of ethics. He regarded the intent of an action as crucial towards determining its morality. In his mind, an individual must always do the right thing for the right reasons. Actions that are self-serving are immoral. If the motive for an action is selfish, and not a desire to fulfill a moral duty, then the act is wrong, even if it results in a positive outcome. Kant apparently did not place much importance on outcome.
Of course, when considering the intent of a planned act, it is important to remember the saying “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” The Consequentialist outlook would have that in mind. Consequentialism determines the morality of an action not by the intent behind it, but by the actual outcome. Whereas Kant would find enlightened self-interest to be morally wrong because it proceeded out of a selfish intent, a consequential outlook would regard it as morally right if it produced a positive outcome. (By the way, this is a very simplified rundown on both Immanuel Kant and Consequentialism. There is obviously more to the two philosophies than I had room to explain!)
Qui-Gon states to Obi -Wan “You must learn, as I did from my own master, that the true moral value of an act can be calculated by weighing the spirit of the motivation against the benefit of the result.” I immediately wondered if Mike Kennedy, when he wrote that line, was aware that Attack of the Clones would reveal that the Jedi Master who trained Qui-Gon was none other than the scheming Count Dooku. The description that Qui-Gon’s teacher “believed that certain despicable behaviors can be conscionable” certainly sounds like Dooku!
I was hoping that Kennedy would further delve into this philosophical debate within the actual story, and that the plot would revolve around the ethical issues raised by the two Jedi. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, and Kennedy wasn’t actually setting the stage for such a scenario. But it was an interesting scene, nonetheless.