BPRD: Hell on Earth: Gods 1

I admitted the other day that I had never read Hellboy before, so you won’t be surprised that I was unfamiliar with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense spin-off. Actually, I don’t feel a great deal more familiar with them after reading this, since none of them appear until the final panel.

Instead we get a story about a group of bums, starting with them riding the rails – it could almost be set 80 years ago. They are grouped around a young woman with psychic powers: I am a bit bothered by the writers calling her Fenix (pronounced with a long ‘e’), which feels like a particularly crappy in-joke, and I hope it doesn’t foreshadow any similarities to Jean Grey. She keeps her pals out of trouble, which seems to be largely supernatural in origin – I guess that’s the kind of world Hellboy and the BPRD live in. It’s a bit expository in places, and I’m really not at all clear what the story is or where it is going, but the dialogue along the way is good, often excellent (I don’t know how writers Mignola and Arcudi split the duties), and I am at least a bit interested in the main characters.

But the thing I like best, after raving about Mignola’s writing in my Hellboy review, is probably the art. Guy Davis’s work (see below) is loose and even ragged in appearance, suiting a cast of bums perfectly, and reminding me a little of Harvey Kurtzman in places (not that he is in that exalted class), with plenty of personality in his faces and figures, and vivid emotions on show everywhere. There’s far more conversation than action in this, and without an artist able to imbue that with life and nuance, this might be rather dull. If you study his faces, the features change from one panel to another, but I never had an instant’s doubt at to who was who – I guess this goes back to what Tuomas Alho discussed here a while back, that some artists give you the same face again and again and rely on hair and clothes to distinguish: Davis gives us distinct enough looks that the odd differently shaped nose doesn’t fuck up recognition.

I don’t know whether my mild interest in the story, to the extent that there is one (this feels like all setup, oddly and perhaps unsuitably in a three-issue series, but I guess this world has plenty of adherents who don’t need selling on it – I guess I am fast becoming one of them), would keep me coming back, but the art appeals enough that I will certainly buy the rest.