One Coin Reads 21: The Visitor How & Why He Stayed, by Chris Roberson and Paul Grist

The Visitor How & Why He Stayed, by Chris Roberson and Paul Grist

2017

I thought this was an Abe Sapien book. It wasn't.

I bought this in December for ¥330 and it's been sitting on my pile for months. There's a hairless blue guy with no pupils on the cover of a Hellboy series book. I've been thinking it was an Abe Sapien comic since then, and I was half way through the first issue before I checked to see that "The Visitor" is the main character, and there is no Abe Sapien in this.

I'm not a huge Abe Sapien fan, so it's fine with me, I was just surprised when I started reading.

I read my first Hellboy book in 20 years in February, and my first Abe Sapien book shortly after that, so I'm familiar with the Mignolaverse, but not steeped in its mythology. The Visitor How & Why He Stayed is about a character that was dropped into early Hellboy comics like the polar bear was in Lost; as an interesting detail to pique readers interest, but never really followed up in a satisfactory way. So Roberson and Grist made a five issue series to tell his story.

It was around here that I clued in that this wasn't Abe

The Visitor is a mystery man, an alien in human clothing, sent to protect earth from demonic invasion. He's shown to be assigned to earth initially to kill Hellboy, but upon observation deems Hellboy a non-threat, and more likely to be on the same side. As he spends decades on earth, he goes native, gets married, and starts to reclaim values that have been mostly lost to his species.

There's a lot of lurking in this book

Each issue takes place in a different decade. We see Hellboy age in the background, and we see the Visitor adjust to human life. He marries a black woman in the 60's, so the book tackles an alien's view of America's race issues. It's not a book about race, but the acknowledgment of how stupid racism is from the outside looking in is a nice touch on The Visitor's perception of humanity.

There is some action dropped in most issues, though the Visitor isn't much of a fighter. Rather, he has a floating card which does most of what he needs to do.

The humans summoning demons for their own power are not fleshed out characters, but shown as people duped into thinking that giving super powered demons access to earth will benefit them in the end. People can be quite gullible.

I enjoyed the whole book the way I would a brisk lunch or a satisfying episode of Twilight Zone. The story was clear, the art was clear, and stuff happened in each issue. The Visitor as a character was sketched out nicely and I knew what he was about at the end. 

The book wasn't heavy, but it still had ideas and concepts in it. The relationship between the Visitor and his wife is shown over decades and we get to see this alien reflect on it. The fourth issue has a pseudo-scientific cult describe their own objectiveness, which is always a red flag. Objectivity is borderline impossible and those that claim it are usually less trustworthy than those who acknowledge their own subjectivity.

Don't trust objectivity claims

The appearances of Hellboy with the Visitor lurking in the background, have the vibe of Michael J. Fox trailing himself in Back To The Future II, or similar scenes in Avengers Endgame. Not connected to time travel, but in that it's giving a story to a person in the background watching the main story, adding a layer to a story we already know, like Hellboy's discovery in the 1940s.

Grist's art wasn't doing it for me at first, but once I got into the rhythms of the book, I liked it a lot. It is clear and consistent, and has a human touch to it. I enjoy seeing a slight wobble in a "straight" line. I'd seen his work before, but this was the first series I've read by him.

All in all, it's not a ground breaking book, but it was thoroughly enjoyable, and I'm happy to see that the Hellboy universe makes space to tell an intimate story about an alien sent to monitor the earth. It was a good read.

One Coin Reads 4: Abe Sapien Dark and Terrible and The New Race of Man, by Mike Mignola's crew

Abe Sapien Dark and Terrible and The New Race of Man, by Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, John Arcudi, Sebastian Fiumara, Max Fiumara and Dave Stewart

2013

Shortly before I read this, I was told by an acquaintance not to go into the Mignola-verse through Abe Sapien, but it was too late, I had already picked up this at a bargain price of ¥391! It couldn't not be worth that price, could it?

How much does Mignola do on these books? Is he Stan Lee-ing it?

Sometimes low expectations are key to enjoying a book. I'm currently finishing a fan favorite book which isn't blowing me away, and the high expectations probably made me overcritical. With this, I kept thinking it was alright. Expecting work-for-hire stuff let me enjoy it for what it was.

Up front, I'll make the criticisms I have before getting into what worked with it. The book asks for a lot of tolerance from the reader up front. I am a lifetime comics reader, but I know Abe Sapien only from the movies. The book collects issues 1-5 of his self-titled series, so it should be pretty easy to slip into, right?  Then the book is numbered 3 on the side, and the back cover lets me know the stories take place after B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: A Cold Day in Hell. So it's meant for people who've bought into the universe already? It's not a deal-breaker: I still pick up X-Men old collections where I'm lost for the first 20 pages because it was one of four simultaneously printed series and was overly bogged down in continuity, and I still manage to enjoy them. In the opening pages of this, a bunch of B.P.R.D. folks sit around a table spouting exposition about things like Crab Point and the Frog Wars. It's not inviting. I think they would have been much better off having a character introduction or guide at the back to introduce readers. Just acknowledge it's continuity heavy, and leave that there for those who need it, rather than try to work it into a table meeting scene.

Great tree, great shadow in the room (Sebastian Fiumura)

Once the story starts moving, I could pick up the broad strokes: some big Kaiju-style monsters have attacked, some monsters have turned people into monsters, and human society is having a crisis of faith over all of it. It's a solid hook for a series, making it more about the repercussions of monsters than about cool fights. They'll put fights in, but there is a heart to it. 

The collection has two stories, one drawn by Sebastian Fiumara, and the second by Max Fiumara. Sebastian's is about Abe taking refuge in a small town church, thanks to the kindness of the preacher, who is embracing the change as part of God's will. His congregation is about to lose their mind, and are ready to string him up over his acceptance of the monsters and people transformed. Abe, who is a monster of sorts but apparently unrelated to the madness in the world, just wants to keep the peace, but is pulled in. The art is really good. Clean, clear, noir work with a good sense of movement, reminiscent of Jae Lee's art. In small moments and bombastic moments, Sebastian pulls it off. 

Reading about rural American Christians readying the nooses to string up the enemies in their midst is a bit nauseating in February of 2021 though.  Probably not the creators' intent when it was made.

Very strong silhouettes in action (Sebastian Fiumura)

The second story is a smaller story, about a trio Abe meets at the Salton Sea. The one guy is all about the changes that are happening to the world, and feels it's the birth of a new religion. His girlfriend is all with him, and the third guy is bitterly there only out of support for the first guy's girlfriend. It's a smaller story without any big action, but Max gets to draw some crazy monsters through flashbacks and detours. The art here is similar, although I liked it a little less. The faces are heavily stylized which I wasn't crazy about, but beyond that, it was very good. He also had very good motion and movement in his work.

The coloring by Dave Stewart gives a strong through line to the book and keeps it tonally unified.

I liked this page a lot, the knife going in, the throw in panel three (Max Fiumura)

I wouldn't want to pay full price for this myself, but if I were a fan of the Mignola-verse, I think I'd be quite satisfied with it. I have another discount Abe Sapien book still to read, so I'll find out if this was a better quality collection or if I just personally enjoy the quieter talky books more than most.

Getting to the back of the book, I saw the list of Mignola-verse books for sale in 2013! I was tired looking at the list already, and that wasn't including any of the Hellboy books. Power to Mignola for building an empire, and for keeping the lights on at Dark Horse. It's off-putting for me though. I know that if you hook people in, you can get some people to buy all of it, but it makes me want to steer clear of it. There's no clear entry point for readers, and it seems like a huge time investment. 

I'm so tired already

I Really Should Read This 7: Hellboy Omnibus 3, by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo

Hellboy Omnibus 3, by Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo

2017, reprinting work from around 2005 to 2010

I used to be a huge Mignola fan... until Hellboy. His work at Marvel and DC stuck out so much, and around 1990, I would buy comics if I saw he drew them. It was usually just the odd issue, but I liked the style so much. I was a reader of John Byrne's Next Men when Hellboy first appeared, and I was into it... Then I read Seeds of Destruction and dropped it in the middle of the second series. I can't go back in time to 1995 and see what I was thinking, but I imagine it was two things: 

1. Image Comics had killed my appetite for art-based comics. I had been so on board with Image and felt so ripped off and embarrassed for reading them that I was aggressively avoiding books with "no story".

2. I was around 20, had just moved to the city, and a lot of books just didn't feel worth my time as a young adult (I've been doing a read of a number of late '90s books that I missed out on at the time).

In a comics forum, I was told, "No, Hellboy is good!" a few times, so I decided to jump in, skipping the first two omnibuses and hopefully getting on when the story was in gear.

Mignola on the cover, Fegredo on the inside

Right up front, the verdict: It's solid. This collects three story arcs (Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, and The Storm and the Fury), though according to Wikipedia, the third of these are two separate ones. 

It's sometimes hard to start reading a book that has been praised a lot, because you're expecting it to be awesome from page one. With this collection, Darkness Calls is definitely the least of the three. The first few issues, I couldn't even understand what was going on. There are a lot of characters that look similar (grizzled is a common adjective I'd use for the cast) and a lot of portentous speech. Hellboy walks through a door that's a portal to old Russia and has to get back for three issues while fighting an undying bad guy.  Once it was set up, I could follow what was happening, but the mechanics of getting it going didn't make much sense to me.

Lots of pages like this, sometimes small bad guys, sometimes big, always monochromatic

Anyway, by the end of the first arc, I was on top of enough things to follow the second arc. It was full of portentous talk and a lot of similar characters too, but the main villain was very clear and I could follow the broad strokes, and that carried over to the final arc as well.

I certainly enjoyed this more than the series I read in the mid-90s. The story at that time (that I haven't read in 25 years, mind you) was more of a monster of the week with references to something bigger. This actually was getting to the meat of Hellboy's story and his destiny.

One of the interesting things about this book and character was that Hellboy is both a passive and active hero. He's being thrust into situations and told over and over again what he was born to be, but he also makes his own decisions and actively wrests control of his so-called destiny. That's a pretty cool character arc and not something you commonly see in a protagonist.

These two characters stood out a lot. The pig is probably the most interesting character in the book, just an angry, frustrated thing

The weak part for me is that there are a lot of characters that are there to spout exposition, and you just can't know who they are or distinguish them easily. Lots of withered witches, and I can't tell if they're good witches or bad witches or what. It's just a page of exposition. The colors are nice, but only Hellboy, Nimue (the big bad), and the red haired girl (who pops up in the second arc and is suddenly important) get standout color schemes. Everyone else is a shade of brown or gray. After a while, you just roll with it, and enjoy what is good, but it's not great design.

The art is excellent. I know Fegredo's work, but I hadn't seen any of it in a long time. It's bold and he has a real flow to his storytelling. I found it interesting just how dark images could get and still be understandable. Some pages are almost black. It's an interesting choice.

So, I ordered omnibus four. I doubt I'll feel the need to go back to one and two to read the entirety of the epic, but I enjoyed this collection, and read it about three issues at a time. That's a brisk, solid read.

One thing I want to mention is that this was such a good price. Over 500 pages on a beautiful heavy stock for about $25. In comparison, Marvel's Epic Collections are about 400 pages on cheap, thin paper for $40. Marvel made their money on their comics when they were printed and don't pay royalties on much of it (to my knowledge), while Hellboy is creator-owned, so Mignola and hopefully Fegredo are making money off these collections.  Marvel is printing cheap, selling high, and Dark Horse is printing expensive and selling low. It makes me think about what a fat company Marvel is. They definitely have higher overheads, but I can't help but think that buying a Marvel Epic Collection puts gas in the tank of an executive's Lexus, while buying a Hellboy omnibus simply puts dinner on the table for Dark Horse staff. I have no actual numbers to back that up, I just think the difference in price and print quality is ridiculous, especially considering Marvel's advantage of scale. Dark Horse should probably add $5 to the price and put it in the bank.