The second overall plotline of the B.P.R.D. series -- after "Plague of Frogs," which took ten years and a couple of thousand pages to tell -- starts off in the aftermath of a global catastrophe and features a B.P.R.D. team deeply divided and profoundly damaged by the end of that war against the frog-monsters. Perhaps "New World" will end up being about some other existential threat to mankind, since that's what the B.P.R.D. is there to stop -- but, so far, it's mostly about office politics, and who distrusts who, and what schemes may have happened or be coming together. As usual, their stories are written by series creator Mike Mignola with John Arcudi, and these three volumes see a passing of the main art duties from Guy Davis, the primary B.P.R.D. penciller for many years, to Tyler Crook, who may have as many in front of him.
But, just in case you don't know what I'm talking about: The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense was originally a US government operation, started by scientist Trevor Bruttenholm in the aftermath of WWII. Bruttenholm also adopted a mysterious little guy, nicknamed Hellboy, at about the same time, and the two grew up together: Hellboy became the B.P.R.D.'s premier field agent for the second half of the twentieth century, before leaving right after the turn of the century. And there were a lot of supernatural menaces to fight along the way. Mignola creates a cosmology for this and the parent Hellboy series from materials both Lovecraftian and Miltonian: there are many-angled ones lurking sideways to reality and demons to torment mens' souls. After a decade-long period of escalating danger after Hellboy's departure, the B.P.R.D was subsumed by the UN after saving the world -- messily, loudly, very much in public and with repercussions that may never settle down -- from those invading frog-monsters and the gigantic creatures that they spawned or grew into.
B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth Vol. 1: New World
New World's supernatural story is a small-scale one: Abe is off in the Northwest woods, investigating an entire town that went missing. Along the way, he meets a couple of old friends that we didn't expect to see again -- but it's clear that this is a rare moment of relative quiet in a world where massive volcanoes destroy major cities and huge crab-monsters pop up regularly. And there is the matter of the deaths of everyone in more than one small town: this is what a quiet B.P.R.D. story looks like now. It's one in which only a few hundred people die.
Gods and Monsters
Gods and Monsters also sees the beginning of a major transition for one of the core members of the team: these issues are three years old at this point, so saying that much shouldn't be a problem. But, again: this is not a world that has gone back to normal, but a world where the paranormal erupts violently somewhere in the world nearly every single day. Some of those eruptions are ghosts that kill a few dozen; some are megastorms that destroy London; some are monsters that level Seattle and require major military armament to kill. All this goes on in the background of the B.P.R.D.'s story. it's not called "Hell on Earth" lightly.
And then Russia
Nichayko is another one of "Hell on Earth"'s many schemers -- long-time readers will immediately wonder what happened to the SSS's original leader, the creepy ageless demon/girl Varvara, and we do find that out by the end of this story -- clearly working some angle of his own, and possibly only barely keeping the SSS together in the face of plots and schemes. And we don't know enough about him to even guess if he's better or worse than the alternative.
Together, these three volumes show a world in turmoil and distress. At the very best, it's holding steady and managing to stop each new supernatural threat in turn. But that's a rosy view: these B.P.R.D. stories actually show a world and an organization left a little weaker, and little less stable, and a little more brittle with each event. It's a dark, dangerous world, but these stories are told well and with real humanity: this is one of the very few stories about the end of the world that I can actually tolerate.
Book-A-Day 2014 Introduction and Index
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