The tour of the American Apocalypse continues, and I continue to
wonder how the people that Abe meets in each book manage to keep feeding
themselves, let alone care for any other needs. There's no sign of
large-scale agriculture in any society he wanders into, and any modern
distribution network has been completed smashed to bits by this point in
the societal collapse. Since many of those folks get eaten by monsters
anyway, perhaps this is a self-limiting problem.
I've been giving the various Hellboy
books a pass from one of my core reading rules -- I don't like to read
books that murder me or my family just to make a dangerous background
for the heroes to wander through -- but I'm having less
and less patience with each new story. (For context, here's what I wrote
about the first three books of Abe's wanderings, and the immediately previous book -- plus two round-ups of the post-apocalypse exploits
of the BPRD.) Frankly, this is turning into apocalypse porn, wallowing
in death and destruction just to make the main characters a little bit
sadder each time, and focus them on their Amazing Destiny. And I'm never
going to be comfortable with the murder of millions (even in fiction)
just as background to one guy's struggles not to be the Apocalypse Beast.
So that's where we are with Abe Sapien, Vol. 7: The Secret Fire.
(The story is by series creator Mike Mignola with his long-time editor
Scott Allie, with art by Max and Sebastian Fiumara.) Abe comes to
another small town with a secret -- this time a girl with prophetic
powers. He gets caught up in their local interpersonal issues...and, of
course, with the giant frog-creature/monster/thing looming over the
town. Eventually, he leaves, after only a couple of deaths, to go to the
next (and possibly final) stop on his death tour of the US.
Meanwhile,
a crazy evil magician and his zombie slave continue their own much wider
journeys to gather power in an attempt to eventually capture and control
Abe. They'll fail in the end, of course -- whose name is on the cover?
-- but I'm getting tired of seeing them continue in an entirely separate
plot thread for what I think is a third book in a row. Time to pick up
the plot, guys: the wheels have been spinning idly for far too long
already.
All in all, I'm ready for some Mignola-verse people to start saving people
again, instead of only getting a couple of folks killed, maybe. I don't
know if there's going to be any rebuilding of civilization -- the theme of this book
tends to argue against it -- but if the story is just that more and more
people die and eventually the human race is replaced....well, we don't
need to read that month after month in a comic book. Might be time to
put "the end" on that story, and start telling something less depressing
and less tedious.
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