Our Encounters With Evil by Mike Mignola and Warwick Johnson-Cadwell

This one is the middle, so of course I got to it last.

There seems to be a recent omnibus of the Mignola/Johnson-Cadwell books under almost exactly the same title, which will be somewhat confusing, but what I just read was the original 2019 book Our Encounters with Evil, the second book of the adventures of the intrepid Victorian-era vampire hunters Professor J.T. Meinhardt and Mr. Knox.

Meinhardt and Knox first appeared in Mr. Higgins Comes Home, battling one specific vampire, and then later appeared in Falconspeare, mostly listening to the vampire-fighting tales of the title character of that book. This time, we get to see them in multiple bits of action - Encounters includes several stories of monster-hunting, most of them also including their compatriot Ms. Mary Van Sloan.

Mike Mignola created these characters originally, and wrote Mr. Higgins, but the follow-up books are all Johnson-Cadwell, under only a Mignola cover. (So I wonder if Johnson-Cadwell also somewhat rewrote or adapted the first book, since they all have the same tone.) This is mostly serious monster-hunting, but not quite fully serious monster hunting; there's a background assumption or tone that something is faintly off, or the whole exercise is just a bit silly, or that we've all seen this so many times before that we know exactly how it will happen.

Not funny. Nowhere near a parody. But aware of itself as a genre exercise, just a bit, mostly in tone.

Since core Mignola tends to be deeply serious - with the usual comic-book-people-punching-each-other kinds of quippy humor to lighten it up - that makes these books substantially different in tone, like a nice cup of sorbet after a big meal.

I could talk about the separate stories, but what's the point? This is the middle. If light, not-quite-serious monster-fighting sounds appealing, just take a look at Mr. Higgins. Assuming you enjoy that, you'll be here soon enough: they're all short books. Johnson-Cadwell has an energetic line, just a couple of clicks towards cartoony, in a vaguely European-looking style - like some BD series you've heard of vaguely but never quite tracked down. And otherwise it's vaguely in the Mignola canon: vampires and odder beasts rampaging through the landscapes of "the Balkans," battled by adventurers in sensible garb and a giant pile of mostly-lethal apparatus.