Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea by Mike Mignola and Jesse Lonergan

It's always nice when two creators you're vaguely getting back into have a book together - it makes it feel like the universe is telling you you're going in the right direction.

I was a long-time Hellboy fan who lost the thread when the two major stories basically "ended" - Hellboy himself died and went to hell, his former organization the B.P.R.D. failed to stop a couple of major supernatural apocalypses and the fictional world was plunged into megadeath and chaos - and also, maybe about the time we learned various sordid details of the working life of long-time editor and sometime cowriter Scott Allie. But even if the main stories ended, that doesn't mean comics stopped appearing, since companies in the business of publishing comics gotta publish comics, and they tend to want to keep doing the ones that sell well and make money. So there's been a flurry of what seem to me secondary and odder Hellboy-universe books over the past five years or so, including Hellboy in Love.

At the same time, I randomly rediscovered Jesse Lonergan. I'd read a couple of his creator-owned books a decade ago, including All-Star, thinking he told good stories and had an attractive flexible drawing style. And then I came back to his work this year with Hedra and Planet Paradise, two interesting but unrelated SF stories from 2020.

So, when I realized that Hellboy creator Mike Mignola wrote and Lonergan drew a four-issue Hellboy-universe story last year - which was collected as Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea in January - I thought that I might as well read that book, too.

It's set in one - well, two; I'll get to that - of the quirkier niches of this particular fantasy universe. You see, ages ago, before the rise of the sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars...and so on. Yes, Conan's Hyborian age, with only a slight shift in spelling, took place in Hellboy's world as well.

Both Howard and Mignola are very fond of evil snake gods, so it works pretty well. (There's one here, of course.)

Anyway, we don't start there. The titular Miss Truesdale is a London-based follower of a secret society, the Heliotropic Brotherhood of Ra, in the Victorian era, and is in Paris to meet the organization's head, Tefnut Trionus, when the book opens. Teffie - no one calls her Teffie but me - gives a portentous speech to Miss Truesdale (who does not seem to have a first name), all about how they are both reincarnations of women who were around in the last days of the ancient Hyperborean empire. (Teffie is also the reincarnation of Eugene Remy, the founder of the Brotherhood, which is why she's the figurehead leader now. Souls are valuable; you gotta re-use them as much as you can.)

All those thousands of years ago - after the drowning of Atlantis and so forth - Miss Truesdale was the doughty warrior Anum Yassa, a powerful woman with a gigantic hammer-axe thing she used to win glory in the inevitable gladiatorial combats she was thrown into after she was captured as a slave by the obligatory evil and cruel overlords of the empire. And Teffie - again, only I call her that - was the new slave girl who warned Anum Yassa that said evil and cruel overlords were going to have her quietly murdered because, of course, she had gotten Too Popular With the Groundlings, and Threatened The Established Powers by being so good and honest and true while killing other slaves with a big hammer-axe thing.

There is a snake god behind those evil and cruel overlords, and Anum Yassa will eventually get a chance to whack it with her hammer-axe thing. But first! She has to escape, fight various pursuers, muse on the fickleness of fate, and do all of the other standard Conan-style bits of business.

That's about half of the book - the more exciting and fun parts. We also see Miss Truesdale, mostly after having returned to London and falling into a swoon or coma as she relives Anum Yassa's life (or is thrust back in time to live it for the first time? I'm not clear on how time in general, reincarnation, or mental time-travel works in this universe). Anyway, it's the standard "collapse on the bare floor of your tiny cubicle, behind a locked door" thing, with her Brotherhood compatriots first worrying about her and then breaking down the door to offer her succor during the strange episode they do not ken.

(You may notice that, while I enjoyed every bit of Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea, I didn't take any of those bits at all seriously. Your mileage may vary.)

Lonergan, here with colors by Clem Robins, is a bit more energetic in his art than I've seen him before, to fit the tone of this story. He does fine Mignola-esque monsters and evil men, and gets the required dynamism into his layouts as well. (Books about whacking people with giant hammer-axe things need to be zippy and full of action.) I find the whole thing just a little bit silly, frankly, but it's the fun kind of silly.