Shadow of the Golden Crane by Chris Roberson, Michael Avon Oeming, & Chris O'Halloran

I periodically think I should catch up on the Hellboy universe, but then I take a look at the books I missed and it's always more complicated than I feel like dealing with. So sometimes I just walk away, and sometimes I pick a random book.

This was one of the latter times; Shadow of the Golden Crane was written by Chris Roberson,  a writer who's done various things I liked and who I knew very slightly way back in my own SFnal days. So that was enough of a hook, and it looked to stand alone.

It does stand alone, by the way: it's a smaller story, but entirely itself. You don't actually need to know anything about Hellboy or his world to read it. It's the 1960s in the US; there's supernatural dangers out there; the BPRD is the US agency that handles them; their star field agent is a big guy with red rocky skin. The story tells you all that, almost immediately.

But Hellboy is not the focus here; he's in the first issue and the last (of four) for muscle, and presumably so he can be on the cover. The main character is Susan Xiang, a Chinese-American high-level desk jockey for BPRD with a family connection to the ancient and secretive Golden Crane Society and who has visions.

The four issues are each separate field missions: something is rampaging, somewhere, and BPRD agents are sent out to stop it. The first time, it's Hellboy with Victor Koestler, a field agent who manifests an astral gorilla, and Susan tags along. The second time, it's Susan with Victor, and Susan tackles the third one alone. The fourth issue brings all three back together again.

The rampaging thing is, in each case, possessed by an ancient evil spirit, which - Susan realizes through her visions - was originally captured by the Golden Crane Society and trapped in a specific object. Each issue has a substantial flashback, presumably Susan's vision, of a previous time when members of the Society, back in China, recaptured that very same rampaging thing and re-trapped it. That knowledge allows Susan, and her co-workers, to do the same.

Shadow is not quite schematic, although all four issues have very similar structure. It's pretty straightforward, though: the threats are not explicitly rising or gaining in power (in that usual Hellboy way; note that I am not complaining; we got thirty years of "this issue is worse than last issue" and it can get tedious). And capturing them is not easy, but it's well within the skills of BPRD agents, particularly once they know what to do.

So this is a solid adventure-comics story, in which we don't really doubt the abilities of our heroes to do the thing and stop the monster and save the world. (Well, not the world: these are all small-scale things.) Roberson gives us what turns into a large cast, counting all of the flashback characters, and keeps it energetic and engaging. Michael Avon Oeming draws it with equal verve: I always like his work, though I haven't made an effort to keep up. And Chris O'Halloran gives it appropriately moody colors for a book about punching supernatural creatures back into hair clips. (I may be phrasing that oddly for comedic effect, but it's not inaccurate.)