Finally. After 25 years of Hellboy, BPRD and the various titles that relate, we are at the end. This is it! The finale! We all thought Hellboy in Hell was the end of the line. That spectacular and intimate book provided a conclusion that we all thought we deserved so this book has a lot to live up to in order to top it as a satisfying conclusion.
And... Well... It's just kind of okay?
The art is fantastic as usual, providing some of Mignola's classic artwork as a surprise sprinkle of flair near the end. It's dynamic and dark with colours that shift well to show the stakes as they grow and the antagonist's shift in character.
That's all fine and dandy.
It's the writing that is really... Like, REALLY bad.
Not the story, specifically, but the writing.
Like, put yourself in the Mignola-team's shoes for a second and think about this. You have been building to this for over two decades. You have over 60 tpbs on the market, 3 movies, a handful of omnis and are reprinting books every few years due to retailer demand. These things are SELLING OUT, you guys are on fire. Mignola has become psunonomous with independent books and Hellboy is a household name. What's more, BPRD, the gamble-series that had to take the reigns while Hellboy was out of commission, has succeeded with flying colours. Under Mignola's guidance, John Arcudi has created close to 30trades worth of dynamic and fun stories that are flying off the shelves. Arcudi has a firm grasp on the characters and has taken some payed-off risks in storytelling that made the series what it is today.
Now it's the endgame. The big one. The final volume that you guys need to stick harder than any book before it because it's the one you've been leading to for over 20 years. So, you gather your team, look everybody over and take a moment to figure out who will write this pivotal moment in Hellboy history.
And you pick...
Scott Allie? The editor who has been slogging through a terribly-received Abe Sapien series and was recently accused of sexual misconduct in the workplace? That guy?
Dark Horse... What the fuck, guys?
This was such a disastrous writing decision. His personal life aside, Allie has proven to be a terrible writer through his career, and this book is among his worst. The story ideas have already been credited to Mignola, so we can't even give his props on that. The dialogue is all over the place with characters assuming conversations without them actually occuring, settings and scenes breaking up halfway through a page, leaving the reader disjointed and the scenes feeling half-finished. And the worst of it all, Hellboy is not even utilized in this book. He's resurrected for the end times, as has been predicted since the beginning, only to mope on an airship, saying two sentences to a couple characters, not consoling, not guiding, not even fighting for 3/4 of the book. He literally stands in the background and makes more of an impact through a psychic vision than he does in the final battle. Scott, you are killing our boy!
Oh and about that battle. Why did it have to be Rasputin? And if it's for some story reasons outside of the main series that somehow I missed, why build up Varvara for a decade only to pull the rug out from under us in the final three issues? AND, why was the final battle so anticlimactic? Rasputin already won, no? Ragnarok has started. Hellboy and him punch it out for two pages and then he breaks his neck.
Rasputin dies from a broken neck. The man who was stabbed, burnt alive, drowned and crushed as a man, only to survive; becomes the living embodiment of the devil, a vessel of the great dragon, and dies of a broken neck.
Strange, strange, strange.
Anyways I'm done talking about this. I'm probably going to just hang onto my Hellboy in Hell books and pretend that the series ended there, otherwise I'll bring up these feelings of disappointment every time I look at my bookshelf.
2/5, a whisper of an end for an otherwise fantastic world.