John Arcudi

Mike Mignola is somehow able to tell a dark story with occult rituals and limb-severing violence but give it the innocent charm of a TinTin comic. He doesn't usually let us in to the minds of the primary characters in Garden of Souls, but he endears us to them by portraying with no grandiosity whatsoever - just a self-destructive dedication to ridding the world of evil. The story is well paced, and gave me the same quality of pleasure as watching an episode of a good television series.

The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense ended the Plague of Frogs in its first series, only to create a greater menace in its wake. The planet is now fighting monsters who are crawling out of places no one could anticipate. I got the feeling of Rome try to fend off the barbarians. Our heroes, like good Romans, are fighting on.
They consist of Dr. Kate Corrigan, the human who runs the agency, Abe Sapien, a fish-man, Panya, a resuscitated mummy, and Johann Kraus, a German medium existing show more as a spirit in a suit. Liz Sherman, the fire starter who made everything worse, is hiding out in a trailer park. Ben Daimo, whose lycanthropic alter-ego slaughtered many of his comrades, is hiding out in the Canadian wilderness. Two new characters are added: Fenix Espejo, a homeless teenage psychic, and Iosif Nichayko, a reanimated corpse who runs the Russian version of the BPRD.
This sounds like it would be a depressing read, and the feeling of apocalyptic doom is always present. That doesn’t mean that our characters have lost their decency or courage. Also, the action scenes are as exciting as they are gory. They are unpredictable, too, for the writers don’t equip their characters with plot armor. As for the artists, Guy Davis was great at designing monsters and as mentioned, drawing action, but his characters looked like they were born in Innsmouth. Tyler Crook draws his characters in a slightly cartoony style, but at least he uses more than one head shape. show less

I am fan of secret agencies fighting against dark occult, various secret societies and dangers from beyond. This is what X-COM, Bureau, Delta Green, even X-Files and S.H.I.E.L.D are all about - ordinary men and women thrown into highly non-ordinary situations fighting against overwhelming odds and dying in service of humanity.

B.P.R.D is exactly that kind of agency. Formed and led by the professor Bruttenholm, B.P.R.D tries to uncover and neutralize mysteries and horrors that put humanity in show more great danger. In these stories we follow them from post-WW2 Germany to continental USA while they fight monstrosities and lose agents at alarming rate. Stories show in a great way how ordinary men cope with what they encounter (psychologically but also physically - although wounds are not always of the flesh kind) plus we get introduced to the assortment of creatures either hiding within humanity for sheer self-amusement (not unlike scientists (Q comes to mind here) infiltrating animal wild-life just to see how animals live and behave when tackling almost impossible odds) or biding their time until the moment when they raise again and eradicate the humanity for all times.

Art is great, every book/year having a very specific artistic signature.

Highly recommended to all fans of supernatural thriller. show less

This trade paperback collects the five-issue BPRD: The Dead series along with the stand-alone “Born Again” story, used here as a Prologue (though it’s not really connected with the main storyline).

Note: This review features mild plot spoilers -- read at your own risk.

As we’ve seen from the last couple BPRD collections, the strange frog-like humanoids who are attempting to take over all of North America (reminiscent, of course, of Lovecraftian Deep Ones)
are still at it and the BPRD is show more engaged in a full-scale war. And they’re more or less losing. The frogs are steadily moving westward and encroaching on increasingly populated areas. To better continue the fight, the BPRD relocates its headquarters to an abandoned military base carved into the side of a mountain in Colorado. Why yes, there are hidden sub-basement levels and lots of strange, mysteries down there, why do you ask?

Our pals are assigned a new field team leader, with Kate Corrigan and Abe Sapien out of the picture (we’ll get to them in a minute), and that turns out to be Captain Ben Daimio, a special forces officer who has returned from he dead. He’s abrasive and there’s friction galore between him and the rest of the team, but I like him.

Ah yes, back to Abe and Kate. They are exploring Abe’s mysterious past and in New England. This isn’t a bad storyline at all – I think it’s actually really good – but Kate really isn’t used at all, so that’s a missed opportunity, and it’s not at all integrated into the main storyline. In any case, we learn some additional tantalizing hints about what Abe was doing before he was…Abe.

Back to the main storyline: the BPRD discovers an old Nazi scientist who had been trapped down in one of the new headquarters’ sub-basements for the last fifty years. They free him, of course, which turns out to be an extremely bad idea, as he’s insane and uses his own body as a kind of fleshy portal to an evil otherworldly entity. Ooops.

By this point in the BPD run, Mike Mignola has turned over art duties to Guy Davis (I happen to like his work, though he can’t draw Liz Sherman worth a darn) and has picked up Jon Arcudi as a co-writer. That writing transition is seamless here, and the book in no way suffers from having Arcudi onboard.

This is an absolutely outstanding collection and I highly recommend it. Great characterization and story. I give it 5 stars out of 5.

Review copyright 2010 J. Andrew Byers show less