B.P.R.D. 1947 #1

When Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game premiered in Paris on the eve of the Second World War, moviegoers incensed at the film’s portrayal of a dissolute French bourgeoisie attempted to burn down the theatre. The film was Renoir’s attempt to portray the social circumstances that had again failed to check Europe’s inevitable path to war. Renoir’s countrymen vigorously rejected the film precisely because it showed something about them that they weren’t willing to acknowledge.

This notion of an unwillingness to acknowledge or face up to unwelcome or unsavory truths suffuses the first issue of B.P.R.D. 1947. When scores of former Nazi officers found trying to escape suddenly turn up mutilated, the reaction of many of the former allies is to chalk it up to a sort of balancing of the scales. But as Professor Bruttenholm explains to Sergeant Maes in the second issue of 1946, there are monsters in the world and simply pretending that they aren’t there won’t make them go away.

The same idea is behind the story of the spectators burning down the opera house subsequent to the premier of Jean-Marie de Grigny’s Carnaval des Condamnés. Presumably those unsuspecting opera aficionados saw the monsters that Grigny was witness to at Baron Konig’s island party. But as Robert Louis Stevenson—and Jean Renoir, for that matter—knew, people are the real monsters and this precisely what we don’t like to acknowledge.

So we have monster stories. Of course, when they are done right, monster stories still manage to show us something of the monsters within us and one would be hard pressed to find a more consistent source of great monster stories than Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics.

One of the great ironies of the Hellboy comics is that the thing about which fans of the series complain most loudly—namely Mignola's choice to invite outside talent to help write and draw the books—is precisely what has kept the series consistently interesting and raised the overall quality of the books. Joshua Dysart, who also co-wrote 1946 with Mignola, is one of the most interesting writers in mainstream comics right now. As much as any other writer, Dysart has a perfect sense of the balance between the demands of narrative and the little bits of political and literary erudition that make a story more than a story. In 1946, Dysart recognized that the story's most interesting character was the Russian girl/demon Varvara and the high points of that series generally centered on those moments where her terrifying ambiguity was most apparent.

Both Varvara and Dysart are back in 1947 and are joined by the Brazilian artist/brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon. Anyone uncertain of the ability of this pair to illustrate a legitimately terrifying horror comic need look no further than the recently released Pixu: The Mark of Evil, in which Bá and Moon were joined by Vasilis Lolos and Becky Cloonan. Bá's chunky lines and expressionistic grotesquerie are a perfect foil to Moon's broad strokes and impressionistic dread. The shifts between the two artists' respective illustrations are subtle enough to be unsettling to the reader and yet not so subtle as to defy differentiation.

Somehow, Hellboy has become something of the Rodney Dangerfield of comics series, never quite getting the respect it deserves, in spite of its ever increasing quality. With creators like Dysart, Bá and Moon, not to forget Mignola himself, 1947 promises to be one of the handful of the series's truly great narratives.

Creepy Synchronicity

Subsequent to my analysis of this fantastic panel from B. P. R. D.: 1946 #2, I came across the following photograph of Hitler surrounded by a phalanx of adoring Bavarian children:

Powerful Panels: B. P. R. D.: 1946 #2 by Paul Azaceta

B. P. R. D.: 1946, which was released in a trade paperback this week, is one of the scariest things I have ever read. It is also one of the most expertly executed of the B. P. R. D. series in the sense that each of the genre strains represented in the book--horror, science fiction, detective--is equally developed, with none of them taking precedence over the others. Issue #2 is particularly amazing because it centers on the character of Varvara, the head of the Soviet equivalent of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B. P. R. D.), who, while actually more or less fighting on the side of Professor Bruttenholm and the Bureau, is ten times more terrifying than even the series' villains.

This particular panel shows Varvara as she walks out of a barn after "interrogating" Audo, who has escaped from a mental asylum where he was part of a Nazi program to create an army of vampires. The entire sequence of panels depicting this event is particularly effective as it encapsulates the multifarious and paradoxical nature of Varvara's terrifying magnetism. The juxtaposition of the opposing aspects of her nature is reminiscent of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, in which he uses the metaphors of childhood innocence and experience to illustrate the two aspects of the human soul.


As the sequence opens, the manner in which she approaches Audo's mother is perhaps a bit less deferential or shy than one might expect from a young girl dressed as she is, but at most the impression is of perhaps a rather precocious child. This precocity gives way to a fully adult arrogance in the subsequent panels as she stares down Dr. Eaton and then condescendingly orders him to close the doors as she brushes past him and into the dark barn, marching unflinchingly toward those hauntingly glowing eyes. Varvara's fearlessness is underscored in the following panel in which Dr. Eaton, his own fear etched in the lines on his face, apprehensively latches the barn door.


One could almost dedicate an entire piece to the panel depicting the moment of the interrogation. The barn door is framed by the tense figure of Dr. Eaton on one side and a silhouette of Professor Bruttenholm's hand clasping Varvara's baby doll, a symbol of childhood innocence left at the door. Azaceta employs a classic cinematic technique in enhancing the terror of the moment by obscuring our view, leaving us to the suggestions of our imaginations and Audo's shrieking pleas.


The panel depicting her exit from the barn presents an excellent demonstration of the tension between text and images in comics. Her words are business-like: she shares what information she was able to extract and alludes to some nebulous "accident" which has befallen Audo. But Varvara's physical aspect clashes with the text in the panel. Her stance is forward, confident; very adult, very experienced. Her facial expression is relaxed, but with a knowing look indicative of experience--suggesting the immediate aftermath of sexual release. Then there is her arm: the splash of color contrasts highly to everything else in the panels immediately surrounding this moment, with the notable exception of the exclamation point extending from Bruttenholm in the subsequent panel. Clearly her arm is coated in blood, but as discussed above, Varvara's expression reflects sexual satisfaction, making the blood far more transgressive in suggestion than if we were dealing with mere physical violence.

The two panels which complete the sequence round out the cycle of Varvara's spiritual metamorphosis. As Bruttenholm rushes into the barn, he gives back Varvara's baby doll, and with it her innocence. As the perspective flips in the sequence's final panel, we see through the carnage in the foreground that Varvara's re-infantilization is complete. Her expression of easy pleasure, of childish innocence, now matches her stature and accoutrements.


One thing that makes this whole sequence so bafflingly satisfying is that at this point in the narrative, the reader has no idea who or what this Varvara is. It is only later in the issue that Professor Bruttenholm finally asks who she is and she responds by sharing a story of Peter the Great and the three demons who helped him defeat the Swedish, giving Russia access to the sea. The panels accompanying this entire portion are an excellent example of just the sort of cinematic montage Brandon discussed in a recent post. Particularly effective is the moment in which Azaceta visually links Varvara to the poetry witnessing demon.

B.P.R.D. The Warning #4

What can one say about a comic book that blends elements of detective fiction with classic sci-fi, horror and even German Expressionist cinema and adds a touch of Art Deco design; all without lapsing into the self-conscious intellectuality of a Jonathan Lethem or Michael Chabon? Not only does issue #4 of The Warning do all of these things, but it does so wrapped in a narrative that is so tightly constructed, so economically conveyed that it could almost serve as an object lesson in how illustrated stories can and should be told.

The issue opens with an amazing full page illustration of the destruction being wrought upon Munich by the weird Art Deco radio robot monsters that were introduced at the end of issue 3. We also learned in that issue that the proto-humans which built these robots had apparently evolved since the Bureau's first encounter with them. This is an important detail, because it gives the threat posed by these creatures an element of the pathological, echoing the struggle between advances in medical science and the constant evolution of disease causing pathogens. The more we learn about the world around us, the clearer the tenuousness of our existence becomes and this is a major cause of fear and anxiety in our post-industrial age.


The confluence of nature and artifice is a major theme in The Warning and it is reflected masterfully in the illustrations. There is a panel in issue 4 in which the team led by Abe Sapien and Johann Kraus is exploring the underground cavern from which the robot machines originated. The differentiation between the stone and earth walls and the fabricated machinery is nebulous. It is fitting that the events take place in Germany as the emergence of a catastrophic war machine from the bowels of Mother Earth recalls the emergence of the Nazi ideology from the nature ethos of German Romanticism. Moreover, the images of the underground factory and the strangely beautiful robots constructed therein also call to mind Fritz Lang's Metropolis.


Mignola's skill as an illustrator is pretty well undisputed, but its amazing how much he has developed as a writer over recent series. The Warning is typical in Mignola's universe in that after several issues in which little happens outside of a broad outlining of setting and incident, things begin to happen and happen very quickly in the fourth issue. It is a testament to the quality of Mignola's writing that information is conveyed with minimal dialogue. When the underground team confronts the proto-human army with their oversized komodo dragons, Abe suggests to Johann that he can take control of one of the dragons by by projecting his consciousness into it simply by shouting his name. In a less well written comic like Walking Dead, the writer might say in twenty words what Mignola did with one and the effect would be a less exciting read.


If Hellboy forms the basis of Mike Mignola's grand 21st Century American mythic cycle, B.P.R.D. is this great genre-smashing vehicle through which many of the tales of this cycle are fleshed out. Mignola's comics work so well as horror stories in part because even as one monster is vanquished, the reader is left with the unmistakable sense of larger threats looming in its wake. Perhaps more importantly, Mignola shows that comics can and should be intellectual and literary, without being Intellectual and Literary.