New wrinkles surface as the village is invaded.
Creative Staff:
Story: Mike Mignola, Christopher Golden, Thomas Sniegoski
Art: Peter Bergting
Colors: Michelle Madsen
Letterer: Clem Robins
What They Say:
Having made contact with some of the new world’s mysterious inhabitants, Frank and Lilja continue their search for the “Star Lady.” But the danger they’re trying to prevent has already caught their scent–literally–and now it’s a race for what could be the fate of the reborn world.
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers):
Having dipped my toes in some other Mignola books recently, this series from him with the team of Christopher Golden and Thomas Sniegoski putting it together intrigued me. I have no familiarity with past stories for this character in this form but it was very accessible and a lot of fun in its worldbuilding to get into. Peter Bergting is handling the art duties on this and it’s a great-looking book with so much detail and interesting creativity from what we see here. The designs are neat and I love the details while Michelle Madsen’s color design really shines.
With one more issue in this hopefully opening series of books, we get to see how things have settled a bit here while Frank and Lilja spend some time as part of their bigger journey. It’s good to see Lilja just having some fun while Frank continues to orient himself a bit since coming back to life, in a sense. There are some fun moments that get this going but it takes a dark turn when Lilja goes into one of the locals’ huts and find a creature that has been hurting from something that infected him. This leads to learning about how he and a couple of others went exploring into another species lands nearby and ended up in a bad place that resulted in the others killed and only this one making it back – but poisoned and dying.
Of course, just as Frank finds out about this and realizes the scale of the problem, the other species has come to cleanse this village for their offense and it turns into a lot of chaos, what with most of them captured while Lilja escapes with a few of the kids. That subplot moves along to set things up for the finale but for Frank, he gets to learn a bit about the others as they take him and some of the kids back to their own village. I do like that we get more nods towards those curious about the past and all, especially since so many in Lilja’s home had little interest, and how the toxicity of that past can still haunt and cause problems. The story here moves in familiar ways, if a touch too decompressed for a series as short as this, but it’s engaging to watch as Frank is forced to interact in ways that he’d prefer not to in order to do the right thing.
In Summary:
There’s a lot of good stuff just in the worldbuilding here as the first few pages show more of what’s going on with Murk and how there are others like him, though he’s the one that’s in charge. That has to go somewhere eventually and if it crashes into events in the next issue this quickly it’s going to feel really weird as it’s building too slowly to connect so quickly. I do like what we get with Frank and Lilja here but also a good several pages given over to exploring what happened to the group that went exploring which shows more of the world and some of the unusual things that happen out there.
Grade: B+
Age Rating: 16+
Released By: Dark Horse Comics
Release Date: November 16th, 2022
MSRP: $3.99
