Ah! It always warms my heart to see a new Mignola series. A truly unique writer, Mignola’s brilliant world of Lovecraftian, subtle supernatural is seldom rivaled in today’s or any day’s comics, as its cult following would agree. (Of which I am a card-carrying member.) The B.P.R.D. stands for the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, a secret government organization made to destroy or contain the unexplainable, and is therefore the pinnacle of human tolerance and understanding. But despite the Bureau’s prejudicial shortcomings, it is pretty much the only line of defense against threats of doomsday proportions that the public isn’t even aware of. The Black Flame is the story of one such threat to humanity.

The frog monsters, which first appeared in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction are roaming the countryside killing and reproducing at a rate much faster than the Bureau can deal with. In fact, if this expansion continues, the world will be covered with these frog-men and their grotesque alters sculpted from flesh and bones, and the human race will be overrun. So its up to Captain Daimio (once dead, super-gruff leader), Roger (impressionable homunculus), Liz (embittered pyrokenetic), Johann (mostly detached spirit which resides in a special suit), Abe (an amphibious humanoid that was once human), and a crack team of the B.P.R.D.’s best and expendable to destroy the frogs before their spreading is out of control.

Written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, The Black Flame shows the same brilliant dialogue and intriguing story as all of Mignola’s projects. “But what influence did Arcudi have?” you might ask. Well, diehard fans might notice a goodly amount of focus on group fighting, and a certain element of getting to the point. Don’t get me wrong, I love Mignola’s style, but I believe that Arcudi’s influence explains the lack of pages devoted solely to bizarre and heavily shaded cells without dialogue or strange and dark humor. The result is a comic with Mignola’s style that is more suspenseful and action packed than his other, more somber series. And it rocks.

 

-Fumanchu