Art: Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon
This edition: 2019
Contains spoilers
The Blurb: A vampire-haunted B.P.R.D. agent's quest for revenge turns into a rampage as he pursues a clan of undead and their gorgon-eyed queen.
This new edition includes the original five-issue series and sketchbook section, plus the new short story from the Hellboy Winter Special 2018 and a new introduction by Bá and Moon.
The review: The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) as a concept (within the Hellboy universe) did not always include Hellboy as an agent and this gives a large scope for non-Hellboy stories. Indeed the original story contained within this volume only features Hellboy in the background, very fleetingly, at a time when he is still actually a boy.
Rather this follows Agent Simon Anders as he hunts down vampires that he faced in the previous volume (B.P.R.D: 1946-1948) but don’t worry, the story makes perfect sense if you haven’t read that volume (I hadn’t). What is interesting is that the story uses the historical Princess Eleonore von Lobkowicz, under her married name of von Schwarzenberg, as the basis for the vampiric background – we met her in the documentary Vampire Princess. The story is fairly straight forward, but no weaker for that fact, and the short story appended to the end of the volume has a folk horror feel to it.
What is lovely is the artwork, which is in the classic Mignola style – though actually created by Bá and Moon. Self-contained and worthwhile 7 out of 10.
In Paperback @ Amazon US
In Paperback @ Amazon UK
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