This is a book that I desperately wanted to enjoy because Panya the Mummy was one of my favorite supporting characters that Mignola came up with during his run on B.P.R.D. so a solo story for her is right up my ally...but this book just suffers from a serious case of prequel-itis. Rather than giving us a moody, ambiguous monster story we are instead "treated" to a very perfunctory feeling origin story taking us step by step how Panya went from an ordinary girl to a living mummy. And while a by the numbers "secret" origin story can sometimes be enjoyable if you can get past the reliance of the usual tropes and just take it for what it is, but for Panya you can't even really do that because so much of what makes Panya work as a character is her mystery and the tension of how who she was and how she came to be was so artfully doled out in dribs and drabs. Sadly, this kind of development is something of a pattern for Roberson's work with the Hellboy Universe; he has a habit of telling rather than showing with everything just spelled out too cleanly instead of being open to the reader's interpretation. It's safe...and frankly a little boring. There's nothing offensively bad here, it's all well written but it's just not very exciting which is a death note for me.