I'm also really struggling with this chapter, less for the multiple plotlines--though I do agree it's too hectic a lot of the time--and more because the feel of the book has, to me, gone a bit Big Two. I don't feel like there's a great deal of character development happening.
spoilers:
Though I can see what some people are saying about Devon being a bitter character from the beginning, smashing SO MUCH into one issue felt like whiplash. Imagine a thing like that in Plague of Frogs? It would have happened over an arc or even 2. To do it in one issue is incredibly rushed. |
end of spoilers It feels like the characters are taking a backseat to the plot moving forward, and that's not a thing I anticipate being happy with.
I also tried to alleviate those thoughts by rereading the Messiah trade and my feelings didn't really change. If Allie is writing for the omnibus, as the guys at Multiversity have commented a couple times, he's really failing to land anything that feels fully thought out or structured.
But I think the biggest issue I have in terms of character rush is that we've only had about four solid pages of anything like Hellboy's emotional and mental state right now. This entire series/universe was built off of moody, impressionist styles letting the art dictate the pace and tone of the work around it. I don't feel I've connected him as the same character, and not in the good "he's just changed" way. He uses the same one-liners sometimes (Damn!) and punches stuff, but I have absolutely NO sense of what he's feeling or why. The cover of issue 10 told me more than the last four issues, and that scene on the cover never even appears in the book.
So TL;DR I'm frustrated with the apparent lack of character development and the breakneck pace. If they were struggling to figure out a writing solution after so many creative shake-ups, I really wish they'd just taken a year long break to come up with something solid rather than forged ahead without giving the arc time to breathe. There's plenty of side projects to flesh out that would have kept me satisfied until they felt like picking up the main story again. Sigh. I do really hope I get back into it, but this has been a very difficult half-year of BPRD for me.
Final note:
spoilers:
FOR GOD'S SAKE LEAVE THE CLASSIC VILLAINS AND CHARACTERS ALONE. Rasputin had a great ending already. It diminishes everything about that ending to have him be playing a long game. The beauty of his passing was that in the end, he was another zealot who put his faith in something that ultimately wasn't interested in rewarding him, and he faded away like so many others who thought they were puppet masters. If, during that entire "maybe a man can make himself a god" bit, he was just waiting for his Varvara card to come into play, that sucks. Maybe we could have used Gylfryd, or whatsisname from Abe Sapien who died so undignifiedly. But Rasputin just makes me feel like I'm reading the 3,000th Batman title where X Dead Villain comes back to life. |
end of spoilers