Hellboy and the BPRD: 1954 "The Ghost Moon"

[thwhtGuardian]

I just finished reading this and I was glad to find it satisfying after last month's dud "The Visitor". The demons stalking Kowloon and the connection to the previous story with the Chinese ghosts was fun and i loved the art depicting the festival and the little tidbits of culture given to us. That said there wasn't lot of character work here making it feel a little like a "monster of the week" kind of story. Still it was pretty decent all around.

[Joker]

I liked it. A little heavy on exposition, as always, but it gets better in the back half.

Who's the horse? Have we seen him before? He called Hellboy cousin and has a fly ring, but I can't place him.

[thwhtGuardian]

I liked it. A little heavy on exposition, as always, but it gets better in the back half.

Who's the horse? Have we seen him before? He called Hellboy cousin and has a fly ring, but I can't place him.

I thought the same thing after reading it so today I pulled out the Right Hand of Doom trade to check the demons in the sketchbook section. It's not conclusive but I think the horse one could be Orobas and the bull may be Belam.

Man, I love the little details in that sketchbook.

[Joker]

Too hard to tell...

[seusilva]

The festival scenes without dialogue are really beautiful! But the exposure is a bit too boring sometimes - for example, the scene where they are descending the stairs could be silent, they don't need to say all the time stuff like "well, this looks like the place" and in the next panel "let's see if there's anyone home".

[Joker]

Roberson has that problem. He could cut a ton of dialog in all the Mignola books he's done so far. But he doesn't, and nobody is telling him to from an editorial end, either. It's a shame. These books could be much better with just a few simple tweaks.

[thwhtGuardian]

Yeah, some times less is more.

[Joker]

I think a big problem isn't so much that it's always bad writing, but this is a Mignola Hellboy book, and we're used to much more silence and mood. So it stands out here more than it would in another comic. At least that's my feeling.

I don't think Roberson is a bad writer, I'm just not sure he's the right fit, or found his footing yet.

[Kirby101]

I didn't mind all the exposition. As long as it's out of the way and the pace will pick up in the next issues. Better than some wriiers that tell you nothing and make you read between the panels for issue after issue to figure out what is happening. Or tell you nothing, assume you know everything they know.
The art was quite nice, very Eisneresquq and worked well for the story.

[Jan Bentzen]

Not a fan of the art - I´m really looking forward to some Mignola interior art.

And what´s up with the dating of the story - 1953 ??

[Joker]

Wow this issue was bad. Not, I didn't like it, or there were scenes that should have been silent. No. This was a structural mess top to bottom.

98% of this comic is indeed people talking... at length. They talk a lot. They have to, I guess, because they're telling us everything the actual comic didn't. This whole story is basically characters talking about what would have made an interesting story. Instead of that story, we get them talking about it.

There's a panel where two people are fighting, and talking, but in two different languages. Do they speak each other's languages? If they do, why aren't they? It makes no sense.

I'm confused. Mike Mignola is such a good storyteller, I don't know how he's reading these scripts and giving them the OK to go forward.

Genuinely debating if I'm going to read anything by Roberson going forward. This was a mess of a story and waste of $8 and, you know, fool me twice...

This sums up Ghost Moon for me.
Screen shot 2017-04-12 at 9.02.10 AM.jpg

[ckmoak]

'Twas like BPRD Exorcist all over again.

Though at least with that mini, we had some sense of there being a rush to completion. Ghost Moon didn't seem like it had that problem.

I'm genuinely confused as to how a product that shoddy was let out of the stable. Until now, I haven't had any misgivings about the HB & BPRD series, but this one really let me down. I think it's especially rough that there seemed to be some canon-significant teasing going on at the end, but I was already so through with the issue that I didn't even register it as worth noting.

[zerodemon]

I haven't been that critical of Roberson yet, but this was pap. A Mignola story wouldn't have bothered explaining what the jar was or what it did, and never would've needed to explain that the animal headed demons fulfilled a specified role in Hell. He would've been satisfied to have Hellboy fight the demons, [spoil]blunder onto the roof, accidentally break the jar, and then have the guy killed[\spoil]. Bing bang boom. Everything else would've been contextual.

The issue is that while Arcudi, Stewart, Allie and others seem to understand the importance of the work all being of a kind, Roberson seems to be writing in a different throwaway kind of way, which is fine and all, but I don't like my Hellboy to be throwaway. I like metacontext and deep cuts. It's what appeals to me about this universe. It's smart even when it's being dumb. If she wanted my books to be dumb while they were being dumb, I'd read Spawn or Witchblade or something.

I'm so glad he's not writing BPRD. He's too hit and miss.

[middenway]

There's a panel where two people are fighting, and talking, but in two different languages. Do they speak each other's languages? If they do, why aren't they? It makes no sense.

So it's not just me. I had the same reaction to that panel.

[Junior Wormwood]

I wasn't thrilled with the first issue, and I haven't even bothered reading this one. Bought it, bagged it, threw it in the box. I'm very nervous about the future of the Mignolaverse. Everything seems to be going downhill. Serious bummer.