Comics Review: SIR EDWARD GREY, WITCHFINDER Volume One

SIR EDWARD GREY, WITCHFINDER VOLUME ONE: IN THE SERVICE OF ANGELS by Mike Mignola (writer) and Ben Stenbeck (artist).(Dark Horse, April 2010) Trade paperback, 160 pages. Collects Issues #1-5 of the mini-series. ISBN #1595824839 / 9781595824837. 

Summary on the Goodreads website . . . . . .

Mike Mignola teams up with artist Ben Stenbeck (B.P.R.D.: The Ectoplasmic Man) for a look into one of the Hellboy universe's greatest enigmas: nineteenth-century occult investigator Edward Grey.

In one of Grey's first cases as an agent of the queen, he goes from the sparkling echelons of Victorian London to its dark underbelly, facing occult conspiracies, a rampaging monster, and the city's most infamous secret society: the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra. 

My Four-Star Review on the Goodreads website . . . . .

I read this story in the original monthly comics issues. 

     This is the first collection featuring Sir Edward Grey, the Witchfinder and occult detective during the Victorian era. Grey travels down the same mysterious paths as Hellboy, the B.P.R.D. and other characters in the Mignolaverse. 

     Ben Stenbeck alters his art style here to resemble Mignola's Hellboy work, and it helps make this fit right in. Dave Stewart's crafty work on colors really helps set off the moody atmosphere.

  

  While I enjoyed this as a straight-up adventure tale spiced with plenty of horror and supernatural themes, I found the character of Sir Edward Grey to be sort of wooden. He always seems to be so matter-of-fact in his interactions with the other characters and doesn't really emote or show anything other than his disciplined side. 

     Mignola throws in a slew of disparate horror tropes and makes the blend work: bones of a man-sized animal discovered in the ruins of an ancient civilization, and the subsequent murders of expedition members in ways reminiscent of Poe's Murders In The Rue Morgue; a gargoyle like creature that gains strength and size with each bloody murder; zombie-like corpses; a medium who brings forth an ancient spirt (or agent of the devil?); Acheron and the river Styx; mysterious cabal-like symbols; the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra; the Church of the Inner Word whose pews are occupied by exsanguinated corpses; the ancient garden of Shambhala; the Bedlam asylum; a lunatic sorcerer; and a relic of Jonathan Swift's Lilliput.

     Grey emerges from it all with nary a hair displaced. At least, he indulges from time to time in a good tankard of ale.