B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Pickens County Horror #2
By Jason Latour, Mike Mignola, Scott Allie, Dave Stewart
Published by Dark Horse Comics
When I was about 11 years old, I was a very clever babysitter. Eleven is a great age to be babysitting a 7 year old and a 5 year old because you’re not so far away from those ages yourself and you still remember how to play. AND you can institute games and activities that are challenging enough that keep them entertained for hours!
One of those games was this:
I would take 3 pieces of paper and fold them in half. We would each draw a head on the top half of the page, without showing the others. Then, we’d put the paper head-side-down, and pass it to the right. It was then our task to draw a body on the other blank half. (And we only had about 3 minutes for each drawing.) When we were finished, we’d each open up our pieces of paper to reveal the hilarity of mismatched heads and bodies - all of the wrong scale, with strange features, and odd body parts. We could do this over and over again, and it never got old.
What has this got to do with anything? I feel like “they” did something similar with this mini-series of BPRD.
The first issue - “the head” for purposes of my metaphor - was a pretty beautiful set-up. It set the scene, introduced the characters (and there were A LOT of characters for one issue), introduced the conflict(s).... In fact, I remember double checking the cover of that issue to see if my eyes had correctly seen “1 of 2” because it seemed like a set-up for a big, long, multiple issue story. With so many moving parts come so many possibilities. I was really excited to read this second issue to see how the mystery would get solved.
So, here we are, and what is issue two like? What's “the body” in our game?
Essentially, I feel like they handed over issue 2 to someone with mental incapacities who then scribbled a big blob and wrote “SKREEEEEEEEEEE!” all over. And then, for the hell of it, all over the head side, too. Seriously. Did you see this thing? Honestly, I feel like someone went, “oh no. This is too hard. I can’t think of anything. How about this big air-blob-vapor thing just takes over and kills everyone? Yeah! Yeah, that’s IT!”
I don’t know what else to say. This is a very sorry piece of work. That’s all I can say. If you were in school and wrote this, your teacher would hand it back to you and tell you that you clearly just gave up, and needed to try again.
And that’s what the editor should have done.
Skree? WTF?
BPRD - I’m disappointed in you.
-Nina Stone, 2012
PS: After I wrote this, I found out that this comic was actually written by the editor. Well!
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