Thursday, June 2, 2011

Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever

The fifth and final issue of the Witchfinder miniseries "Lost and Gone Forever" hit stores yesterday, finishing off one of the best comic book stories I've read in a long time. Because it was written by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and takes place in the prehistory of their Hellboy/B.P.R.D. universe, it was very esoteric, strange, and hard to follow in places, and I'm still not quite sure what actually really happened over the course of the story, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, since I also came away very satisfied and glad I read it.

This miniseries (the second, I think, to star the character, although he has made a few appearances in the Hellboy comics) has Sir Edward Grey travel from Europe to Utah sometime during the late 1800s or early 1900s to stop a witch who has taken captive the soul of a Shaman and resurrected a bunch of cowboys into zombies. Or something like that. Like I said, it's a weird story that was never really explained, keeping things vague and confusing, but intentionally so. Anyway, it was a neat story that allowed for lots of scenes where Grey fought cowboy zombies.

The artwork is by comic book legend John Severin, who should be well known to any fans of western, war, or horror comics, or maybe even just comic books in general.  At 89, the guy is still creating some of the best looking comics I've ever seen. The story is great fun, but the entire series is worth checking out of only for some great work by a true legend. Just check out some of these pages:


2 comments:

Justin Garrett Blum said...

89? Damn, I hope I'm still productive at that age. One thing I've always liked about the B.P.R.D. and Hellboy books is that they always find the right artist to tell the story.

Donald said...

It's true. A lot of people complain about how Mike Mignola doesn't draw all of the comics anymore, and while I agree that it is a shame that his pencils have become so scarce, it's hard to complain considering how he hires artists like Severin, Guy Davis, etc to fill the void.