Endings — Reviewing ‘The Serpent In The Garden: Ed Grey And The Last Battle For England’ #3

Welcome to the table,

Before I start … Thank you, Mike Mignola.

Things often start with brilliant beginnings. In truth, the Hellboy universe has quite a few of those, but The Serpent in the Garden: Ed Grey and the Last Battle for England is a book about endings. The final issue of the three-issue series ends in a way that is nothing short of a masterclass in how to draw the curtain on a legacy of lore. It will last for generations to come.

Issue #3 of The Serpent in the Garden: Ed Grey and the Last Battle for England (a very long title but one worthy of the story) picks up with Edward Grey, now transformed into the mythological Green Man. He’s armed with a fate-bound sword, clashing with the transformed champion of Morgan Le Fay The Gruagach of Lough Leane.

The world is not as it was . There is one last place, one last dream of a green place of power, a kingdom that can be called such. In this place, two queens have sent their champions to fight over who will hold dominion over the final kingdom. The story is as monumental as gods warring in the heavens and as delicate as ideas colliding in your half remembered dream.

Everything about this story is quiet and loud at the same time. Therein lies the beauty of it all. Each blow struck between combatants that grow to kaiju size is earth shaking. Yet the soft wind that blows across the treetops at their feet can be felt in the brilliant lines of Ben Stenbeck and the stellar colors of Dave Stewart.

This book is a thing of legend. We’ve read about the fall of Atlantis, of the coming of the various “end time” kingdoms, we read about the slaying of Dracula or how Icarus tumbles.  I would say that in my long and strange life, I have come to be an authority on how legends, folk stores, and tall tales end. Without giving spoilers, I can tell you that the end of this book feels as honest and true an ending as you will find in any book that carries the title of “classic.”

Where Mignola once worked in the world of weird fiction and horror comics, he is now constructing a legacy of lore than will serve as allegory and shared story for ages to come. I could not picture a landscape that would not look at these stories of champions and queens, of curses and conflict, that does not include the lore than he has provided the world.

I am in tears as I type this but they are not sad tears. In the same way I was moved to tears when a cube, a sphere, and a pyramid floated above a lounging couch in a small house at the end of the world, this book will forever stick with me.

As someone with a degenerative disability who has been taught to think about the end of his life since the beginning of my own, endings are hard for me. I stray away from finishing shows, the last bit of a snack in the cupboard, the last few pages of a journal. I struggle with the ends of things because I think about my own end daily and with all that in mind I can say with certainty that I hope whatever way I leave this world is as beautiful and poetic as the endings Mignola has given us in these stories that mean so very much to me.

Until next time, thank you Mike Mignola.