Something Spooky — ‘Witchfinder: In The Service Of Angels’

Welcome to the table,

It’s time for Something Spooky from your old pals at Comicon.com. This haunting holiday season, we are digging into our back issues, the comicbook kind, not the parents never loved me kind, and exploring old stories full of fun and fright!

When our editor/the man Tony asked us what stories we wanted to cover, I immediately said, “Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August!”

Tony then reminded me that I did that story last year. To be fair, I would talk about that story all day if someone let me. However, he is right, there are a ton of cool stories out there I could pull from to talk about, so today I am bringing you Mike Mignola’s Witchfinder: In The Service Of Angels.

While I have the single issues of this story, my books are currently stuck in my office, and we are working on the floors, so I’m pulling from the Witchfinder Omnibus for this retro-review. It’s a really rad Omnibus, but if you have checked out any of the “From the World of Hellboy” books, B.P.R.D., Hellboy, Koshchei In Hell, and so forth, this is the level of quality and care you have come to accept.

Our story picks up in a very grey and smoky London in 1879. A body has been tossed onto the street and is grey, badly broken, and sliced up, and surrounded by shattered glass. Two police officers are milling around the body when a bearded man in a suit who looks like he has not slept in a month of Sundays arrives on the scene.

This is our protagonist, Sir Edward Grey, the Queen’s Witchfinder. Out of the gate, it’s hard to deny that Edward Grey is not a perfect Victorian-era main character in a world that has all sorts of magic and monstrosity lurking around the edges of it.

Ben Stenbeck delivers some truly moody visuals, and Dave Stewart’s colors in this book solidified him in my mind as one of the best stewards of the mythos Mignola was creating.

Sir Grey is approached by an individual named Lord Wellington, and we discover one of his companions is the man who is dead on the street.

Sir Grey and Lord Wellington shuffle off to a nearby home, where Lord Wellington reluctantly starts to tell Sir Grey a story from an expedition he and his companions had gone on.

The story takes us to an ancient and previously unknown city full of all sorts of oddities and artifacts, including a Hyperborean blade, relics of other ancient cultures, and a very nicely placed image of a Venus of Willendorf.

As an aside, as a student with many, many credit hours of art history, it always makes me smile when someone busts out something in a comic panel I have written papers about and had to recognize and write on as part of midterms and finals.

The Venus of Willendorf is an 11-centimeter-tall figure of a woman that is estimated to have been carved around 30,000 years ago. It’s carved out of oolitic limestone that is not local to the area it was found in and has been tinted with red ochre, making it one of the oldest pieces of art ever discovered. For sure, there have been older things discovered, but this was a big deal to one of my art history professors, and she would always delight in talking about it for hours, so it has stuck with me all these years later.

Back to the comic!

In the ancient city, Lord Wellington and his companions discover the body of something humanoid but not human. I’m always a fan of ancient spaces and the idea that whatever occupied them was not human but some other sentient species capable of dreaming, creating, and living in societies on the world we now inhabit. Lord Wellington’s hired workers, who were native to the land, abandoned him and his companions once the bones were discovered, not wanting to invite whatever disturbing those bones would bring.

Lord Wellington, being a European Lord, however, decided that taking the bones was what should be done, and the terror of this tale begins soon after the colonizer starts to colonize.

Before they even get the bones back to England, two of Lord Wellington’s companions die. The second seems to have been gnawed upon, but they write it off as ship rats.

However, Wellington and his companions start to feel more and more dread and believe they have messed up by taking the bones, so they hire a random guy off the street and have him dispose of the bones.

Lord Wellington gets quiet, Sir Grey turns around, and this absolute hobgoblin-like creature is on the back of Lord Wellington’s chair and seems to have sucked his soul out.

This is how this story kicks off, and I remember reading it and being beyond delighted. Reading it again to prep for this retro-review, I still get excited at the page turn where you realize this dude is dead and this creature is about to crash out on Edward Grey.

As a student of Hellboy stories, Edward Grey does something next that I still think about often. He grabs the closet thing he can find, and it just so happens to be the Hyperborean Sword, an item that has a long and storied history in these stories that I can confidently say is a close second to Hellboy’s Right Hand of Doom itself. With the new weapon in hand, Edward Grey commands the creature to tell him who sent it.

While the creature does not speak, the body of Lord Wellington does whisper from its undead lips the name Donald Blackwood.

The little monster, giving zero cares about what Edward is saying, chucks the dead body of Lord Wellington and the chair he was sitting in at Sir Grey and leaps through a closed window, running off across the rooftops into the night.

Sir Grey gives chase and eventually encounters the creature lurking in the shadows, where he shoots it multiple times, and the creature fades into spectral mist.

Edward goes to the corner and finds out that Lord Wellington was dead and yet somehow spoke to him. Armed with the Hyperborean Sword, he is given some information on where to find Donald Blackwood in a very dangerous part of town, and he heads out to investigate what exactly is happening in foggy old London.

Chapter two of this terrifying tale kicks off with Sir Grey, after heading to the shady part of town, finding a gruesome murder scene, bodies torn apart, and blood everywhere. The local police are called and investigate, and Edward, as he is wont to do, rushes off down back alleyways, encountering less than savory characters and eventually an individual known as “Captain.”

“Captain” is a broker of secrets and declares himself Sir Gray’s new partner, leading him to a medium named Mary, who is able to conjure up amazing ectoplasmic apparitions and produce the specter of an entity who talks about all manner of things with Sir Grey, including his place in a history that has not yet happened (that is a story for another time) but mentions that Donald Blackwood is nearby.

The doors blow open, and a larger version of the little creature Edward Grey fought before bursts in and immediately chomps down on one of the Captain’s companions, drawing the second chapter of this story to a blood-curdling close.

Chapter three kicks off with Edward Grey, Captain, and Captain’s remaining companions fighting this larger, more crimson, and way more primordial creature.

Eventually, they push the creature back, and it escapes into the night, leaving the team shaken and down in numbers. The medium Mary and Edward head out to the river, and with the aid of a Victorian diving mech suit, the bag of bones that kicked off this whole sorted story is recovered.

This, and I realize how unhinged this sounds, is where the story starts to get truly weird.

From finding the bag, Mary and Edward head over to a church and find it full of people whose necks and wrists have been fed upon, leaving their bodies drained of blood.

Now this would not be a Mignola story without something deliciously antediluvian, and this church is just that. It’s dedicated to the Hollow Earth, the belief that there is a world within our world, full of wonder, mystery, and ancient advanced societies.

In the backroom of this church, they find Donald Blackwood, who tells them a story of ancient people who fled ancient gods hiding in the inner earth, where they raised and enslaved creatures who they put to work building massive weapons of war.

The slaves rebelled, and one of them escaped, making it all the way to the surface, where it was killed by ancient surface-dwelling humans.

And this is where my favorite bit comes in. The creature then becomes one of the undead. So we have a creature who is an undead crossing the traditional thresholds of humans, are vampires or ancient evils or whatnots, and allowing, for the first time in my mind as I read this comic in the shop the day it came out, the idea of undead from other sentient species that were considered “monsters” before they died.

What a fantastic concept! I love it so much. Undead of other non-human species was a revelation for me. I knew of elven lichs and vampires and a dwarven werebore, but the concept of a creature who could achieve unlife and go about being a menace far beyond its mortal years delighted me to no end.

With this revelation, chapter three draws to a close.

Chapter four kicks off with the creature busting into the church and fighting with Captian, Mary, and Edward Gray.

This time, Mary hits it with the bag of bones, and the thing runs off again into the city. Some steampunk cult scientists show up and hold Sir Gray at gunpoint while they try to capture the creature.

This goes really poorly for them, and a bunch of them are ripped limb from limb. The creature then squares up with Edward Gray, who is defenseless in the moment, and the two kind of share this moment where they respect each other, and the creature tosses the cart of the cultists and then walks away into the city’s labyrinth of alleyways.

Chapter four dials back the action and does some really fun lore dumps, giving the team some time to explore bits of lore that they can seed for future stories. Additionally, it’s also a really solid opportunity to get some more time with Mary and Edward hanging out, talking about life in a loud and chaotic pub.

The story does some more rad lore turns as Captain takes Edward to meet a man named Martin Gilfryd in Bedlam, the horrific prison asylum of historical renown.

Martin Gilfryd, also known in other stories in the Hellboy mythos as Memnan Saa, is a sorcerer who knows the secret histories of the world and becomes a bit of a problem for the B.P.R.D. in future stories.

This brings us to the close of chapter four.

Gilfryd, using the bones of the creature, summons the undead thing to the halls of Bedlam and binds it with its bones, making it mortal once more and giving Edward Gray and the Captain the ability to actually harm it.

Edward blasts it with his revolver, and the thing meets its final bloody end as it crumbles to dust. Captain is knocked out, and Gilfryd escapes with the iconic Hyperborean Sword. Edward gives chase, finds him in a heap on the floor, having been laid low by a specter of his former master, and then, as is the nature of such stories, Edward finds himself once more in the clutches of the scientist cultists who promptly knock him out, take his sword, and leave him to find his way out of the asylum on his own.

Edward wakes up and finds himself in a sitting room with a nasty bump on his head. He rushes out to find his friends and finds that Captain has been killed, with two holes in the chest, and Mary has been murdered. Mary manifests in spectral form and tells him to stop chasing the trail of who killed her and Captain as they are the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra, and they are frightfully powerful and well-connected.

We get a bit of lore telling us that in the future, Edward Gray becomes an occult detective and does some great deeds, but is always haunted by this first case, and then we get a glimpse of the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra and their use of a strange device where they seem to be absorbing or communing with the body of the dead creature while keeping the fabled blade they took from Edward Gray on one of their shelves.

 

Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels not only treats the reader to a Victorian murder mystery, but it also fills the spaces between bloodbaths with mountains of lore that speak to a wider and far more ancient world. There are elements of existential dread, ancient necromancy, and the influence of entities far beyond our understanding that unravel in deeply compelling ways, and the introduction of an undead creature with a keen intelligence that is so far removed from human is an absolute stroke of genius that elevates this tale of terror from something amusing to something truly memorable.

I spend a great deal of time each month just pondering the elements of this story because I am so fascinated with how the pacing and panels so perfectly pull together the elements that make the Hellboy mythos what it is.

Until next time, if you are looking for a great folklore-level horror story this Spooky Season, you can’t go wrong with this offering.