A Delightful Dance Through Time: Reviewing ‘Captain Henry And The Graveyard Of Time’ #2

Welcome to the table,

I am going to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible. Each page turn is jam-packed with surprises, twists, and turns. I want you all to have the joy of experiencing that for yourselves.

I recall reading The Time Machine when I was very young. It was a dog-eared copy whose cover was laced with bits of yellowing masking tape to keep everything together. The pages smelled like dust with just a hint of salt and sea.

Most of the secondhand, or in this case, probably third or fourth hand at very least, books from the used book exchange I got a lot of my novels from tended to have that scent to them. Living that close to the ocean tended to mean that tourists would dump a wealth of reading material that served as their summer beach reads before returning to the various parts of the world they were from. While that meant the books all had a particular rippled feel and a hit of sargassum, the contents they held were still full of timeless adventures and wonderful stories.

When not reading mythos and folklore or sword & sorcery, I would dive into pulp-filled adventure tales and weird fiction and get lost in the landscapes of Mars or the weird and wonderful islands of adventure above and below the waves.

Captain Henry And The Graveyard of Time makes me feel the same way those strange pages did. There is so much wonder and adventure within the visual worldbuilding of this seemingly timeless tale, which at the same time is very time centric.

Let’s get into it.

Captain Henry and the Gravyard of Time #2 picks up with the good captain running from a strange clock-like entity in a landscape of strange, discarded bits of chronometric counting machines and the devices that bend and shift the natural flow of the then till the tomorrow.

There is action and conflict within these pages, but I think that the team of Mike Mignola and Bruce Zick, with letters by Clem Robins, really shines in that this is not a story of super-hero slugfests or mythic monsters mixing it up. I love those things, especially the monsters bit, but what Captain Henry and the Graveyard of Time does exceptionally well is weave an absolutely astonishing adventure story through an alien landscape that somehow feels familiar and altogether fresh and new at the same time.

So much happens in these pages; there are some really fun cameos and iconic locations from other stories in the Hellboy landscape. What I adore, page turn after page turn, is that there is this ‘high adventure’ feeling that saturates not only the art but the narrative.

I’ve been covering the majority of the work in the Hellboy world for years now, and it’s my favorite space to hang out in in comics for the most part. That cross section of gloom and occult mystery and mythos that centers around non-traditional protagonists and a world that always feels alive and filled with consequences that are real. If something happens … it happens. We don’t get recons and reinventions, we get the consequences of events, and that security and realness make the whole thing feel so much more important and lived in.

For a fan of that kind of storytelling, Captain Henry feels like it is crafting, intentionally or not, a device that is going to give us even more chances to see even more of this well-storied world, not only in the moment, but from other perspectives. No one tells a story from the iceberg’s side of things. They just talk about what was going on with the people on that big luxury liner. Captain Henry feels like it is opening doors to worlds and layers of worlds, both known and unknown, and that sense of wonder and exploration has me positively excited.

I also want to take a second to comment on Clem’s work in this book. Bruce is doing a dazzling job with the visual storytelling, not only serving as one of the authors but also handling the lines, inks, and colors, and it is really making this whole ordeal feel surreal in the best possible way.

Clem Robins is doing some really fun things with the lettering that I think, unless you are really looking for them, are going unnoticed. There are moments when panels are worked within, and moments where panels are broken. There are some really cool placements of the clock-creatures dialog that come off as haunting and otherworldly, and it really just shows what a super solid letterer can do on these kinds of titles.

Until next time, I love weird stories and strange fiction, and Captain Henry and the Graveyard of Time really just feels perfectly put together to me, and I can’t wait for more!