Love and Monsters

Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: In the Service of Angels #4

Sir Edward, the Captain, and Miss Wolf have been cornered by the vampiric demon, but they still manage to drive it out of the defiled church. Grey gives chase, but runs into a bunch of mooks from the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ray, an Egypt-focused magical secret society, which plans to capture the monster with a bunch of guys armed with electrically-charged harpoons and knockout gas. That doesn’t really turn out that well for them, what with the blood and the murder and the screaming and the dismemberments. Later, Grey gets to spend some quiet time with Miss Wolf, recounting his own past and the less-than-honorable history of the last man to bear the “Witchfinder” title. And the investigation into the monster’s origins leads Sir Edward and the Captain to Bedlam Hospital, where they meet a man who should be familiar to readers of recent “B.P.R.D.” comics…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Nice creepy fun. Beautifully cinematic artwork by Ben Stenbeck, too. This story has giant, blood-soaked monsters, steampunk weaponry, zombie puritans, madhouses, and drinking beer with pretty girls — it’s a winner in every possible way.

The Unwritten #6

Tom Taylor has been accused of a horrific mass murder in Frankenstein’s castle — otherwise known as his boyhood home — and he’s now going to prison in a town called Roncevaux. That’s the setting of “The Song of Roland,” an epic poem written in the 12th century about the massacre of part of Charlemagne’s army by the Saracens because their commander, Roland, is too proud to summon the rest of the army for help. For a book focused on the uncomfortable connections between literature and the real world, that’s not too ominous, is it? Tom slowly becomes accustomed to prison life, Lizzie Hexam looks for her next orders in random books in a bookstore, and the prison warden, a dedicated fan of the “Tommy Taylor” novels, tries to deal with his feelings about locking up someone he can’t help seeing as the hero of his favorite books. And finally, Tommy meets a new, heavily scarred ally…

Verdict: Thumbs up. Wow, this story keeps getting better and better. I wasn’t expecting a big mixture of prison drama and high French literature, but this comic actually pulls it off. And there’s a really cool moment with the hardnosed warden reading his children bedtime stories.