“Abe Sapien” #35, the second last issue of the series, is coming out this Wednesday. This is Max Fiumara’s last issue on the series, and it’s a beautiful issue to bow out on. Check out our exclusive preview below.
“The Garden (III)”
Written by Mike Mignola and Scott Allie
Illustrated by Max Fiumara
Color by Dave Stewart
Cover by Sebastián FiumaraThe necromancer Gustav Strobl demonstrates his newfound power as Abe Sapien reaches England in the final calm before the storm of Dark and Terrible.
Mark Tweedale: Thinking back to where this series began back in 2013, I never thought it’d go into territory like this. The stuff with Alice in England is so very different from “B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth”, and while it has been referenced in that series, it’s been so far away from all the current concerns, that it kinda felt like an extension of “Hellboy in Hell”—a feeling bolstered by the fact that only Mike Mignola has ever drawn it, and even then only for a few pages.
So this feels like the “Abe Sapien” series is stepping into territory halfway between “B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth” and “Hellboy in Hell”. It’s beautifully surreal.
Mike Romeo: Yeah, for sure. For a long while now everything that’s happened in “B.P.R.D.” has been very reactionary, while “Hellboy” and “Hellboy in Hell” has gotten to be far more fantastic, even whimsical at times. We all know that it’s the same world, but the titles almost exist on opposite ends of a spectrum. Now we’ve got Abe pulling those ends together, first with his trip to New York, and now with his stop-off in England.
There’s a lot going on in these few pages, and we’ll probably go into a bit of depth when we do our full review on Wednesday, but was there one thing about this preview that you found most striking?
Mark: It’s very hopeful. I mean, whenever anyone talks about the end of the world it’s always doom and gloom and frog monsters… Here we have the new world tree, and instead of having its roots in Hell like Yggdrasil did, its roots are in the realm of the fairies. I mean it’s sad, the fairies are gone, but it has set in motion events that will make the new world better. Through Hellboy’s death, the best parts of the old world are carried into the new.
So that was very striking. That and Dave Stewart’s amazing colors.
Mike: Oh, that’s really interesting. I definitely picked up on the hopeful aspect of the pages, but I thought that it created dissonance in the reading that I found curious and unsettling. Abe seemed almost euphoric while Alice seemed burdened by the weight of it all, which is a sort of reversal of their character types, I think. A lot of that comes back to Fiumara, and his knack for expressing the sort of subtle emotion that can easily get lost in illustration. His approach to these pages, particularly when it comes to Alice, feels almost like comfort in a crisis, I think. I was left with the impression that Abe was almost being treated like a young child at a wake, from whom the adults try to mask their grief. Maybe I’m being a little dramatic, but it is the end of the world, after all!
And yes, Stewart’s colors are flooring.
Mark: I think your assessment of the Abe and Alice dynamic is absolutely spot on. Plus, I’ve missed Alice. She was such a major character in “The Wild Hunt” and “The Storm and the Fury”, and it’s good to know she’s still around and she has a role to play. We’ll have to talk more about this in our review on Wednesday.
