Mike Mignola, Angela Slatter, and Valeria Burzo’s “Castle Full of Blackbirds” may seem at first glance to be a stand alone title, but when the solicitations mention “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb” it is quite purposeful—they want you to go back and read the stories that came beforehand. “Castle Full of Blackbirds” is deeply immersed in lore and it will reward readers that are familiar with it. New readers will be able to follow along, but there are whole other levels of context for those more intimately acquainted with the Hellboy Universe.
Written by Mike Mignola and Angela SlatterCover by Wylie Beckert
Illustrated by Valeria Burzo
Colored by Michelle Madsen
Lettered by Clem RobinsWhen Sara May Blackburn headed for New York after the events of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb, she had one goal in mind: find the mysterious Miss Brook at the Linton School for Girls and ask her what she knows about the mysterious powers that have plagued Sara May her whole life. But as is often the case with these things, the answers are not as simple as all that. Sara is in for an education in more than just reading, writing, and ’rithmetic at the Linton School.
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola partners with celebrated author Angela Slatter and artist extraordinaire Valeria Burzo for a new adventure from the world of Hellboy!
Continues the story of a fan-favorite character from The Return of Effie Kolb.
Witches play a curious role in the Hellboy Universe. Whenever someone is explicitly called a witch, it usually means they are a villainous character with very few exceptions. That said, there are also many magical people that are never called witches, but surely must be. (One of my personal favorites is Agent Shengli in “Crimson Lotus.”) In universe, characters often express the attitude that witches are bad, with no nuance whatsoever on the subject. To be clear, this is the attitude the characters have on the subject, but not the attitude of the comics themselves. There’s a subtle difference—the comics show us witches that are good and show us witches that fall somewhere in between. We don’t see these as often as the bad (after all, the B.P.R.D. isn’t exactly called in to help in places where everything is perfectly fine), but they do exist.
And then Sara May Blackburn came along. This character seems perfectly designed to explore witches in all their complexity. First introduced in “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb,” Sara is a young girl with magical abilities. She’s born with these powers, so she’s a natural witch, not someone who made a deal with a devil for power like Effie Kolb. But she lives in a place where witches have done a lot of damage—as far as anyone is concerned, witches are bad, end of story.
In ‘The Return of Effie Kolb,’ we see Sara wrestling with this. She’s heard stories about witches, and she recognizes something of herself in them. So far, the similarity she sees has caused her pain—her own parents kicked her out because they thought she was a witch. And clearly she’s internalized that stuff because as soon as she meets Hellboy, she starts asking him questions—she wants to know if she’s doomed to be evil, if the devil already has a claim to her soul, just because of what she was born. And in some ways Hellboy helps; he reassures her that she’s her own person, that she’s good. However, in other ways he doesn’t help; he doesn’t acknowledge the similarity between Sara and witches, and reinforces the idea that witches are bad. Ultimately, the answers he gives her boil down to “Just don’t think about it,” which makes perfect sense because that’s how Hellboy deals with being a demon at this point in his life.
But that’s not enough for Sara, and so at the end of ‘The Return of Effie Kolb,’ she sets off on a journey of self discovery, looking for the one person that has promised her real answers, Miss Amelia Brook from the Linton School for Girls.
Continued belowAnd this is where “Castle Full of Blackbirds” picks up. This isn’t just an interesting spinoff from “Hellboy,” but one that’s going to explore the shades of gray of witches in the Hellboy Universe. It may be a direct sequel to “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb,” but it’s building off of elements from all over. Long-term readers are going to see connections everywhere.
“Castle Full of Blackbirds” is not just the debut of writer Angela Slatter in the Hellboy Universe, it’s also her first time writing comics. One of the big hurdles for writers going from prose to comics is a tendency to over-write scenes, to rely too heavily on text to tell the story, but you won’t find this in Slatter’s work. Throughout the issue, she frequently relies on the art to tell the story, dropping away dialogue entirely. There are scenes where we’ll be presented with imagery that references other stories in the Hellboy Universe, but Slatter resists the urge to drop a name—she trusts Valeria Burzo’s art to make the connection with the reader.
This is the single greatest strength of the issue. By holding back on answers in the literal text, readers have to look closer at the art, and Burzo’s art is a strange thing—it shifts and moves. The world of “Castle Full of Blackbirds” is not the concrete reality we’re used to, and how the world shifts and moves is communicating something to the reader. By holding back on dialogue early on, Slatter makes us pay more attention to the art, and by the time we arrive at the Linton School for Girls, that attention should start paying off.
Burzo’s art has a disorienting quality to it—there are more high angles and low angles and dutch angles than you’d usually see in the Hellboy Universe. In most other stories these sorts of compositions are usually held off for moments pushing a specific effect, like a shift in power or a reveal, but in “Castle Full of Blackbirds” they’re used to take normal moments like a handshake or a simple conversation and make them feel not quite right. Something is off balance.
The way Burzo uses these angles, it almost directly taps into Sara’s level of comfort. Just look at the stark change in this sequence. . .
The first three panels twist with tension, whereas the final two become peaceful once she finds Miss Brook, who is a source of comfort for her. (There are, of course, other things going on here too, but I can’t explore them while avoiding spoilers. We’ll get to that when we talk about issue #2 next month.)
There is so much complexity to explore with witches in the Hellboy Universe, and I look forward to a nuanced take on them in “Castle Full of Blackbirds.” Sara May Blackburn is the perfect lead for such a story, and with the first issue relying on visuals as much as it does, Slatter and Burzo are able to lean into the ambiguity of this corner of Mignola’s world.
Final Verdict: 8 – “Castle Full of Blackbirds” #1 has put its best foot forward.
