Sara May Blackburn begins her special training with the mysterious Ms. Brooks at the Linton School for Girls. As she learns more about her special powers, she’s faced with new and dangerous challenges—but could they be a distraction from something more than magical education that’s going on at the mysterious school? Minor spoilers ahead.
Cover by Wylie BeckertWritten by Mike Mignola and Angela Slatter
Illustrated by Valeria Burzo
Colored by Michelle Madsen
Lettered by Clem RobinsSara May Blackburn begins her special training with the mysterious Miss Brook at the Linton School for Girls. As she learns more about her special powers, she’s faced with new and dangerous challenges—but could they be a distraction from something more than magical education that’s going on at the mysterious 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!
The second issue of this miniseries has a lot on its plate and it somehow covers it all, while keeping the dialogue to a minimum and a pace so quick you nearly feel a breeze from the turning of the pages. Taking a few moments in its opening pages to establish Sara May’s new life, her connection to Hellboy (for those who missed her initial introduction), finding the Linton School, and setting up multiple dark plots; we are told that things are not OK, and most likely won’t be for the foreseeable future.
For a book that has so much going on, Mignola and Slatter keep things quiet and low-key. The tone never gets overdone, even when a moment gets tense or shows its hand at how important it is to this universe. Quiet conversations and secret plotting make up the majority of this issue and that helps keep things feeling manageable, even when so much is going on. As Sara May looks to learn more about her roommate Eliza, Miss Brook, and the school; there is an equal exchange in information. Just as she lets Eliza in to the circumstances of how she left home, Eliza too goes into detail of her father turning her away from her home and former life.
This is where the book takes a turn into dark fairy tale territory, and its strongest elements are at play for the majority of the issue. Eliza tells her story quickly and in terms that feel like an old Mother Goose tale, which Sara May takes as simply a more cryptic telling of what actually happened, but the further we get into the issue, the more it feels like everyone except Sara May has led a supernatural or fantasy adjacent life before coming to the school. The interplay between fantasy and horror throughout is extremely satisfying and extra rewarding by the time the issue reaches its final page. Sara May gets her first special lesson—Scrying, or seeing the future in reflective surfaces. And as she goes on her first mystical quest into this greater world of magic, we get an inkling of just how powerful she already seems to be. Multiple visions, one of which shows us Hellboy’s Beast of the Apocalypse future, that of course confuses and terrifies Sara May. And the other of which she catches only a glimpse of, but has no meaning to her, but would have great meaning to Miss Brook.
Valeria Burzo’s art feels right at home within the Mignolaverse. It’s finely detailed, focused on character, setting, the important elements in equal measure. There is a malleable softness to nearly all of it, but in a way that keeps the work feeling a bit safe and welcoming, so it can draw you in and surprise you when the story takes its darker turns. Because this series spun out of “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.” specifically, her style definitely feels like it is shaking hands with the various artists who have worked on that run of miniseries. It is through and through fun, spooky, and gets right to the heart of what makes this universe so collaborative and always shifting to make sure everything is connected in story, tone, and style—even when all of those things feel to be forever changing and growing. Her work, which is already wonderful, paired with the ingenious talent of Michelle Madsen’s colors make for yet another winning combination for this world.
“Castle Full of Blackbirds” continues to feel like something akin to the Mignolaverse’s take on Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, but with an even more sinister underbelly. It’s a fun read straight through, and while it dabbles in some of the scarier elements of the world of “Hellboy,” it does feel like one of the safer books to put in the hands of a slightly younger reader who perhaps is looking to take their first steps into a larger world.
Final Verdict: 8.5, Fantasy horror, a dark spin on the hero’s journey, and includes ties to the overarching themes of the greater “Hellboy” universe? What more could you ask for?
