Feature: Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: Time Is a River Reviews 

Mignolaversity: “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: Time Is a River”

By | July 21st, 2022
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

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In “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: Time Is a River,” artist Márk László returns to the Hellboy Universe to continue the tale he and Mike Mignola began in a 2020 short story.

Cover by Márk László
Written by Mike Mignola
Illustrated by Márk László
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Clem Robins

When Hellboy accidentally left eclectic academic Lajos in a ghostly version of Budapest in The Miser’s Gift, he didn’t realize how far-reaching the consequences would be! As timelines get crossed, reality starts to crumble and Hellboy must return to the ghostly city to recover Lajos before it’s too late.

Mike Mignola and Márk László, along with colorist Dave Stewart, return with an explosive one-shot to continue the story they began in The Miser’s Gift, part of the Hellboy Winter Special from January 2020.

Way back before the pandemic, there was a short story, ‘The Miser’s Gift,’ in the last “Hellboy Winter Special.” The story featured the Hellboy Universe debut of Hungarian artist Márk László, which presented a situation where the city of Budapest was drawn by someone that actually lives there. To have László illustrate ‘The Miser’s Gift’ was practically kismet.

László proved to be a perfect match for the tale, especially the way he transformed modern Budapest into the ghostly version of Old Budapest. The city had a life all of its own. It was immediately clear Mignola and László clicked—and now we have “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: Time Is a River” as a result. The tale is a sequel to ‘The Miser’s Gift,’ picking up on a particular loose thread where Professor Lajos ended up stuck in Old Budapest. In ‘The Miser’s Gift,’ this moment was played as a gag, but I get the feeling Mignola felt a little guilty about leaving the poor guy there. Plus, Hellboy’s not the sort to leave someone behind, so ‘Time Is a River’ feels like a very character appropriate sequel, with Hellboy on a rescue mission. The story showcases some of Hellboy’s best qualities—not just that he’s trying to rescue the professor, but that he approaches the search for him with genuine empathy. The way he talks to one of Lajos’s friends in the first two pages and the expressive work László does there, immediately takes that last gag panel from ‘The Miser’s Gift’ and elevates it to something with real stakes.

It’s a very human place to start the tale and it’s absolutely the right one because ‘Time Is a River’ gets wild pretty fast. Like ‘The Miser’s Gift’ before it, László has a way of drawing in a way where things can be rigid, with straight lines where you would expect them, and then transforms that into something more uncanny, with rubber hose-like physics—limbs become bowed, towers have curves, everything feels malleable.

Oftentimes Mignola has a way of writing about the paranormal that gives the reader just enough to feel like there’s a logic underneath it all, and yet not quite enough to feel like you completely understand it, and that is definitely at work in ‘Time Is a River.’ It’s a kind of organized chaos, and in its most extreme examples it usually only shows up in stories Mignola draws himself, such as in ‘The Hydra and the Lion’ or ‘Hellboy versus the Aztec Mummy.’ I can see why Mignola usually reserves these stories for himself, because tonally they’re a difficult line to walk. However, I’d now add ‘Time Is a River’ to that list, and it works because László seems to be able to tap into that tone and walk that line. In fact, it complements his work beautifully, and it wouldn’t surprise me if we see more stories from Mignola and László that have this same energy. They clearly share certain storytelling sensibilities and Mignola has taken what he learnt from writing for László in ‘The Miser’s Gift’ and used it to showcase László’s work at its best.

Tone requires all elements of the creative team to work with unified purpose, and I think you can see this clearly in Clem Robins’s lettering. At the beginning of the comic, which focuses on the emotion of the characters, he’s careful with how much or how little space he gives the words in the speech balloons. Look at the “Thank you. . .” on page two, how tightly pushed against the word balloon’s edges it is, even to the point of Robins changing the balloon’s shape to be more square-ish in order to push this aspect of the dialogue. Paired with the expression on the woman’s face, we can feel how that “Thank you. . .” is said with little hope in it. Compare this to the final panel of page five, when “Too old,” is said, how much space is around those words. It accents the emptiness and helplessness in the delivery. The space or lack of space around dialogue has tremendous power to change how we read a line, especially when it’s only a few words.

Continued below

There’s even one case in this issue where a word balloon has no words at all, yet it’s given a bigger balloon than the next one which actually has dialogue in it. This emphasizes the temporal space before the line delivery, accenting the comedic timing. Hell, this careful control of tone even extends to Robins’s use of sound effects. When rain starts to fall on Hellboy’s cloak, he could have used “DRIP” or “PLIP” or “PTT” or any number of other sound effects, but Mignola and Robins go with “DOINK” instead, which immediately speaks to the kind of cartoon logic at work in the world Hellboy finds himself in. It sets the stage for what is to follow before we’ve even seen any of his surroundings.

Dave Stewart’s coloring in ‘Time Is a River’ is particularly interesting to me in the way it inverts what he did on ‘The Miser’s Gift.’ In that first short story, modern Budapest was primarily defined by blues whereas Old Budapest was browns. In ‘Time Is a River,’ most of the tale in Old Budapest occurs during a time of flooding, so the establishing material in modern Budapest is in browns with greens and blues bleeding in along with the supernatural elements of the story. As is often the case, Stewart is less interested in literal colors and more interested in thematic colors that connect spaces and storytelling elements that add clarity to the work.

‘Time Is a River’ swings big with its tone and pulls it off because of a unified focus from the creative team. Robins and Stewart demonstrate here why they’ve remained close collaborators with Mignola for more than two decades now, and László shows how he can push the more cartoonish aspects of the Hellboy world without straying into outright farce. ‘Time Is a River’ retains the spooky mood at its heart that holds everything together.

Final Verdict: 8.5 – “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: Time Is a River” takes the best of ‘The Miser’s Gift’ and pushes it further.


//TAGS | Mignolaversity

Mark Tweedale

Mark writes Haunted Trails, The Harrow County Observer, The Damned Speakeasy, and a bunch of stuff for Mignolaversity. An animator and an eternal Tintin fan, he spends his free time reading comics, listening to film scores, watching far too many video essays, and consuming the finest dark chocolates. You can find him on BlueSky.

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