Feature: Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club #5 Reviews 

Mignolaversity: “Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club” #5

By | March 30th, 2022
Posted in Reviews | % Comments

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“Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club” wraps up this week, but it leaves us wanting so much more from this era and these characters. Read on for our full review, but beware, spoilers abound.

Cover by Christopher Mitten
& Mike Mignola
with Dave Stewart
Written by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson
Illustrated by Christopher Mitten and Ben Stenbeck
Colored by Michelle Madsen
Lettered by Clem Robins

When Hellboy and the Professor face a dead-end in their supernatural investigations, Simon Bruttenholm offers inspiration in the form of a tale when the combined forces of the entire Silver Lantern club were required to defeat a strange occult endeavor!

If you’ve been following my previous reviews, then you know I’ve enjoyed “Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club” a great deal. It was a series I’ve been anticipating for many years now, and rather than meeting my expectations, it subverted them. Sir Edward is such a serious character in “Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder,” and in my head I’d imagined ‘The Silver Lantern Club’ as a continuation of that. And it sort of is. . . but it mostly isn’t. The lighter tone and ensemble nature makes it feel entirely different, even though there are still recognizable elements from “Witchfinder.”

If anything, it’s got a bit of the “Hellboy in Mexico” stories in its makeup—not the bits with Hellboy drinking himself into oblivion as he struggles with the death of friends, but the bits when Hellboy and his luchadore companions are drunk and running around Mexico looking for paranormal problems to punch. Sir Edward is still recognizably Sir Edward, but he gets to cut loose and relax more than we’ve ever seen him do before, and since his prior stories have mostly featured him alone, it reinforces the camaraderie he found in the Silver Lantern Club.

So going into this final issue, I didn’t really have an idea how this could wrap up. Structurally this is five short stories strung together by the framing sequence in 1953 with Hellboy, and it reached peak lunacy in issue #4. What we get in the end is a winding-down issue. It feels very much like the last call for drinks before sending everyone staggering home. Admittedly, it’s a bit anticlimactic, but it’s also totally appropriate.

The other reason it feels anticlimactic is because it’s not just telling the Silver Lantern Club story, it also has to address Trevor Bruttenholm and Hellboy’s investigation in the present and both end up feeling truncated. The Silver Lantern Club story wraps up with a montage and the 1953 investigation jumps ahead to it all being done in a page turn.

But the thing is, this story isn’t really about the investigations—that much should be clear by all the extra stories we merely catch pieces of at the opening and closing of each issue—it’s about stories forge and reinforce connections between us. It’s why a story about the Silver Lantern Club all working together is the only thematically appropriate ending. It’s the reason why a montage showing them working together is so much more important than the details of how that particular case wrapped up.

And it’s also nice to get a glimpse of how Trevor’s interest in the paranormal would’ve begun and been nurtured through his Uncle. It’s moments like this where we really get a sense of Hellboy feeling like this is his family, especially as he practically carries a drunken Uncle Simon. Ben Stenbeck draws these moments so well, and I thought it was a nice touch to position Simon at Hellboy’s right, by his stone hand, the least human part of him—it shows in a very simple way how accepting Simon is of him.

I’ve no doubt Simon thinks of Hellboy as Trevor’s son, plain and simple.

All this is my very long way of saying that ‘The Silver Lantern Club’ having a quiet, anticlimactic ending is the right choice for this story.

Look, it’s very unlikely this is the last time we’ll get a story about the Silver Lantern Club. Next month we’re getting a new series about the British Paranormal Society, and if Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson want to do that, then I’ve no doubt we’ll be seeing more paranormal investigations in the late 19th century too. Plus, there are still a few loose plot threads from “Witchfinder” to tie up (and I really want to see how Sir Edward and Mohlomi become friends after we got a little teaser in “Witchfinder: City of the Dead”).

Continued below

I have to mention Michelle Madsen’s coloring in this issue. She’s doing so much invisible work in defining space and time. Just look at the second page, where she uses split shafts of light to tell us it’s coming through a grille above, which gives us a sense of the prison environment—yet the story that’s going on here isn’t foreboding, instead it’s leading into a wistful moment with Simon, so instead of dark shadows, the scene is bathed in soft blues and she uses the shaft of light to bathe Simon in the light of his memories.

Then when we get to the Silver Lantern Club scenes, each environment has its own distinct color palette, and on top of that, the three flashback investigations nested within have their own unique palettes too. It means we never get confused spatially or temporally while reading. Madsen’s story-focused colors keep the reader’s attention where it needs to be, while also serving the emotional needs of the story.

I also have to mention Christopher Mitten’s art. I won’t repeat what I’ve said in my previous reviews about how he handles the characters—all that remains true—but I wanted to draw attention to how wonderfully he draws mysterious underground environments. It’s something that jumps out at me every time he gets to draw them, but here he really went all out with all the old machinery and crumbling bits of temple. He could draw pages on end of characters just silently walking through these environments and I’d love it.

In terms of great comedic moments, “The Silver Lantern Club” has had a few, but the best was saved for last. Sir Edward crying out, “I knew it! It’s the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra!!” made me laugh out loud—it was my biggest laugh for the whole series, and saving it for the final issue was a pitch-perfect choice. Very nicely done.

As we get to the end of the series, my main quibble is that Miss Goad never showed up. I rather like her, but I felt she was underappreciated in her position at the Saint John of the Cross Police Hospital. She plays off Sir Edward so well, and I would have loved to see her surrounded by people that would recognize her intellect and resolve. Hopefully that’s something for a future story.

“Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club” #5 is in many ways a quiet ending, fading out rather than ending with a bang—but ending with a bang would’ve undermined the previous issues. This rather gentle ending gives the miniseries as a whole shape, and while it wraps up this collection of stories, it leaves us wanting so much more.

Final Verdict: 8 – Whatever else is planned for the Silver Lantern Club, I’m glad we got this story that feels utterly unique among literally hundreds of Hellboy Universe tales. That alone is something worth celebrating.


//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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