As you’d expect, the mystery deepens in “The House of Lost Horizons” #2 and connections to other aspects of the Hellboy Universe pop up. And while this aspect of the story works, there are unfortunate cracks in other areas.
Written by Mike Mignola and Chris RobersonCover by Christopher Mitten
Illustrated by Leila del Duca
Colored by Michelle Madsen
Lettered by Clem RobinsThe murder mystery continues after another body is discovered! The remaining guests on the storm-ravaged island wake from the same eerie nightmare to find that one of them has been the next victim of a brutal killing! But Sarah and Marie-Thérèse are starting to suspect that there may be more than one murderer afoot. Who is the killer, and if they’re not discovered, who might they target next?
Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson return to the world of Hellboy, accompanied by artist Leila del Duca and colorist Michelle Madsen for this second installment of the new Mignolaverse mystery.
If you thought “The House of Lost Horizons” was just going to be a one-off Agatha Christie–style romp, you haven’t been paying attention. Right from Chris Roberson’s first story in the Hellboy Universe story, he has developed his stories non-linearly. Elements would be introduced in the 1950s, then developed in the 1970s or the 1880s or the 1920s, then jump back to the 1950s. It’s easy to miss if you’re only reading one series at a time, but if you’re reading all of them, you gain a greater perspective on everything that’s going on.
So when a story comes along that appears to be largely disconnected from everything else, that’s when you should really pay attention. “The House of Lost Horizons” #2 says as much right from the first panel, when the death from the previous issue is directly compared to the deaths in “Rise of the Black Flame”, a story that taps into many of the Hellboy Universe’s most deep-rooted elements.
The series is also on a collision course with the Golden Crane Society—not something that’s specifically come up either in this issue or the last specifically, but advertised rather loudly on the for issue #4. But it’s not hard to see how the Golden Crane Society would become involved, especially since Alden Whelstone made his fortune taking advantage of Chinese laborers and then started trafficking in occult artifacts.
However, since this whole mystery is closely linked to an auction of occult objects, the door is open for links to any number of other stories. And then there’s Whelstone’s home, the Golden Terminus, which I can’t help associating with the Golden Lodge of the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra. And no, this isn’t just because both have “golden” in their name, but because Whelstone is from New York, which is where the Golden Lodge was built. It still feels like a bit of a reach, but then Dr. John Caliban is also from New York, so it seems like something about this location is going to be important at some point.
That’s not even addressing the obvious red herring here. When Reginald MacKerrell was introduced as a proxy bidder for Rupert Zinco, I couldn’t help but immediately take him off my mental list of suspects. While MacKerrell may be involved in some trouble (because inevitably the Zinco name is always tied to trouble of some sort), a murder by a Zinco is not a satisfying solution to mystery.
But you get my point. If you look for connections, you start seeing them everywhere.
That said, I still have the same frustrations that I mentioned in my previous review—this sort of murder mystery is not well suited to the monthly issue format. In this sort of mystery, the devil is in the details, and the details are the first thing a reader forgets when they have to wait a month between issues. Don’t believe me? Well, did you even notice that earlier in this piece I called Arlen Whelston “Alden” instead? Alden is a completely different character, Alden Albert Kern.
The other problem is that monthly issues are very short, and this sort of mystery comes to life when the investigator interviews characters. Each interview should be a kind of game, where the interviewee has something they want to hide from the interviewer and some sort of lie or abridged truth they’re trying to sell. The fun is in watching an investigator make them reveal something they didn’t mean to in a series of moves and counter moves. But this sort of playful back and forth doesn’t have room to exist, let alone breathe, in such a truncated format.
Continued belowThat’s not to say this isn’t happening. For all we know, Sarah Jewell has already caught several characters in a lie and said nothing just to keep their guard down. But if that’s the case, the payoff is still at least a month or more away, which means that, at least for now, the investigation is missing an extra dimension. For now, our investigators ask questions and seemingly get either plenty of answers or a roadblock. This is particularly glaring in Marie-Thérèse’s ill-conceived questioning of Dr. Caliban, where her approach immediately made him shut down. I don’t know what she thought she’d achieve by throwing around half-baked accusations. “Ah-ha! You practice magic!” is not the gotcha she seems to think it is when literally every guest in the house is there to participate in an occult auction.
But this is a case where I feel like the writing is compensating for the format, because by operating in an overly confrontational manner, the scene between Dr. Caliban and Marie-Thérèse immediately becomes one of the most memorable moments of the issue. A month from now, I’ll remember Dr. Caliban practicing voodoo. It’s a blunt tool, but it serves its function.
Honestly, I’m baffled that this issue is two pages shorter than the usual Hellboy Universe comic. If anything, it needed more. I mean, we’re two issues into this story, and I still don’t know why everyone thinks Mr. Severin was murdered. Yes, he was found dead, but what was it about his corpse that said “murder” and not “untimely heart failure” perhaps? It’s details like this slipping through the cracks that particularly trouble me.
But the biggest problem with the format is in the way it forces time truncation. Every issue needs to end on a cliffhanger, so Sarah and Marie-Thérèse have less than twenty pages to interview seven suspects. Needless to say, there’s nowhere near the space for it, so they only get through four and a half. Which is weird because those twenty pages span an entire day, and it’s weird that our investigators haven’t really engaged with Mr. Huang, Mrs. Li, and Madame Saito properly. There’s no room for a good solution to this problem in this format. Mathematically, it’s far too much for twenty pages to reasonably carry.
That said, given the space restrictions, I do wish the inner cover had been leveraged to double as a list of characters and what we know about them so far, to jog the reader’s memory between issues. I simply can’t help noticing all the extra work the creators are currently doing at the moment, where characters are referred to alternately by their name then their most distinguishing characteristic, just so the reader doesn’t forget. (For example, “Mrs. Li” then “the cook.”)
The frustrating thing is I like what Chris Roberson and Leila del Duca are doing on this issue otherwise, I feel like they’re doing it with one hand tied behind their back. Visually, the MacKerrell and Loveland relationship makes sense—despite the two being so antagonistic toward each other, even working for competing bidders, the two were always close. Right from their introduction, they were shown standing next to each other, constantly occupying the same space, so when the reveal came, it was a perfectly natural extension of what we’d already seen. This is just good storytelling. I only wish they had the space to let more of that come through.
Final Verdict: 6.5 – For the work they’re doing, the creators deserve a better score than this. “The House of Lost Horizons” is at odds with its format. It would have been significantly stronger as an original graphic novel.
