The first two issues of “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” delved into a rarely explored corner of the Hellboy Universe. Combined with Jesse Lonergan’s art and visual storytelling, it truly felt like nothing else in the Hellboy Universe—and we mean that in the best possible way. However, “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” #3 takes this aspect to a whole other level.
Written by Mike Mignola
Illustrated by Jesse Lonergan
Lettered by Clem RobinsHyperborea is burning, torn asunder by the fury of the first angel. As the city falls, Anum Yassa’s and Miss Truesdale’s lives intertwine, and they are drawn to face their destinies and the wrath of gods.
Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and artist Jesse Lonergan bring the third installment of a new tale of ancient Hyperborea.
James Dowling: “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” #3 is an absolute visual treat of an issue and I can’t wait to dig into everything it puts in front of us, but before that I actually want to mention one of the variants. Elsa Charretier drew an alternate cover for this issue and it’s such a stunner. I also liked this piece as a mini-allusion to “Love Everlasting” (which Jesse Lonergan has illustrated a variant cover of for issue #10 coming out next month); complete with feminine repression and surreal alternate lives, she’s co-created a pretty good thematic companion series to this one.
Charretier is another bucket list artist who I really hope could make the time for a Hellboy Universe series between her other creator owned projects. It feels like Lonergan and Charretier both share a lot of their kineticism with past Hellboy Universe artists like Guy Davis, and Gabriel Bá & Fábio Moon, which makes it even more tempting to see her breakout into her own stylistic riffing on those influences, like Lonergan has.
Mark Tweedale: Aye, she’s definitely high on my list of artists I’d love to see work in the Hellboy Universe. Only a year ago Jesse Lonergan debuted in the Hellboy Universe with his variant cover for “The Sword of Hyperborea” #3, so maybe we’ll be lucky and this time next year we’ll be reading a Charretier story?
Now, before we dive into reviewing this issue properly, I have to quickly address readers planning on reading it digitally: Please do yourself a favor and ensure you are reading it so that both facing pages are visible together. While there are no double-page spreads in this issue, the page layouts are frequently in conversation with one another. If you’re only viewing one page at a time, you are missing a key part of the way the layouts communicate with the reader.
OK, with that said, I’m going to dive straight into spoilers.
You could say that not a lot happens in this issue. Certainly, if you were writing a summary for a wiki, you’d only get a few sentences. But in another way, so much happens. We are made to sit with the silence and feel the weight of events that will echo down through the ages to follow. I’ve praised Jesse Lonergan for his work in our reviews for the previous two issues, especially the way he retains his own identity in the work, but this issue showcases that aspect more than ever. There is a particular way his page layouts move, carrying our eyes through the panels, that is so languid and elegant. It reminds me of moments Mike Mignola has drawn. It reminds me of moments Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon have drawn. But also, it’s uniquely Lonergan.
I was overwhelmed by the quiet, melancholic beauty of this issue.
James: I think I would argue that this book almost gets too decompressed, just because we saw how the last issue could actually balance a folkloric and art-forward style of narration without losing much economy in its exposition. That said, you aren’t wrong that by giving these sequences so much real estate there’s this importance given to the ephemeral. So many Hellboy Universe stories are in conversation with mortality and the ritual of dying, so this truly felt like a confident stride into the significance of varying funeral rites, divinities, and resurrections.
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“Melancholic beauty” is absolutely the right way to describe this too, as it’s a story about a severance in tandem with the moment of self-comprehension. Miss Truesdale and Anum Yassa finally understand their imbrication at the moment of bisection. It was a moment that strongly reminded me of the eulogistic style story of Ted Howards and Gall Dennar in “The Sword of Hyperborea” #1, only this issue carries more purpose than grief. That story was a very concerted epilogue to “B.P.R.D.: The Devil You Know,” while “Miss Truesdale” is purposely putting a lively and uncontainable protagonist into a previously defined era, asking us to see a new layer of nuance and story that is almost boundless.
Mark: There are more than a few similarities between the Yassa/Truesdale and Dennar/Howards plotlines. In particular, this story reminded me of “B.P.R.D.: Hell on Earth—The Abyss of Time” and the ‘Wasteland’ arcs, where after the link between Ted Howards and Gall Dennar is established, Gall lies on the ground like a corpse until he’s found by the Bureau. Fans have had a few theories as to why Gall Dennar and Ted Howards were connected through the Hyperborean sword when so many others had touched the sword and never had their life entangled with someone else’s from another time. Personally, I’m inclined to believe that Gall Dennar was always Ted Howards’s past life, and the sword just folded his spirit back on itself so that past and future versions could experience the same moments in tandem.
And that’s seemingly what’s happening to Miss Truesdale and Anum Yassa too. This is something Mignola does often, and it’s something I love about the Hellboy Universe—he creates a mystery, but rather than explain it, he creates a completely separate story that involves similar elements, and if you’re paying attention, you can piece it together. It’s sort of like the way we’ve often wondered about how Liz Sherman got her powers, and rather than talking about it directly, Mignola explored women that can channel Vril in “Frankenstein Underground” and “Rise of the Black Flame.” Then, just in case people missed it, he deliberately invoked the iconography of the woman in the crystal from “Frankenstein Underground” on the final page of “B.P.R.D.: The Devil You Know.”
I love that stuff. It’s an answer, but it’s an answer not given in words, not explained to the reader, but rather experienced, and in the process, the answer retains ambiguity, it has fuzzy edges, and it doesn’t diminish the original mystery. But, most important of all, by giving us the answer as a story, it’s never just about the explanation. No one looks at “Frankenstein Underground” and says, “Oh, this totally explains what Liz’s deal is.” Instead, it is simply Frankenstein’s story.
And this issue. . . WOW. This issue is doing that sort of stuff everywhere. And I can’t get enough of it.
Like, just look at what this composition is telling us as Lonergan invokes “Hellboy: The Storm and the Fury.”
Art by Duncan Fegredo; colored by Dave Stewart; lettered by Clem Robins
James: Yeah! It’s a story that really lends itself to that style of allusion, as it’s aiming to be a bit more ancestral. We’ve talked previously about how Anum Yassa gets to be a bit of a template to all the future mythic heroes to come, so by showing her recreation, the two lives she embodies, and this journey of comprehension she goes through. The reader gets to see her forge the path for the stories that naturally descend from Hyperborea’s ending. Those dualisms are even exemplified through the shape of the page. As you mentioned, some spreads mimic each other, while in other places panel borders cut singular actions in half and inset panels completely paint over other segments of the page. It pushes the reader to look at how a dual identity in a person can both enrich their experience of the world, and make it confusing or fragmentary. This all feels set to come to a head when Anum Yassa, imbued with the mind of Miss Truesdale, comes up against a mirror of those chafing identities. It’s very thematically juicy.
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Mark: The parallels are drawn everywhere. As you say, there are mirroring page layouts, deliberately constructed to make us compare specific moments. But this happens across the entire issue too. Just look at the color and composition choices of Anum Yassa’s funeral at the beginning of the issue and Miss Truesdale’s near the end.
Time and time again, Lonergan impressed me with the way he puts together a page. Like on the opening page, when the statue falls from the cliff, you can draw a straight line from beginning of the fall, through the subject in each panel, to the impact at the bottom of the cliff. It’s straightforward, clean storytelling. (Mignola does this sort of thing all the time, too.)
Lonergan’s attention to the specifics is why this story works. Long before we get to Miss Truesdale’s funeral, we have Anum Yassa’s, and note the way Lonergan gently gets our attention by treating the colors in a non-literal manner. Anum Yassa’s colors remain the same, but everything else becomes powder blues—people, buildings, trees. It’s not subtle. It’s designed to make an impression and draw attention to the colors. Later, when Miss Truesdale’s funeral does the same thing, it works not just because it’s using the same color palette, but because the first time we saw that same palette, the scene was deliberately constructed so that even on its own it would have an impact on us, and we carry that impact with us through the rest of the issue.
James: Yeah, it uses dreamlike qualities and icons in the same way Lynchian cinema does, by cluttering all these focal symbols together until it’s both dizzying and its richest thematically. Often sound effects will completely absorb a panel, suggesting a dizzying level of noise, or subjects will intentionally be rendered tiny in scenes that would otherwise garner a visible emotion.
I read this issue around the same time as Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s “Tenement” #1, and both have a similar approach of using surreal formalism to look at how the perceptions of a group of people become messily disarrayed. But where that story revels in its ability to break out of conventional page structures, Lonergan keeps his chaos within the frame. There’s no real white space to the page beyond the gutters, and even on the aforementioned inset panels, they sit tidily in a frame of gutters, suggesting an order or predestination to the whole thing, like the consistent arc of Anum you mentioned before. It’s a story that really works to tell you there’s a puzzle in play, and that pieces are moving on the board chaotically, but ultimately as they have and always will move.
Mark: I can see why this would make you think of Andrea Sorrentino’s work. It’s very different, but it comes from a similar place, I think. And yes, I agree with you on the way the layouts have this kind of inevitability to them. They carry you along.
I’m just blown away that we’re getting “Koshchei in Hell” and “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” in the same year. These aren’t just great books, they are among the very best this universe has to offer.
OK, one more thing I have to mention, and I know I’m kind of repeating myself here, but this was just a really nice bit of visual storytelling from Lonergan. In the latter half of this issue Anum Yassa meets Eeos. So. . . what is Eeos?
James: Haha, I was asking myself that when I was reading, actually.
Mark: Well, Lonergan is telling us that Eeos is like Anum.
He’s placed the two side by side and given them the same silhouette.
There are other context cues in the issue, but Eeos is one of the Greater Spirits, possibly even one of the original Watchers. But Mignola and Lonergan don’t make a song and dance about it. They just drop breadcrumbs and let us put it together.
Continued belowJames: Ah, that is really cool! I’m happy we have your eagle eye to pick up on stuff like this. Again, designs like that show just how well a comic can work when you have two confident visual thinkers collaborating on the style of a comic (another thing this creative duo has in common with Lemire and Sorrentino). I think Eeos is a great addition here too, because he’s a voice of pretty unmatched authority, another archetypal teacher in an archetypal story, priming Anum Yassa for one more gladiatorial fight in the final issue.
Mark: I can’t wait. In case it wasn’t obvious, this issue swung hard into my tastes. And after sitting on it for a few days, I feel even more strongly about it. “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea” is one of the great Hellboy Universe stories. Yeah, I know it’s not over yet, but considering what we’ve seen in the first three issues, it’s hard to imagine they won’t stick the landing. I’m going with a 9.5. And, I think I might have to buy a pair of pages from this issue too.
James: See? No one can say you aren’t a reviewer who puts his money where his mouth is. I think I’d give this an 8.5 just because I think there could’ve been a bit more substance to entice readers into digging as deep as we have, but you’re right in saying this is a truly great comic. It’s a masterclass in everything unique to the toolbox of comics, and truly great mythic fiction at the same time.
Final Verdict: 9. Your mileage may vary. For some, this issue may be too slight to be completely satisfying. For others, the meditative approach may be richly rewarding and prompt a more studied reading. Clearly we skew more towards the latter.
