Comic Review: Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Seven Wives Club (Dark Horse Comics)

In a ‘must buy’ of 2020, Mike Mignola teams up with artist Adam Hughes and colourist Dave Stewart to deliver a wonderful tale of Hellboy, from Dark Horse. This one-shot entitled Hellboy And The BPRD The Seven Wives Club delivers in a big big way.

It’s 1992, Savannah Georgia US. Hellboy visits a woman in a police station holding cell. It’s all about her breaking into a haunted house, regarding Walter Wakeman, and his seven wives. (NOT Rick Wakeman prog-rock keyboardist and his album Six Wives of Henry The Eighth. AND not Father Abraham had many sons, etc. Just sayin’). Anyway, their visit to an abandoned medical school uncovers layers of creepy stuff, not revealed in this review, and not spoiled in this review either.

Trust me to say that this is a beautifully realized tale, with astonishingly well-crafted illustrations to match the zig-zag of the story. Mignola is at his best and surrounded by besties too. Awesome lettering by Clem Robins. There is a particular pleasure in reading a book like this when everything goes SO well for the creative team. The atmosphere, the imaginative scenes of macabre and menace, the background wallpaper rendering, the rending of flesh, the burning of the midnight oil. There’s plenty of black line and black shadow infecting the pages, illuminated with ghastly pale light, the beckoning of the sprites, the screaming of the undead. The skulls that chatter, the comic that matters.

You gotta pick up this one! It’s a one-shot and you get one shot at it!

Dark Horse, Hellboy And The BPRD The Seven Wives Club, $3.99 for 24 pages of content. Mature