By Mignola, Arcudi, Latour, Campbell & Stewart
Publisher: Dark Horse
ISBN: 9781616553951
From Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe comes this second world war tale of a powerful iron battle suit, The Sledgehammer, deployed into France in 1944. Supported by US Soldiers, the aim of the suit, and the man inside, is to test the suit’s capabilities whilst confronting a group of bedded-in Nazis. Although the suit performs well, it encounters some strong, and unusual, resistance that overpowers it and it’s only the determination of the few surviving soldiers that get him carried out of there, now little more than a dead weight. They meet more Nazis on the road, keen to take the powerful suit for themselves, which sees a heroic action by the retreating US group but a chest wound for perhaps the meekest member of the group, Redding, after he displays some outstanding courage. They end up hiding in a barn, surrounded by German troops, heavily outnumbered, and facing certain defeat.
Redding is now dying, and receives a vision of what will happen to his comrades in the coming hours, but he also learns a little more about the occupant of the suit, what powers it, and how he can help. He leaves his body and takes possession of the suit, bringing it back to fighting strength and enabling it to confront the menace outside the barn.
But it’s not just the Allies that have a secret weapon weighted very much towards the paranormal. The Germans have the Black Flame, and now the two creatures are set to clash when The Sledgehammer is sent to retrieve a stolen experimental plane and its pilot.
This is billed as Horror, but of all the Mignola books this reads more like a straight superhero comic than anything else he’s done. Horror elements are present, but the strong and somewhat obvious parallels between Iron Man and Captain America can’t help but steer your preconceptions. It’s not a bad tale, but personally I felt the artwork prevented us from getting to know the characters in any depth which kept the unfolding events at a distance. I would have liked to have got to know Redding a little more and for there to have been time to make the Black Flame a little less two-dimensional. If you like Mignola’s other work you’ll no doubt enjoy it, but perhaps not as much as the likes of BPRD and Hellboy.
And if you liked that: Pick up Hellboy In Hell
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