Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown

A new book by Mike Mignola. By that I mean an actual new book, not another Hellboy spin-off/prequel/sequel/re-imagining/whatever. It has been a while, hasn’t it? To be clear, when I write “by Mike Mignola” I mean a book by Mike Mignola, not: “A book by Mike Mignola and some other people who do their best to kinda look like Mike Mignola.” Hellboy, the work which made him a star, started out as one man’s creative expression and with time grew and grew into a publishing empire of its own. Not always for the best, quality-wise. There have been many fine Hellboy-related comics not done by Mignola throughout the years, yours truly is on-record giving the "thumbs up" treatment to the Hellboy stories drawn by Richard Corben and to the Lobster Johnson series. In the end, however, quality-control gave way. As it must. There are enough Hellboy-related comics to make a decent-size book case tremble in terror. It’s nearly impossible to make so much comics, in so little time, while maintaining the same level of quality.

By the time the grand narrative of the Hellboy series "ended" in the Hellboy and the BPRD series I long stopped following. The good work was dragged down by the mediocre, the sense of personality erased by thousands of new pages. I’d still pop a look every once in a while, but the thrill was gone. Ragnarock.

So it’s nice that Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown gives us a back-to-basics approach. Mignola writes and draws all the stories here, the letters are by long-time collaborator Clem Robins, and the colors by even longer-time collaborator Dave Stewart. And the book does things that are, well… Mignola-esque – the interplay of old myths, fairy tale-logic, and swinging-sword fantasy; a bunch of obvious influences (Mignola never hid the stories that shaped him) that nevertheless became something new under his pencil and pen.

Still, fear creeps up when reading the promotional copy, and not the kind of fear that comes from a well-crafted horror story: “The new book introduces readers to the Lands Unknown Universe – a new shared universe created by Mignola and his longtime collaborator Ben Stenbeck.” Oh dear, oh my.¹ A "shared universe" you say? Cast back your mind, to the history of American comics, and try to think back to how many successful ‘shared universes’ started with this sort of mission statement. I suspect the answer hovers, like some vampire at midnight, around zero.

"The Making of the World."

Hellboy certainly took time to gather its steam before lunching its first spin-off. Hellboy also had something lacking throughout Bowling with Corpses, a strong presence to anchor the various stories around. I hold the not-unpopular opinion that the best of Hellboy stories are these in which he is mostly a vehicle for Mignola to retell an old myth, or to show something he just wanted to draw. “The Ghoul,” “King Vold,” “The Troll Witch” – these are stories with Hellboy not stories of Hellboy. They are done so well it is easy to forget that the vehicle is important to the way the story is told. Hellboy might not be the focus, but his presence still shapes the story, gives it a tangible feel.

All of which to say: even without the gnashing knowledge of the “shared universe” there is something not quite whole about most of the stories in Bowling for Corpses. There’s pay-off to the set-up in most of them, but always with the promise of more to come. Few are allowed to stand by themselves, which rather spoil the atmosphere. There is a constant sense of a world being built-up, instead of character or story. It's like jumping into The Silmarillion before reading The Lord of the Rings. Mignola shows too much for (my) comfort.

One of the reasons Hellboy, as a series, lost its appeal was because it revealed that which was previously only hinted at, shone light where shadows left room for endless imagination. There wasn’t a single moment I can point to, no definite line that has been crossed; but I just suddenly realized the whole thing felt less like Tales of Mystery and Imagination and more like Role Playing Game, with the characters racking-up hit points needed to take down a god. I felt like the air was being let out of the big red balloon.

Now, Bowling with Corpses is not "bad." At some points it’s downright "great." Better to say that fails to hit the highest bars of Mignola’s career, while at the same time clearing the lower ones. Even when built on a faulty basis a Mignola story, especially Mignola going at it solo, has something worthwhile to offer. The ‘fairy tale logic’ is something that is easy to do badly, to be too whimsical, to make it like some generic fantasy. Mignola knows how to allow the stories a sense of internal logic that is never fully revealed, powered more by the mythical morality that guides the actions of the characters.

“Immortality is Dust.”

The best of the lot, by quite a wide margin, is “Immortality is Dust.” A story that almost reads like a "best of" for Mignola’s entire career. In a short burst of pages he gets to do a ghost, a transformed beast man, a dusty castle, a pumping heart, a library cast in shadows. It never becomes overburdened with events, but simply flows from one scenery to another. It’s Mignola at his 1970’s Kirby-infused best², the sense of realistic character gives way to geometric shapes in the form of people. It also serves as a shortened guide to Mignola’s artistic growth, starting in a more traditional style and growing bolder with every page. Over the years, peaking with Hellboy in Hell, Mignola has been slowly becoming more and more "himself," trusting the art is a reflection of the self-assuredness of the storytelling, trusting the readers to follow as he leads. It’s a beautiful story, a superior story, because it is allowed to be itself (even with the annoying “we will be seeing these fellows again” promise), because it has the right degree of pathos to it. Because when Mignola draws a man holding a knife, wondering how he had allow himself to go so far, it is truly Shakespearian. A self-made tragedy to shake the world in in its wake.

"Bowling with Corpses"

I wish there more like it in Bowling with Corpses. The title story, for example, is a trifle. A pleasurable trifle for certain, but held back by its lackluster protagonist, an example of why a personality-filled character like Hellboy is needed for a series of strange events to have any meaning. “Una and the Devil” shows promise, and gives Mignola another chance to draw dripping blood, but it's one of these "we’ll have to wait and see" stories. It has a lot of charm but fails to stand on its own goat-legs.

I am reminded of H.G. Welles’ reaction to Finnigans Wake. Writing a letter to Joyce about how much he disliked the book while being unable to hide his admiration to the work of the man overall: “It's a considerable thing because you are a very considerable man and you have in your crowded composition a mighty genius for expression which has escaped discipline.” Bowling with Corpses isn’t like Finnigans Wake – if anything it suffers from being over-disciplined – but even in the worst of it you can see a hint of that "mighty genius for expression." Here, the problem is the genius is confined in a prison it set for itself.

I am not interested in the shared universe of Lands Unknown, and it seems unlikely you could get me invested with anything less than a double-barrel shotgun, but I am interested in the future work of Mike Mignola. There’s bite to that old dog yet.

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