"Hellboy: Wake the Devil" places the red demon hero in a longer narrative with memorable villains

Unlike the previous issue of Hellboy issue that I read, which featured several shorter stories and vignettes of Mike Mignola's favorite BPRD agent, Wake the Devil is a longer narrative than I'm used to seeing.   Not only that, but it features - for a change - villains that are somewhat memorable, and foes that Hellboy will struggle in defeating.  After all, what would be the point if he was smashing right through everyone, right?

Wake the Devil introduces us to new villains, such as Ilsa Haupstein, a former Nazi, and Vladimir Giurescu, an immortal who can be healed by moonlight alone, to name just a few.  It also brings back the irreplaceable Rasputin, the antagonist from Seed of Destruction, who is a villain in more than one comic these days (he also makes appearance in the Hugo Pratt's Corto Maltese series).  Hellboy will naturally fight these villains and other demons and monsters, just as he typically does with his large right hand made of stone, punching everything that approaches him straight into oblivion.

Also typical of Mike Mignola's artistic style, the action scenes appear chopped up and out of sync, because apparently Mignola edits his comics a bit too much, almost to the point where what we see does not make a lot of sense, at least when it comes to one frame transitioning smoothly into the next.  This has been an problem in previous episodes, and continues to be still.  I suppose we could just call this a Mignola effect, and strip any negative connotation we may otherwise have with such a style away altogether.   No need to call a duck something else, if all we want is to hear it quack.

This episode is still a step up for this series, which continues to improve with each new issue.  I'm still not crazy about it as a whole, and part of me feels bad, because I honestly want to like it, since Hellboy is a very likable character.  But the stories themselves are simply not very clever,  recycling the same-old-same-old "Nazis wanting to wake up demons and ghouls from the underworld" storyline to the point of exhaustion.  They come across as something that was written for either a novel format or the big screen, but definitely not for comic book readers above the age of 12.  At least not a comic that features Mignola's inconsistent artistic style.
B-