BPRD Hell on Earth - The Pickens County Horror

Written by Mike Mignola and Scott Allie
Art by Jason Latour

The side of me that prefers my comics to be monthly, and not double- or triple-shipped in a month is annoyed that the Mike Mignola machine is pumping out so much product these days in the wake of Hellboy's removal from the schedule, but the true comics fan in me is happy to be getting a second BPRD mini-series, interwoven with the other one that is currently running (The Long Death).

The thing about the BPRD that makes such a publishing frequency work, as compared to superhero comics, is that since the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense is such a large organization, there is always space for new stories within it (as opposed to stories that star Wolverine, who never sleeps or even has time to go to the bathroom).  This two-part mini-series features two agents, Vaughn and Peters, who have probably been knocking around this title for some time in the background, but whom I don't really remember.  The story does a good job of bringing us up to speed where they are concerned though, and there's a cool little Hellboy cameo to boot.

The Bureau is stretched pretty thin since things started going crazy worldwide, and so two agents are all that can be sent when a town in South Carolina calls in reporting strange fog in the mountains, and the disappearances of locals.  It seems that there is a family of vampires living in the hills, although just what they're doing is not all that clear.  Late in the book we are introduced to a vampire researcher (who strangely goes unnamed), who is in the area looking for connections between these local vamps and a creature who first came to America to help quell the Revolution in the 1700s.  Vampires have only rarely been used in the Mignola-verse, so it's interesting to see where this story is going to go.

This arc is being drawn by Jason Latour, who is an interesting addition to the ranks of BPRD artists.  He has a very clean look to his art, and is terrific at capturing the weirdness of backwoods Carolina.  I'm glad that this is a short mini-series, but I am definitely enjoying it.