Abe Sapien: The Drowning TPB

With “the Drowning”, Mignola takes all the promise and potential of Abe Sapien in his own miniseries and gives us a simple story that could have been so much more. Rather than making this a continuation of his development in BPRD, uncovering his origins and his past, we instead get a sort “year one” concept of Abe’s first solo mission for the bureau without Hellboy.

There are some interesting concepts in the first issue dealing with their doubts of whether or not he is capable of leading a team and in many ways this should have been a “coming of age” style piece that showed some kind of growth for him throughout. There are a few moments where you can see Mignola attempting to touch this subject matter but it comes across as shallow, barely even broaching the subject. Instead, Abe is more of a passive character that lets the demons and monsters of the story wash over him. He deals with them accordingly in order to accomplish his mission, but there aren’t many character moments for him to shine.

That being said, there is a bevy of mystical miscreants and powers of darkness that provide a colorful background for the story. Here, Mignola is in his element. He dives through folklore and mashes together myths and legends to create new gothic tapestries like a fish takes to water. As with all other books in the Hellboy universe not drawn by Mignola himself, I felt that much of the weak elements of the story would have been over looked had you his beautiful artwork to soak up. In his place, Jason Shawn Alexander takes up the pencil chores and does a brilliant job if not in a completely 180 degree direction from Mignola’s simplicity. Unlike Duncan Fegredo who has taken up the task of drawing Hellboy’s newest adventures, Alexander doesn’t have many parallels in his style to Mignola. He masters the mood however and is a definite asset to the book.

I had hoped for more, but in the overview I found the book fun and fast if not only a scratch on the surface of Abe Sapien.