Hellboy and The B.P.R.D. 1957 – Fearful Symmetry #1: A Tiger’s Dream

Hellboy and The B.P.R.D. 1957 – Fearful Symmetry #1 is a one-shot comic spinning out of the critically acclaimed Hellboy Universe, but isn’t a great comic for new readers. If you were hoping that this would be an easy entry point into Hellboy’s world, you’re out of luck. Recent series, such as Hellboy in Love would be a better entry point, but this one-shot isn’t just a bad place to fall in love with this universe because it’s story is steeped in character history. It’s also just a painfully dull comic.

Alongside old friend Virginia Payne, Hellboy travels to a small Indian village where claims of a Tiger-like monster have surfaced after a string of related incidents. As the two track the monster down, they catch up on life whilst utilizing the fundamentals of anthropology to discover the secret behind the fabled ‘Were-Tiger’.

This book is drab, and spends majority of it’s page count showcasing our two characters having a long conversation about one another, and while that’s worked in previous comics, there’s many reasons as to why it doesn’t work here. The plot in this book is not portrayed as particularly exciting, Alison Sampson flat and inconsistent pencilling work falling to breathe life into the script where it desperately needed it’s visual aesthetic to hold up reader interest. However, with a meandering story that has almost nothing to say thematically, the conversation becomes a wiki-page catch up bit more than something with meaning. It doesn’t drive our characters or help build the plots themes, because there isn’t much of that to begin with. Hellboy and Ginny sleepwalk their way through a plot that gets magical wrapped up without any real challenge or agency. It’s almost as though the book is disinterested with its own concept.

The writing at hand, although dull, isn’t offensively bad. The dialogue is competent and the layouts are easy to follow, but at this point, there’s only really a couple positives to latch onto. This book isn’t helped by it’s intense similarities with the near-perfect Hellboy in Love, which is also a throwback story that features Big Red and Anastasia Bransfield teaming up to chase down a mystery while also exploring their relationship and character identities. The book is a redundant retread of a a currently ongoing title with the same main character, but doesn’t make that redundancy a worthwhile experience through artisan storytelling, both in it’s visual and written storytelling.