FINDER

“Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland” #1 has a ridiculously long (and rather fantastic) name for a comic. It also has a new creative team; with John Arcudi and Mike Mignola focusing on some other projects, Kim Newman and Maura McHugh have stepped on board to write this mini-series, with “B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth” artist Tyler Crook joining the duo. It’s an interesting start, and there’s a lot of potential in where it will go forward. But for now, it feels like Crook is performing the heavy lifting. The vast majority of “Sir Edward Grey, Witchfinder: The Mysteries of Unland” #1 is setting up what’s still to come. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first comic outing for both Newman and McHugh (better known for their work in prose), and it feels like they’ve structured this mini-series like a novel. As a collected form, that’s not a problem at all. The pacing there can start out slow, and draw you into the overall story given enough time. As the first part of a se

Since the “Dungeons & Dragons” comics of the ’80s, comics based on tabletop roleplaying games have traditionally included game statistics for their characters and situations, and “Pathfinder Goblins!” #1 is no exception. Before that, though, there are two short stories based in the world of Pathfinder, a popular tabletop RPG that spun off from the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Both of them center, as expected, around goblins, who have become something of a mascot for the Pathfinder line. Both are written with gamers in mind, though one succeeds and the other fails. “The One-Eyed Goblin is King,” written by Adam Warren and drawn by Carlos Gomez, falls flat as a story. It relies too heavily on being a nudge-nudge-wink-wink reference to the Eye of Vecna, a notorious “Dungeons & Dragons” artifact that causes strife among adventurers as they vie for its powers by cutting out their own eyes to replace them with Vecna’s. The problem is that Warren and Gomez’s story shows

I’ll be honest, if John Severin drew issues of “Witchfinder” every month, I’d be pleased as punch. His art is just gorgeous here, a reminder that we have a living legend who’s still active in the comics industry and turning out amazing comics. So for a minute, let’s put aside the contributions of Mike Mignola and John Arcudi, and let me just say that for Severin alone, you should read “Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever.” From the opening panel, with a cloud of smoke billowing around a revolver being fired by the walking dead, we’ve got something special. There’s so much detail crackling in this image; the dead eyes, the startled horse pulling back in fear, the wisps of smoke coming out of the camp fire, even the scrub grass and bushes in the background. It’s the amount of work that people would put into a huge splash page, but it’s just the first panel of the comic. And from start to finish, Severin doesn’t quit. That amount of detail is throughout the entire book, from the opening

It’s fun to wonder which came first: Mike Mignola and John Arcudi wanting to write a western-themed “Witchfinder” mini-series and Dark Horse hired John Severin, or someone at Dark Horse heard that Severin had a hole in his schedule and Mignola and Arcudi quickly said, “We’ll write a western-themed story for him!” (I suspect it was the former, but it’s an entertaining idea to picture the latter.) Whatever the reason, Severin drawing a supernaturally themed western comic is almost always good in my book, and “Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever” is no exception to that rule. Here, Sir Edward Grey is dropped into 1880s Utah, on a stop-over for the evening when he discovers a mysterious burned down church with arcane symbols. And, being a witchfinder and all, it’s not long before he starts investigating. From the very first page, Severin’s art draws you in, from the plains and scrub grass that the carriage is rolling through, to that initial glimpse of the church’s burnt-out shell, barel