Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart

subtitled & Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown. With lettering by Clem Robins.

Y’know, I never seemed to hit Mike Mignola’s work at quite the right time. I’ve long been interested in the Hellboy and BPRD franchises, but every time I managed to pick up a book, I was quickly flummoxed by being required to know far more back story than I had grasp of in order to enjoy the current one I was trying to read.

So it’s honestly really great that I could hit the ground running here in Mr Mignola’s new project, where he builds an entirely new mythology in a world similar to our own yet very different. The title story is actually based on an Italian folktale, but Mr Mignola invents a brand new realm, new challenges, new rewards and a bittersweet ending. Folk tale aficionados will see the twist coming from a mile away but who cares when Yeb has arguably the coolest melee weapon of all time?

The rest of this collection’s stories follows less of an overarching narrative — I don’t believe we see Yeb again in the rest of the book — than it sweeps broadly through this fantastic new landscape, picking out fresh and seemingly random tales for the reader’s delectation. These tales lean towards the horrific side of fantasy: no surprise given the author. But Mr Mignola’s mastery of suspense has only grown since the other books I’ve read of his, particularly in the tale Una And The Devil, where a blacksmith’s daughter facing the gallows in the morning finds a different kind of salvation… and vengeance. That tale especially shows a flair for creativity quite different from the more standard folk tales on which most of this book is based.

I was also really pleased by the inclusion of an author’s (self-deprecating) note as well as a wonderful sketchbook with commentary. The lightness of Mr Mignola’s pencils in those additional pages was actually quite shocking to me. His inks add such a deliberate heaviness to his pencilwork that seeing the latter without the former is almost jarring, like viewing a skeleton stripped of meat and sinew.

I’m really excited to see where this new universe takes us. As much as I wanted to like Hellboy etc., I could never really get into it, so am happy to find such a terrific jumping on point from which to enjoy Mr Mignola’s work going forward.

Bowling With Corpses by Mike Mignola & Dave Stewart was published January 21 2025 by Dark Horse Books and is available from all good booksellers, including