By: Mike Mignola & John Arcudi (story), Tonci Zonjic (art), Dave Stewart (colors)
The Story: Prepare to feel the punishing power of crustacean justice!
The Review: I think all of us have something of a whimsical side, which comes out at the most unexplainable moments. If I’m to be completely honest, I’d admit my tendency for randomness is a little stronger than others. It’s not unheard of for me, in the middle of, say, Professor Wilentz’s Personal Writing class, to crack a “Your mother” joke—to Professor Wilentz. In my defense, she was kind of asking for it: “Why does it have to be so hard?” I mean, really.
Anyway, the moment I laid eyes on the title of this issue, I knew it was going home with me. Even if it totally sucked, at least I’d have a comic in my possession with “Lobster” on the cover. Once you consider the full title, it gets even more irresistible. “Lobster Johnson” by itself is already hilarious and potentially one of the greatest names in comics ever. And that sub-title, “Caput Mortuum,” with its contrasting Latin conveying such pith and import, pretty much ices the cake and makes the whole thing impossible to at least browse through—in my opinion.
Needless to say, I had no clue who Lobster Johnson was or where he came from or how he was related to Hellboy (as the cover indicated), but it didn’t seem to matter. Mignola-Arcudi tell a complete done-in-one that pretty much tells you all you need to know without much effort. It’s a simple tale, an oldy, moldy, good and goldy: Nazis, conspiracy, evil plan, and the hero out to stop them. It doesn’t take much to make this story work, and Mignola-Arcudi do more than that.
Admittedly, some background on ol’ Lobster would’ve been very handy, but it’s enough to know that he’s essentially Captain America in late forties’ pilot-wear with a Batman mentality. He leans closer to the Dark Knight, actually, considering his amazing demonstrations of prep-time and punishing violence. Still, there’s a little of the Cap in the utterly patriotic intensity with which he skirmishes with his enemies, screaming “Justice!” as he does.
In a nutshell, the issue is mostly a brawl fest. There’s little subtlety to the conspirators’ plan and the character work is pretty much nonexistent. The bad guys are unrepentant egomaniacs with little to make them sympathetic. “[O]nce again, we will establish German superiority over your small, petty nation,” they declare, even though at no point in history did Germany ever do such a thing. What little credibility they have almost gets extinguished by corny Deutschland epithets:
“Amerikaner schwein!”
“Komm zu mir, wurm!”
Still, there’s some fun to that kind of thing and on the plus side, you do have Lobster Johnson preventing a chemical attack from a zeppelin over Manhattan.
An issue like this can’t work without some very supportive art and Zonjic provides it in full. He has a Darwyn Cooke-esque quality to his work that straddles the line between comical and serious. Both artists have a talent to make the drama of that period come across convincingly, even though from a distance of years you know how ridiculous most of it is. And both manage to deliver some fairly amazing panels, like Lobster, hanging by one hand from the broken window of a zeppelin, backlit by a lightning bolt in a raging storm, and wrenching out one of the terrorists by his gas mask to let him fall to his (probably just) doom.
Conclusion: Nothing more nor less than a fun romp with a classic genre. Admittedly, the title may be the best thing about the issue, but there are other bright spots as well to make it a worthy read.
Grade: B
– Minhquan Nguyen
Some Musings: – With Lobster, as with Batman, you sometimes just have to believe capable of superhuman feats without any superhuman powers. Leaping out after a parachuting German with no parachute of his own and somehow surviving would be one example.