Abe Sapien #2
Sorry to bring a couple of consecutive Abe Sapien “reviews” to you, my loyal reader(s), especially after a less than glowing bit of writing about issue #1, but I read #2 on the right day and I started to piece some interesting things together about how this book is set up and what it’s trying to bring to the Mignola-verse, at least in the short term.
Abe’s fleeing journey to find some answers about himself in relation to this Armageddon is taking him on a tour of survivors and people struggling to live life and made sense of what’s going on. Last issue, Abe saw what the detached, barely surviving wanderers were doing. This issue, if you can tell from the cover, he checks in with the faithful.
The Big Bads in the B.P.R.D. world are Lovecraftian Old-Gods style monsters. Rebirthed gods that were once worshiped by civilizations that exist outside of our western history books. They’ve lain dormant with no one to follow them until something wakes them. Abe and another B.P.R.D. agent open this issue with a hypothesis that he’s one of the things that woke these old gods. In this flashback, just before he fled, they decide that if he doesn’t discover his ties to the world’s seemingly imminent end, the government (meaning the Bureau brass) may try to find out for him (the implication is that they will try to find out via vivisection). So we now know why Abe is so insistent on fleeing the B.P.R.D. instead of leaning on their resources to help him find these ties.
In the second half of the issue we catch up with Abe on the run as he stumbles into a church in a town that was small enough and remote enough to get passed over by the monsters and has somehow managed to hold together in the face of near total societal collapse. If the Preacher is to be believed it’s his services that keep people together. He says that he’s been doing a service every day “since this started”. The preacher is a total good Samaritan to Abe and is only minimally interested in his fishy appearance. He offers him a place to sleep and excuses himself to go prepare for today’s service.
Turns out the preacher has it in his head that all of this is (big G) God’s will and that Abe will somehow fulfill a destiny that God has set out for them. To him, Abe s not unlike an angel and will transform all the townspeople into something new that will save them all. This brings us back to an earlier insistence that Abe made to Panya (his B.P.R.D. colleague who encouraged him to run from the Bureau) that whatever he is now, he was once a man and possesses a soul, which precludes him from the Christian idea of being an angel since he has both body and soul.
The townspeople aren’t buying this shit. They’ve seen the effects of these monsters, some of them first hand. They aren’t willing to accept their fate as monsters, tortured and abused by their own flesh, as part of God’s plan. Clearly the preacher has been driven mad. He’s seeing the direct affects of other gods which his belief in his God have told him cannot exist, meanwhile, he sees no signs of his God’s influence on their daily lives. He’s reaching to try and explain the unexplained by assigning it to the nebulous concept of God’s will. Abe Steps in to try and calm the parishioners as they revolt against the preacher. Things once again escalate quickly and the book ends with a cliffhanger that threatens our hero’s life, but I have five more issues sitting next to me, so I think he probably gets out of it.
I do like this “Man on the Street: Apocalypse version” that seems to be developing in this series. I hope it continues , but I’ll probably still need to consult that reading order I mentioned in my last post because I’m feeling like I’ve missed something.
Comic was read on 11/2/2017 on the couch at home.
