The House of Mystery departs the Goblin Market with Fig and Cain inside, leaving them to face the Conception alone. Elsewhere, the newly resurrected Keele boys reunite with Harry in an attempt to find Fig. Now seemingly free from the House, the other regulars toy with the idea of going back to the lives they left behind. Written by Matthew Sturges, art by Werther Dell'edera for most of it with Luca Rossi returning on the last part, as well as different guest authors and artists on virtually every issue. Issues 31-35 of the ongoing series.
So I've been reading House of Mystery since it came out, and I'll say off the bat it is an occasionally frustrating series to follow. It's got a cool, wacky premise, a high fantasy setting of absolutely limitless possibility, and it's possessed of a modern self-conceit that allows it to liberally mock itself. The problems are unfortunately many: protagonist Fig has virtually no motivation, is emotionally fickle, and manages to be a pretty boring person. The rest of the cast isn't much better. The plot itself is at times excessively convoluted, and the answers when we get them tend to be half-assed and poorly explained. While there was a lot of cool atmosphere in the early arcs, now most of those elements have been done away with and there's just not a lot going on that anyone seems invested in.
"The Conception" story arc doesn't really fix anything but at least rolls the ball a little further than any arc before it has. Nevertheless, everything here feels a lot like treading water for issues at a time, and then a climax followed quickly by a cliffhanger. Fig is still pretty intolerable, the Keeles + Harry spend three issues walking nonchalantly through doors, and the rest of the characters are content to wait and see what happens next. A few of the shorts were all right, but are woefully short, and their connection to the plot is usually a stretch. The short "Great Artists Steal" (Sturges' postmodern apology to Neil Gaiman?) while one of the better features is told as a parable to Fig by Cain which is (for one, out of character, and for two:) fairly unrelated to the matter at hand, and has Cain just explain the moral afterward to try and draw it back. There's a lot of just going through the motions, and I can't shake the feeling that Sturges doesn't actually have a plan at all. The strength of the series when it began is absent, and while I hope it finds a good pace again, if I see no signs of improvement soon, I'll have to reconsider it among my monthlies.
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