Over the next appearances we’re introduced to Roger’s innocence, which is another massive part of why Roger works. Once Mignola starts really writing Roger the character in Conqueror Worm, his voice starts to come out. It’s so distinctive you can almost hear it resonate in your head as you read it. He reads like an adult child. Not in a creepy way, just in that he’s this profoundly new and innocent being in the world, experiencing most everything he sees for the very first time. It’s this childlike innocence that also makes us, the readers, immediately defensive of him. I personally do not like seeing Roger in danger. It’s heart-breaking. You don’t want him to have to deal with badness. You want to protect him.

As the B.P.R.D. series emerges, we also see that with this innocence, there is also Roger’s nature as a blank slate. This again, makes such narrative sense. He is a constructed being, very much a person, but his brain, or whatever’s in there, doesn’t work like a human’s. While there is a true Roger inside him, the Roger that presents himself on the outside is sort of a chimera or the different personalities he’s exposed to. He goes from a wild animal to a character out of Paradise Lost to a friendly comic relief character, until finally, through too much exposure to fighting and Ben Daimio’s hard edged personality, he’s a killing machine.

That Roger is a blank slate that can be melded by those around him lends itself to the ease at which different artists can bring different moods and emotions out of illustrating him. Mike Mignola’s Roger is a brooding, haunted figure, Guy Davis’s Roger is a giant kid, while Richard Corben’s Roger is pretty scary looking. All of this is true on paper. No artist is bringing out an attribute of him that doesn’t fit, but the depictions are allowed to be wide ranging.

Roger also dies. He’s not present for all that long. We meet him and love him and then we lose him. It hurts. With Roger’s death, I think many of us lost our favorite character in B.P.R.D. at that point in time. The books really let us grieve too. The entire arc following his death is about Kate’s desperate attempt to bring Roger back. And after the whole multi-issue arc, Kate’s mission ends badly. The book she was looking for was lost. She couldn’t bring him back. Roger was gone. He couldn’t come back. To me, this speaks more about Roger’s humanity than a lot of the other stuff. Humans die and don’t come back. We’re not gods. We’re not messiahs. We’re just people. We’re here and we make lives for ourselves, try to make what differences we can, and then we’re gone. We don’t last forever. Our memories might though, and that’s the best we can ask for. That’s Roger’s plot in a nutshell.

Johann goes to Roger’s spirit in the afterlife in one of the most powerful moments in the whole series. Roger is now completely at peace in his little heaven. They say their goodbyes, and Johann leaves. The following reveal destroyed me. We see Roger’s true spiritual form; a baby boy with a ball. Innocence, happiness, childhood, peace.

Roger’s central thematic conflict is his wrestling with place between man and thing. He really isn’t a man. He was an inanimate object grown in a lab, built in a perverse experiment. But his background ends up irrelevant by the end of his story. His actions and relationships were what he was defined for. I think Roger ultimately represents us, or at least how Mike Mignola and John Arcudi think about the spirit of people. He’s a pure soul. He has his ups and downs. His personality runs the full spectrum of the human condition. Anger, sadness, loneliness, happiness, innocence, childhood, adulthood, life and death. He’s everything. He’s human.