Tomorrow John Arcudi’s twelve-year run on “B.P.R.D.” comes to an end. It began humbly with “Born Again,” a short story in the “Hellboy Premiere Edition,” and grew to a run of 118 issues (plus a few more short stories). And it’s not just a big run either. Anyone that’s read the series will attest to the remarkable storytelling in this series.

So today the Mignolaversity team is looking back at the series and picking their favorite moments—five from each us—and we encourage you, our readers, to do the same in the comments.

MIKE ROMEO

“B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground”

Johann in with the ladies

Johann’s humanity is something that is always up for debate and discussion. Is he feigning? Is he losing it? Is it already lost? Did he ever truly have it? These are the questions that swirl around any real talk on the character and his motivations. So, I submit to you, the above image. It’s one of those moments where I’m lead to believe that Johann is doing all he can to cling to the humanity he once had. In this clinging, he seems to focus on some very specific hallmarks.

The moment Johann was able to inhabit a flesh and bone body again he went straight for the obvious: the pleasures of the flesh. This leads to the above panel, with an over-indulged Johann slumbering peacefully. He seems contented in this moment, which leads me to believe that this isn’t a charade for him. At least not yet. In this moment readers can really experience something that John does really well with the series: the brief moment of peace. You know it was hard fought to get, and that it won’t last nearly as long as it should, so while there’s happiness in it, there’s also an underlying sorrow that helps to color the moment.

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Russia”

Johann has knuckles

While my first pick was about peace, this one is all about turmoil. Johann’s fresh from Russia and sporting a brand new look, which leaves Kate with some obvious questions and concerns. While now, at the end of the “Hell on Earth” cycle, we know that Kate had nothing to worry about, this was a big question mark at the time. Why would Iosif, leader of the Russian S.S.S. give Johann this suit? Can he be trusted? It’s Kate’s duty to ask these questions and Johann does not react well.

His response is another human proclivity: violence. ‘I have Knuckles now’ is part of his argument in keeping that suit. In other words, I’m now equipped to maim. This is a real turning point for the character, which set him on a course that’ll ultimately lead to him sealing himself inside the Sledgehammer suit. Another striking part of this moment is how he chooses to end it: like a child. He basically declares ‘I don’t wanna’ and stomps away.

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Reign of the Black Flame”

Iosif’s rampage

Another key turning point is what Iosif experiences in “B.P.R.D.” #118. This is a character who, to this point, had been trying to gain the reader’s trust. Johann’s new suit, laughing at Varvara, these were moments meant to endear and communicate a certain type of character. The misunderstood monster, if you will.

All of that changed with this issue, literally setting the character on the road to Hell. After being eviscerated and left for dead, Iosif rises to take revenge on the beasts who attacked him. With a red curtain unfurled like a flag of war behind him, Iosif looks down upon the helpless, seemingly sad monster that dangles below him. There’s no pity in the formerly jovial Russian’s heart, as he sends the creature plummeting to his death.

I’m going to cheat a little by piggybacking a second moment here, because Iosif wasn’t done ridding the world of monsters just yet.

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While his first dispatching may have seemed cruel, his second is downright sinister. It takes a certain kind of person to look someone in the eye and squeeze the life out of them, and here Iosif proves himself to be just that. Smearing him like a bug across the wall is the icing on this psychotic cake. And that dialog, it cuts to the bone!

“B.P.R.D.: The Dead”

Roger has pants on

Let’s lighten the mood a bit, shall we?

One of the elements John brings to his storytelling is his sense of humor. Sometimes dry, sometimes dark, it’s something that he baked into his time on “B.P.R.D.” The above passage is neither dry nor dark, though, and is something that makes me audibly guffaw every time I see it.

Daimio is such a square that he has a really hard time fitting in with the band of misfits and weirdos that make up the B.P.R.D. It seems that, in the beginning, Daimio viewed poor ol’ Roger as king of the weirdos, and that dang door knocker on his crotch did not help things. At all. So, in Daimio’s mind, pants would be the cure.

Well, it’s clear how that went.

When I knew that this was going to be a moment on my list I went and looked it up. And even though I knew it was coming, it still made me laugh out loud.

“B.P.R.D.: The Long Death”

Giarocco and the grenade

There are so many memorable, noteworthy moments in this mini. The baptism scene, Daimio coming face to face with the Daryl the wendigo, Johann realizing he was dreaming. For all of the notable moments in these pages, none of them were nearly as impactful as seeing Giarocco pull out that grenade.

Well, maybe seeing it go boom might have had a bit more of an impact.

Agent Carla Giarocco was an immediately likeable character, as John set up her personal life and pretty quickly established her take-no-shit attitude. He had just shown us actual pictures of her kid mere pages before this… ahem… explosive conclusion, which came on the heels of her skyping in to her family back home. It felt like she was ascending, becoming more important to the team and the narrative, then boom.

And boy was it a long thirty days.

Fortunately, issue two opens with her in a hospital bed, spitting fire at Johann yet again. It was a relief and a testament to John’s work. To so quickly endear a character to the readers is no small feat. And to do it all just to (seemingly) clean her clock? It’s bold, man. Real bold.

MARK TWEEDALE

“B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine”

Kate cuts off the Marquis’s finger

It’s no secret that Kate Corrigan is my favorite “B.P.R.D.” character, and throughout Arcudi’s run on “B.P.R.D.,” Kate was always fantastic—I could have picked a dozen or so favorite moments with her alone. But Mike, Brian, and I agreed on only five moment per person, so I’m picking this one, the moment that she first won me over. And this isn’t even the best part of the scene—that comes a few pages later when the full impact of what Kate has done becomes apparent.

Kate doesn’t have any enhanced talents like Abe, Liz, Johann et al., but that doesn’t mean she can’t hold her own. Arcudi never tried to turn her into a superwoman—in fact he made a point of showing how human she was—and that’s what I love about her.

And god, I miss her.

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Grind”

Johann waiting in Steelkilt’s

A ghost in a bag, waiting in a coffee shop—John Arcudi has a truly incredible ability to distil the themes of his story to a single, powerful image. Johann’s struggle with connecting to people is a recurring theme throughout “B.P.R.D.,” but this moment was a nice way to remind us that as distant as Johann often is, he is still human and he is trying to make that connection, even if so many of his fellow agents never see that effort. Johann lives in isolation from the others, where no one really puts in the effort to try to relate to him, instead they blame him for being obtuse about the human condition. Johann has to consciously force himself to think about the perspective of others, and even then it’s often too much of a leap from his own daily experiences for him to accurately read people.

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And yet Johann was the only one to see Aaron the barista’s struggles and attempt to help, and all his fellow agents see is a ghost sitting with a cup of coffee.

“B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls”

Daimio and Abe bonding

I agonized over which scene to pick here. I wanted to pick one of the quieter character moments, and there are so many of them that I love for numerous reasons—I could do a list just of these quieter moments. In the end, I chose this one because of the solidarity here. Daimio has no real reason to go with Abe on his quest to learn more about himself, but he does. He just goes to support his friend, and they become deeper friends in the process.

This is a defining aspect of the “Plague of Frogs” cycle. Time and time again the characters invest in each other’s problems and help them get through it. In “Hell on Earth” the characters are divided and they face their problems alone.

This is one of the reasons I think Liz goes adrift for so long, why Johann loses touch with his humanity, why Devon becomes distanced from the others, why Abe leaves the Bureau… Kate was left with a broken Bureau, trying to hold the pieces together. She was the only character left that still tried to engage in the problems of others.

That’s why when she died, she died because she was there for Panya and it ripped my heart out. (If I may, I’d like to shout out to Laurence Campbell for drawing that sequence so beautifully.)

With Kate gone, I want the others to step up and pull together as a team again.

Moments like this one with Abe and Daimio really make this series for me, and their absence in “Hell on Earth” made me feel the bleakness of the end of the world more than all the disasters and monsters. No matter how bad things get, as long as the characters invest in the worries and concerns of their teammates, I feel like they’re holding on to what’s most important.

“B.P.R.D.: The Warning”

Andrew Devon hates phone booths

This is kind of a cheat really, because it’s two moments.

Devon’s first mission for the B.P.R.D. ended up with him stuck in a phone booth surrounded by werewolves. It was a fantastically tense moment. And Arcudi played off that moment beautifully in “The Warning”…

I know, most of the moments I’ve selected are pretty somber, because those are the moments that’ve had the biggest impact on me, but these books are full of character-driven comedy moments that reward long-term readers. And it’s things like this that make these characters feel so real too. Devon can be an asshole at times, but damn it, he’s a very human asshole, and despite his shortcomings, I still feel for the guy.

“B.P.R.D.: The Black Flame”

Liz mourns Roger

This is my favorite moment from “B.P.R.D.” In fact, it may be my favorite moment in comics ever. Back in the days before Arcudi came on board “B.P.R.D.,” I was adamant that Mike Mignola was the only person that could write these books. They just didn’t feel right when someone else was writing. And while “The Dead” did a lot to quell my misgivings, it was “The Black Flame” the utterly obliterated them. John Arcudi didn’t just ape Mignola’s writing; he brought his own sensibilities to the series and did stuff I previously couldn’t imagine these books doing.

It’s an audacious book. We had Mr. Pope show up in a board meeting dressed like a classic superhero villain and then in the same arc we had this moment:

Arcudi always knows when to let the images talk. He understands visual storytelling on a level that leaves me in awe. The agony in these pages gets me every time. I love the way we get to take in Roger’s room and feel his absence. I love that we don’t see Liz crying, but her nose is red, indicating she’s already cried out by this point.

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Roger never came back after this. Arcudi wasn’t gaming our emotions. This moment was written with absolute honesty.

I could list dozens more moments, I really could, but this is the pinnacle for me. Thank you, John.

BRIAN SALVATORE

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Reign of the Black Flame”

Iosif Stands Up for Johann

One of the first “B.P.R.D.” stories that I read in singles, as it was coming out, was “Russia.” Iosif, at the time, seemed to be this cagey character, who I didn’t trust in the slightest. He was a tough nut to crack, and it took a long time for me to be fully convinced that he was on the Bureau’s side, truly.

In “The Reign of the Black Flame,” I began to believe, and there was no bigger moment for that than when we saw the rage inside of Iosif on behalf of Johann. The two had a bit of a natural friendship, as both men existed in bodies they barely recognized but had learned to co-exist with. When Iosif learned that Zinco was stringing along Johann, he went apoplectic. This moment managed to both bring Iosif firmly over to the Bureau’s side in the eyes of the readers, and gave a rare glimpse of friendship at the end of the world.

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Return of the Master”

The old guard, together one last time

Some moments feel momentous in hindsight, whereas others are clearly important in the moment. This scene manages to pull off both of those feats. On one hand, we had not seen Johann, Abe, and Kate together in quite some time, so there was a bit of a nostalgic pang to the scene at the outset. Couple that with the reality that the Bureau was facing one of their gravest threats ever, and the scene felt ominous.

My former Mignolaversity partner David Harper said that this scene made him feel hopeful, that as long as the three of them were together, everything would be ok. He wasn’t necessarily wrong, but they were never together again, and two of the three are now dead, so while it was ok while they were together, it would never happen again.

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: Nowhere, Nothing, Never”

Johann crosses the line

Johann’s grip on humanity has been a theme throughout the series, and nowhere was there more of a disconnect between he and his fellow Bureau agents than when he crept out of his containment suit to take over the body of the recently killed Enos in order to complete the mission he was on. To Johann, this was a simple use of his abilities; to his fellow agents, especially Nichols and Gervesh, this was the crossing of a terrible, terrible line.

The scene, horrifically illustrated by Peter Snejbjerg, felt every bit as disturbing as Nichols and Gervesh thought it was, but also seemed like the logical decision for Johann to make. It was a moment of true warfare – every bit as terrible as you’ve heard.

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: A Cold Day in Hell”

A radio tower?

Could the world literally be saved by a simple radio tower? It appears so, as there is a radio tower broadcasting a chant that keeps Varvara from being at her most evil. At the time, I compared this to an episode of LOST, and I stand by that: this was the sort of mysteries that LOST perfectly integrated into a larger story, and was just the right mix of logic and fantasy.

“B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Reign of the Black Flame”

Prospect Park

Could there be any other scene to end this article on? The Prospect Park sequence remains one of the most haunting sequences in any book—comic or otherwise—I’ve ever read. The park is overrun by folks who have committed suicide—they came together to do so because, as Johann so heartbreakingly says, they didn’t want to be alone.

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This sequence was a stark reminder that there are no real happy endings in this world—people die, sometimes horrifically, and we have to pick up the pieces and keep moving. At the end of the world, your stomach for atrocities changes, and walking through a living graveyard becomes part of the job, and not the event that breaks you forever.