Summary: Just when it seems that the vampire queen Vesperra's conquest is at hand the village elders supercharge Scarlett to save the day.
Plot: I said in my reviews of the earlier issues that I loved all the genre call outs this book had, from the obvious allusions to King Kong, The Land That Time Forgot and The Lost World to the less obvious easter eggs to Herge's Flight 714 to Sydney( I'll have to remember to check out how you felt about that story Confessor) but at the end of the series I think the call outs out numbered the actual plot elements. It's still a really fun book, don't get me wrong, but there was little here that was really about Hellboy and if you take out all the cool shout outs to other fun stories and films what you're left with is pretty thin and forgettable. What's worse though is that the action of the conclusion is all related second hand after the fact by Hellboy to a group of the young Ape-Men which leads to the conclusion feeling really detached and lacking any emotional punch or sense of danger. These kinds of prequel stories are of course always going to suffer slightly from that as we all know these characters have to survive this ordeal as we see them later on, but because we don't even see the action first hand and so much of it is conveyed only by text from Hellboy it feels especially low stakes here which is a shame because with the set up of a mysterious island and an ancient vampire there was a lot of potential here. 
Art: There are some really and truly great sequences of art here by Rousseau that are just so much fun and although it puts in a valiant effort in propping up this story it just isn't stunning enough to make this a slightly mediocre adventure. It's not for lack of trying though, with the plot hamstringing him with Hellboy telling the story of the clash of the gorilla god and the giant vampire bat Rousseau does find some interesting ways to illustrate the battle( I especially liked the image of the two clashing in the smoke of a campfire as Hellboy narrated) but he shouldn't have had to have tried so hard to squeeze it in. When you have Rousseau on art who excels at fun action scenes and cartoony monsters why don't you let him go crazy? If there was ever a time to employ the Marvel-Method this book was it.
Grade:6/7

Summary: When Jessica begrudgingly returns to college after a disastrous first semester she has more trouble than poor grades and a regrettable one night stand.
Plot: I'm not a fan of dumb jump scare movies so I've never seen a single one of the Conjuring films so I almost didn't pick this book up as its main draw was being billed as being a book with clues to the next film installment but the cover by Bill Sienkiewicz made me pick it up and I'm glad it did! As of now, you don't need to know anything about the "conjuring universe" to get into this book, and instead of coming off as just a cheap cash in promotional comic for an upcoming film it comes off as just a really fantastic horror anthology which is always great to see. The main story about a young girl returning to college for a second semester after a troubling start to her freshman year is a bit of a slow burn, but the juxtaposition of occult goings on and Jessica's everyday attempts at getting her life back on track created a fantastic sense of foreboding that just permeated every image. But as much as I loved that story and I'm excited to see where it goes the second feature by Snyder about Death stalking a man through his life after he stole a coin from a woman's mouth at a wake was the real winner for me. The way it went from giving us the idea the guy was a murderer to being a victim was pulled off fantastically well and the twist ending that the cabby was actually Death felt like something right out of an old Warren mag. On top of that, the parodies of old ads from comics but with supernatural twists was really fun! I seriously can't believe I almost missed out on this book.
Art: Although Gary Brown did a great job of giving the first feature a great sense of mood,Denys Cowan was the real winner here. I seriously love his work and I don't understand how he isn't in more demand these days.
Grade:10/10