Mind The Abyss As Sir Edward Heads Underground In ‘Witchfinder: City of the Dead’ #1 [Preview]

Sir Edward Grey returns for another creepy Victorian adventure in Witchfinder: City of the Dead, kicking off the fourth miniseries starring the 18th Century paranormal investigator.

The series is a spinoff of Hellboy, in which a Sir Edward Grey, rendered immortal by a demon's curse, has long been an ally of the titular hero. City of the Dead is co-written by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson, with art by Ben Stenbeck. Roberson and Stenbeck are making their debut on Witchfinder, as the previous series  --- In the Service of Angels, Lost and Gone Forever, and The Mysteries of Unland --- have featured different creative teams, with Mignola, the character's creator, as the connective tissue.

This five-page preview opens in the London Underground, still under construction in 1882. Workers have found a mysterious temple that looks a bit like the Mines of Moria but with more of a snake motif. The two workers who found it have vanished, and nobody knows why, although the zombie/vampire types on the cover of the issue are probably a clue.

Meanwhile Sir Edward Grey is in a particularly cynical mood, after rescuing a young boy who was thought to have been kidnapped by fairies and turned out to have been kidnapped by a pedophile. It makes sense that this would be the worst part of being a paranormal investigator: When the answer to a mystery turns out not to be supernatural, it's always going to be much worse than if it was.

Fortunately the odds of the underground snake temple being supernatural in origin seem pretty high, so perhaps investigating it will put Sir Edward in a better mood. However, Dark Horse has let us know that Sir Edward's longtime enemies from the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra are involved in this story, which does not bode well at all.