MIKE MIGNOLA'S WITCHFINDER

Mike Mignola's Witchfinder is an unsurprising offshoot of his Bureau For Paranormal Research and Defense. Sir Edward Grey has been knighted for his role in saving Queen Victoria from a cabal of witches, and in the first volume of this series, In The Service Of Angels, he is working for the government investigating a series of bloody killings in London. Whatever is doing the killing is linked to an archaeological expedition that found one of the seven lost cities of the Hyperborean Age, and as Grey digs deeper he encounters a secret society, the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra, who may be allies of a sort, or enemies.

In supernatural detective stories, the suspense revolves around first discovering what the danger actually is, and then in how to defeat it. Grey, interestingly, is as much acted upon as actor, and Ben Stenbeck's drawing of him emphasises this: he is not easily surprised, but he does seem very cautious. Which helps this story work well, because it is the surrounding cast which is more interesting: think back to the prototypes like Fu Manchu, and how Nayland Smith is as much as anything a catalyst for the real horrors or sometimes wonders they encounter. The most fascinating of whom is Miss Mary Wolf, a psychic whose visions put the story into perspective. The other thing which works well is Stenbeck's evoking of the Victorian era; we've seen it so many times it risks being cliched, but he finds nice little touches to make it new.

What intrigues me most about the story are the references to other cases which Grey has already encountered, which, like the throwaway mentions in Sherlock Holmes, illuminate only slightly, but pique the curiosity. Given that much of Grey's backstory remains hidden to the reader, that curiosity is strong.

But it isn't answered in the second volume Lost And Gone Forever, written by Mignola and John Arcudi with art by John Severin. Since the story is set in the American West a year after the events of the first volume. Severin was a great artist of westerns in the Silver Age, and he brings the same sort of background perspective to the story that Stenbeck did to Victorian London; the details are both realistic and revealing. The story itself is a bit less focused: Grey is tracking a Lord Glaren from London all the way across America, and arrives in Reidlynne, Utah, where there is something strange at the church, and the locals don't take kindly to questions. He's rescued by a Bill Hickock type named Morgan Kaler, who's accompanied by a backward youth named Issac (there was a similar character in Service Of Angels, Grey is good with the simple-minded) who is older than he appears.

There is also a white woman named Eris leading a group of Indians intent on some sort of revival of their gods and a full spectrum of spectres, including Glaren, wolves and various spirits. It's a full story, perhaps too full, and Kaler in particular might have been fleshed out a bit more. It would be too much to say Grey works better, by definition in Victorian England, but he and his antagonists here seem to be on different planes.

By the way, there's a short story at the end of the first volume featuring another witch-hunter, Henry Hood, in 1667. It's a nice six-pager, but the interesting thing is the presentation of Hood, who reminds me immediately of Robert E Howard's Solomon Kane, still to my mind the best of the witch-hunter characters.

Witchfinder: In The Service Of Angels by Mike Mignola art by Ben Stenbeck (Dark Horse Books, £13.50, ISBN 9781595824837)

Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever by Mike Mignola and John Arcudi art by John Severin

(Dark Horse Books, £13.50, ISBN 9781595827944)

CONAN THE BARBARIAN: THE FILM

The most entertaining thing about this new Conan movie may be the screenplay credit, which it says is based on 'the character originally created by Robert E. Howard. Only in Hollywood can something be 'originally' created, as opposed to created. The oddest thing about the film is that the Cimmerian's name is pronounced 'CONE-in', like Conan O'Brien, the talkshow host, rather than 'Ko-NAN', the way it generally has been before. Though in fairness, even the latter often comes out sounding more like the former when it's said in conversation. The assumption that another Conan movie needs be made rests, I suppose, on the idea that you can do more justice to the character with someone other than Arnold Schwarzenegger. The reason here is to make something closer to Lord Of The Rings than Robert E Howard, and director Marcus Nipsel does a fine job of that—there are moments when Conan's world is both stunning and believable.

In fact, this version is somewhat truer to Howard's world than any of the Arnolt adaptations were.Although it also sets up a simple revenge-style plot, it gives more of a taste of the various nation-states within the Hyborian Age, and gives Conan two sidekicks, neither of whom get enough of a look-in, but the very idea that they'd recapitulate Conan's corsair days is nice. It has a nice line in wenching scenes too. Sadly, Conan keeps leaving people behind, which means Nonzo Anozie, playing Artus, winds up auditioning to be the black Brian , while Said Taghmaoui as the theif Ela Shan is a kind of Grey Mouser to Conan's Fahfrd, but he too doesn't get much of look in. It is interesting, however, that his return in the film illustrates the law of Last Reel Compression, in which time slows down (or speeds up) in line with the running order of the film, and distances shrink if necessary to allow the characters to move from one place to the next to impossible deadlines (see also John Carter).

For all his flaws as an actor, Arnolt was not a bad Conan. He had the anabolic profile necessary (in fact, bore an eerie resemblance to Frank Frazetta's paintings of Conan, see below left) and his accent reminded us that the Cimmerians are indeed northern barbarians. The Governator's problem was trying to keep a straight face (making an interesting contract with, say, Wilt Chamberlain's trying not to) and not softening the character. Jason Momoa, a method-acting veteran of Baywatch Hawaii, actually begins with a sort of softer Conan and gets harder as the story progressing, until he is pretty convincing by the end, if only as a hero, if not Conan. It's sometimes hard to conceive of him as Ron Perlman's son—Perlman is good in the role of his father, and the battlefield birth scenes are excellent, but Perlman brings a lot of baggage from his grotesquerie roles (Beauty and the Beast, Hellboy). But at one point, Momoa too strains the straight face test, when he says 'I live, I love, I slay' I couldn't help but hear Allen Sherman's comedy Greensleeves in which the knight wishes he 'could give up smoting for good'.

The highlight of the film, however, is Stephen Lang, sporting impressive new pecs (and teeth far too perfect for any Hyborian dentistry), as the villain Khalar Zym. Lang is a tremendous actor who has shone in many smaller parts, for Michael Mann in the TV series Crime Story and in Manhunter, as Pickett in Gettysburg and ten years later as Stonewall Jackson in Gods And Generals, and as Ike Clanton in Tombstone), but here he gets to indulge himself, and he sells the character completely. Rose McGowan as his daughter is somewhat less convincing, though the two play a fascinating sort of incest scene, which suggests more motivation and might have conveyed Zym's supreme manipulation. But when McGowan goes one-on-one against the heroine, Rachel Nichols (above left), the battle to be convincing almost reaches an apex of futility. Nichols, like Momoa, starts off drawing incredulity, but tries hard to grow into the role. She's hindered partly by a script that flips her between being aggressive fighter and proto-feminist role model and being screaming damsel needing Conan to rescue her from distress. And the solution is to end her climatic battle with a wisecrack, which actually works.

Which brings us back to the original question, what is the point of another Conan movie if it isn't going to do anything new (which would include going back to the old, pre-movie, idea of the character and his world). As we're bombarded with remakes of the comics and pulps of our (and ours via our parents') childhoods, Howard, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, is perfect fodder for adaptations that will always fall just short of being totally satisfying. And that is because they lack the sense of wonder the originals had. Their makers, and indeed their audience, brought up on JK Rowling and teenaged heroes, may lack it as well. My worry is that our generation, which rediscovered Howard, may have lost it as well.

SOLOMON KANE: THE FILM

It also took me a while to catch up to Solomon Kane, Michael J Bassett's adaptation of Robert E Howard's Puritan swordsman, who was the most ambiguous of Howard's pulp heroes, a sort of 17th century version of The Shadow, and for that reason always my favourite. With that sort of foundation, it was amazing no one got to the character more quickly, and though I'd like to say it was worth the wait, the Shadow comparison is an apt one. Although Bassett gets much about the character right, he is more concerned with creating an origin story, and his Kane has an origin much like the Shadow in the Alec Baldwin film, an evil doer on a massive sadistic scale, who is somehow reformed.

Sadlt, this doesn't really work. The key conflict for Kane is between the sober restrictions of his Puritanism and the unsheathed evil which he encounters; his Kane may well be a sinner but he is also in the spell of this simple version of Christianity freed of paganesque ritual. Howard would contrast this with the unspeakable evils hidden in the dark continent, making a Kane a Kurtz in pulp clothing (see the cover of the Centaur Press reprint of Kane, the version I first read, left).

In this film, Kane, having been sworn off the rape and pillage we see at the film's start by an encounter with a devil who wants him for his own, is hiding out, as it were in a monastery, trying to find himself and lose himself from the devil. He encounters Puritans after he leaves, though the devotion of Pete Postlethwaite and family to the actual tenets of their faith seems somewhat tenuous. Drawn into the fight by the Raiders who massacre the family and kidnap the beautiful daughter, he follows them to his own family's ancetsral castle, where the ultimate confrontation with the masked warrior (hiding an identity obvious almost from the start) and his master, who can call upon great powers of CGI which somehow seem sub-Harryhausen in their awesome power.

Within this simple and predictable format James Purefoy is pretty good, if a little too muscular, as Kane: his inner demons are always externalised, more like Hugh Jackman's Van Helsing than Howard's Kane, though you can see the parallels between Howard's Kane and Stoker's Van Helsing quite clearly. Postlethwaite is excellent in his role, and Max VonSydow has a brilliant couple of cameos as Kane's father, and there is one brilliant scene in which Mackenzie Crook plays a priest gone mad and serving up sacrificial victims for ghouls hidden under the floor of his church. There are some other nice touches: the laying of hands by the evil Leatherface, the demons captured behind mirrors, and even the setting and the everyday people who inhabit it; Dan Lautsen's photography moves equally well between the grimness of the 17th century setting and the gruesomeness of the supernatural.

Sadly, Rachel Hurd-Wood is a boring heroine, who gets her final screams as the CGI monster appears with no purpose except to claim Kane and drain all the drama which has been built previously and make it redundant, kind of like the car crashes in a John Landis movie. Alice Krige, as her mother, deserved a bigger part. But the real cut and thrust of the picture seems to be setting up a sequel, where she is dumped and Kane and his few sidekicks get to go off searching for more devils. I suspect that one may be closer to the real thing, but this was entertaining enough in its generic way.