Review by Frank Plowright

The Hillbilly, Rondel by name, has a hatred of witches despite one supplying him with a cleaver of unnatural power that once belonged to the Devil. Volume Two featured a cliffhanger ending picked up here, and it’s rapidly apparent why the continuation couldn’t have been packaged in that book. Volume Three is four connected stories bringing together themes and characters from throughout the series.

Eric Powell has shown Rondel’s past and present, along with those he’s associated with and those who’ve troubled him, and most feature in a climactic battle. This is slowly paced. Involving such a large cast requires the time to see them all, and seeing them all generates the tension for what’s coming. Powell’s constantly interesting art is the final selling point. He has no interest in glamour, and even the most ordinary of his creatures have a lumpiness about them, yet they’re rendered with a bony elegance and the reduced tones of the watercolours add to the atmosphere.

Powell doesn’t take the traditional route in telling events, and the storytelling variety keeps the interest up, while the methods comics generally use to present a climactic battle are innovatively subverted. Nevertheless, this is a more straightforward story than the snippets of the previous volumes and doesn’t quite have their strange allure. The best portion is a mother telling her frightened child a story fitting the folklore of previous books. It’s reproduced from the pencilled art with a sepia wash overlaid, and ties in cleverly with the final chapter.

There’s a settling of accounts for a number of characters, and tragedy among the triumph. It is, though, but one of the stories told of the Hillbilly, and another is Red-Eye Witchery From Beyond.