Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Lands Unknown is the new project from Hellboy author Mike Mignola. He showed his new vision in Bowling with Corpses and Other Strange Tales, a collection featuring a variety of settings and characters in little bite-sized snippets that gave us a taste of this universe, the concepts and themes we can expect to see again. Uri Tupka and the Gods: Another Story from Lands Unknown is the first of his stories to explore these new territories in some depth. The protagonist is bald and grey-bearded Uri Tupka, formerly a doctor of theology. He has to flee his house in the middle of the night to escape death for daring to defy the Emperor. With nothing but the clothes on his back he begins a perilous journey to the furthest corner of the Lands Unknown, using all his spiritual and arcane knowledge to search for the Gods whom everyone is sure abandoned their world long ago.

Uri’s quest unfolds in a multi-layered series of recollections and digressions, as right from the start we understand that he is telling the tale of his journey to someone as they drink together in an inn, but a secondary story another person told him is weaved in amongst this retelling. The density of this information that mixes events, folklore, prophecy, history and geography amongst his encounters with mysterious forces is doled out to us by Mignola as if he is uncovering painted Russian dolls, one nested inside the next. His beautifully semi-abstracted forms of shape and shadow are given richness and intensity by Dave Stewart’s amazing colours with some sequences, particularly where Uri encounters a coven of witches, erupting off the pages with blazing fervour. Whether Uri achieves his objective is for you to find out, patiently unravelling the maze of exposition presented here. His story is not complete, and there is more to come in Uri Tupka and the Devils.

An afterword by Mignola explains a little of the backstory around the creation of this book, including why Uri Tupka has a very familiar face. The last fifteen pages are sketchbook excerpts: pencil sketches of people, places and creatures, thumbnails and notes, and two inked, finished covers rejected by Mignola before the pencil drawing and final inked version of the image that appears on the front of this volume.