I didn’t actually write down any notes when I was reading Cradlegrave. I guess because I just wanted to read it without having to stop every other page and so that I could pretend (if only to myself, if only for a little while) that it was something that I was reading for fun (although “fun” is very much the wrong word to use to describe the experience of reading this comic). I know that if I had been writing things down tho - the word that I would have written down and unlined three times would have been sticky [12]. At this point in time I think that maybe I need to admit to myself that I’m just much too old to be eating sweets. Still at lunchtime today (for whatever reason) I thought that it would be a good idea to buy myself a packet of wine gums which (more fool me) I managed to completely devour in the space of a hour. Now my mouth feels all sicky sweet, coated in chemicals [13] and just kinda - well - sticky. Do you know the feeling? Well - that’s the sensation that Cradlegrave does it’s best to replicate: only inside of putting it inside your mouth - it puts it inside your brain: and instead of it being just the side-effect of eating a whole packet of wine gums - here it’s masking something a lot more unpleasant and a lot more dangerous.

All of this is to say that if you’ve previously read an issue of B.P.R.D. here and there: Hell on Earth is going to be a little bit of a jump. Again with the X-Files - it’ll be like tuning in only to find that the world was ending  - several major cities had already been destroyed - Scully was a wanted fugitive and Mulder had turned into a white werewolf-monster-thing.

Stanisław Lem was a Polish science-fiction writer who thought that contact with alien lifeforms would be nothing like it appears on Star Trek: all easy and sanitized. As a quote from his most famous book Solaris has it: “Any attempt to understand the motivation of these occurrences is blocked by our own anthropomorphism. Where there are no men, there cannot be motives accessible to men.” Or: if something’s not human - it won’t think like us: and it’s pure vanity to assume otherwises. If you take that idea and apply it to the wonderful world of costumed heroes then: you get Supergod (no relation to Grant Morrison’s Supergods). Or if that’s a bit too vague for you - then I’d say this - what if every nation on the planet had a Dr Manhattan? And what would happen if those Dr Manhattans went to war?