She’s a hunter of beasts. Big ones. Supernatural ones. She’s just entered a presumably locked house without a key. She’s carrying a weapon, and she’s thinking about death--partially because she has the time to do so, but mostly because she’s dying. She’s bleeding out of her abdomen. Her thoughts fade out. Precisely how she got to be in this predicament is the subject of Belle - Ancient Instincts #1. Writer Dave Franchini and artist Rodrigo Xavier deliver a story with colorists Juan Manuel Rodriguez and Maxflan Araujo. The Grimm universe’s dedicated beast-hunter gets another close-up in another fun one-shot adventure. 

Belle is hiking in the woods in Pennsylvania with her friend Mel and her pet turtle Hershey when they run into a line of yellow police tape. There’s a dead victim. A couple of EMTs think it might have been a bear attack. Belle knows better. She’s got this family curse. These things tend to come looking for her. She’s an expert in this sort of thing, and she’s going to have to go to work. She thinks that it might have been a harpy. (Yep. Pennsylvania harpy.) Okay: she doesn’t know for sure what it is that attacked, but she DOES know that it’s her problem now.

In true horror fashion, Franchini doesn’t actually let the beast in question show up until like...halfway into the issue. Thankfully, Belle and her friend are engaging enough dramatically to make the two of them thoroughly likable. So often, monster-based horror ignores the fact that an audience isn’t going to be emotionally invested in the outcome unless people actually care about the potential victims. Belle, Mel, and Hershey are cool people. Really. So when the beast shows up and there are a bunch of modern monster hunters that could really get hurt, there’s an interesting dynamic going on.

Belle’s costume is cool, but the visuals that Xavier is bringing to the page don’t make it feel all that natural. She’s wearing a Batman-style superhero costume that doesn’t feel right in the middle of the woods. It feels more aesthetically appropriate in a big city. The armor seems practical, but the mask and cape feel...a little off. The actual action hits the page at clever angles that amplify the sense of disorientation and aggression. The colors lend WAY more depth to the nocturnal forest than what would have been present in Xavier’s artwork alone. Rodriguez does a particularly good job of adding atmosphere and texture near issue’s end.

Xavier’s art can feel a little bit stiff in places, but the dialogue is crisp and occasionally quite witty. And there’s a slaying scene involving a decapitation towards the end of the book that has got to be one of the more dramatic and graphic deaths on the comic book rack so far this year. The complex emotional dynamic that Xavier nails in that one panel is positively haunting. Belle might feel a bit generically superheroic on the surface, but Franchini and company make her engaging and relatable enough to hold her own regular series.

Grade: B+