Bowling With Corpses and Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown
Mike Mignola is rightly hailed as a master of mythology. While most famous for his creation of Hellboy, most of his original works have 
involved fantastic realms, horrific creatures, and tall tales. All of this plays into his latest work, Bowling With Corpses and Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown.
In the afterward for this volume, Mignola describes something of his process as a writer and how he completely ignored it this time around. “Start with a character,” Mignola advises, and “the world will grow up around them.” This time, Mignola started with an image from an Italian folktale he read – a young boy bowling with the undead – and then built the story around that idea.
Soon Mignola found himself building a world around that story. The world itself inspired characters, monsters, and gods. All the things a healthy new fantasy world needs to thrive. Throw in a line from Hellboy… “We flow now into Lands Unknown” and Mignola had a mythos. Despite that tip of the hat, however, there is no connection between the Hellboy universe and this new setting.
Mignola acknowledges many of his inspirations in the afterward. Most of the stories, as with the aforementioned folktale, came from his taking an image from an older story then moving in unexpected directions. “Justice Denied,” for instance, features a vampire with long fingernails from Japanese myth, who gets its nails stuck in a tree. Mignola changes the tree to a door, wonders who the door belongs to, and moves off from there. Similarly, “The Soldier and the King” draws inspiration from the Darby O’Gill stories of Herminie Templeton Kavanagh. In this story, however, the titular soldier befriends the king of a far more savage race of little people.
The result is a collection of twisted tales in a world several steps removed from the Shrek movies. There are snarky talking animals acting as a Greek chorus, but little in the way of comic relief. These are more like the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales, meant to offer cautionary lessons with a heaping helping of horror.
The first tale, Bowling With Corpses, sets the tone for what follows perfectly. It twists the classic story of a young man leaving home to seek his fortune. This leads him to bowl with some threatening corpses, winning a prize that seems less than helpful. He faces the standard evil wizards with the hope of winning half a kingdom and a princess’s hand in marriage, but the tale Mignola tells is anything but standardized.
All these stories are accompanied by Mignola’s trademark artwork. Stylized and shadowy, Mignola has an aesthetic all his own, as distinctive as his prose. Visually, there is much that is familiar about this unknown land, yet more that is alien. The finished art is well completed by the contribution of Mignola’s frequent collaborators, colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Clem Robins. While their work here is unlikely to win over those who prefer more traditional art styles, I think it is a perfect visualization of Mignola’s stories.
Dark Horse Comics rates the volume as appropriate for readers 14 and up. I consider that to be a fair assessment. Indeed, 14 is the perfect age to appreciate the subversive nature of these comics. The sensitive should avoid this book, however, as there is a copious amount of bloodshed. There is also a spattering of nonsexual nudity here and there – one bare breast on a pirate queen and a naked undead corpse. There is little definition to these moments, however, and nothing sexual or erotic about them.
Bowling With Corpses and Other Strange Tales From Lands Unknown
By Mike Mignola
Dark Horse, 2025
ISBN: 9781506745886
Company Age Rating: 14+
NFNT Age Recommendation: Adult (18+), Older Teen (16-18), Teen (13-16)
