Hellboy: Beginner’s Guide, Concluded

PART TWO: Volumes 5-8
Hellboy II got its ass handed to it thanks to The Dark Knight’s stellar debut. It’s a shame Hellboy opened only a week before Batman—it was going to be hard enough to hold market share anywhere in this summer of superheroes, but having this Batman cut into your box office after only one week is really unfortunate.

Returning to the comics: Halfway through the eight volumes of the main canon, Mike Mignola has established himself as a consummate storyteller. He has created his own bizarre pulp/Lovecraftian cosmology with a central mystery both personal and universe-shaking, and at the same time layered the books with so much fascinating and obscure folklore that the world feels surprisingly real, considering that it’s populated by vampires, giant bug things and heroic blood-red demons.

Hellboy has a simple surface: Woven with weird bits of legend and victoriana, a giant red monster dude punches other giant monsters, and sometimes he makes wisecracks. But Mignola has created a world that provides endless stories through inventive combinations of source material, stitched into a greater mythology of Mignola’s devising. He makes Hellboy and his struggles compelling without any of the usual trappings. Hellboy has no inner monologue, and virtually no outer monologue. As character designs and art styles go, Hellboy is fairly expressionless, and he is generally taciturn, rarely ruffled. He has no love interest, and by this time has abandoned what associates, if not friends, he’d had. Mignola has created a lonely character in a lonely world, trying to figure out his place in it.

It’s not an obviously universal struggle, what with all the monsters and the whole destined-to-destroy-the-world thing, but I think there is a subtle universality that makes the world compelling beyond the curiosity and charm of the various bits of folklore and legend. I think that’s why the solitary and stoic nature of the character not only works, but improves the work — we relate enough to Hellboy’s sense of isolation in a mysterious and hostile world (or is that just me?) to extract a connection to the character from what would otherwise be too little to grasp.

And the art—Hellboy exists on the inner fringes of the superhero world: More-than-human hero fights supernatural evil, with a very distinct and marketable look and a codename that’s an ironic play on typical superfolk naming conventions. Yet the book’s muscular, square-jawed hero is not some fantasy icon, and the women are never drawn as sex-doll caricatures twisted into porn poses—which I think is grounds enough to have Mignola banned from mainstream comics entirely. The art is not about flash and dazzle, but exists in service of story and mood. That mood, overwhelmingly, is dread. Though Mignola spices it with perfectly placed flashes of deadpan humor, this is not lighthearted action fun.

Mignola does mighty work here, and the latest volumes of the series demonstrate his continued growth as a writer and artist.

Book Five: Conqueror Worm
While I arbitrarily divided the eight Hellboy collections down the middle, volume 5, Conqueror Worm really belongs in the first group, climaxing, as creator Mike Mignola himself mentions in a text piece in the volume that follows.

After two servings of short stories, only some of which advance the current-day storyline of Hellboy coming to grips with his apparent destiny to destroy the world, Conqueror Worm is a full-length return to the present day, in which archetypally weird characters who only had a panel or two in previous books get a larger role. Floating head in a bell jar! Talking ape with giant electrodes! Undead Nazis! Apparently dead action heroes! Mignola gleefully brings out all his pulp indulgences while putting a definitive close to the first sixty-odd years of Hellboy’s odd life.

Thematically, the book is Mignola’s strongest work, embracing the theme that was also explicit in the first movie: What does it mean to be human? What really makes someone a monster? Here, in this weird ghost story laden with long quotes from Edgar Allen Poe, the human is almost always revealed as monstrous, while more than one monster displays touching humanity. In the end, troubled both by the unconscionable behaviors of his government employers and all this yammering about the Beast of the Apocalypse, Hellboy goes off alone to understand and deal with his true nature and the prophecies tied to it.

The moody, blocky art has never been better. The weird stillness is still in full effect, but the action scenes are more vital and engaging than seen before. It really marks the culmination of Mignola’s storytelling skills to date, with the artist getting more from his taciturn hero than ever before, without truly opening up the character. Economy of storytelling? Subtlety (laced, yes, with giant monster fights)? Conqueror Worm is a master’s course.

Book Six: Strange Places
This book consists of two midlength stories that follow directly out of Conqueror Worm. In “The Third Wish,” Hellboy’s search for truth and destiny lead him to Africa, where he’s sidetracked into an underwater trap by a sea monster who wants to stop him from eventually destroying the world. In an intro to the story, Mignola mentions that he created the tale in the immediate wake of Sept. 11, and perhaps that knowledge colors my reading, making it seem even darker, sadder, and more moving than usual. Or maybe not—it’s just a damned good story.

Following is “The Island,” in which Hellboy washes up in a haunted Sargasso, where he first encounters, again, witch-goddess Hecate, the enemy who now wants to be queen to his fated king of destruction, leading to the memorable panel at the top of this article. Hellboy then faces the ghost of a pagan victim of the conquistadores and the Inquisition, whose connection to the Ogdru Jahad monsters whom Hellboy is “destined” to unleash leads to deeper revelations and ruminations on the character. And some really exciting art. Another favorite for people who can’t get enough of the “main story” developments that Mignola is so willing to tease out over the years.

Book Seven: The Troll Witch & Other Stories
After Conqueror Worm and Strange Places, volume seven is a letdown for the impatient: a series of tales all set before Seed of Destruction introduced the big arc of his origins to Hellboy’s life. It’s fortunate, then, that the stories and art in this book are delightful, with the first appearance of guest artists—and august personages, at that—adding variety and fresh textures to Mignola’s ink-drowned world.

Each story draws from the legends of its various settings—Norway, Prague, Malaysia—and as always, contain strange wonders. Worth noting here is the guest artwork. First, highly accomplished fantasy artist P. Craig Russell lends a hand in “The Vampire of Prague” (original uncolored page at left) and while he’s known for the faerie delicacy in his work, he also manages to deliver the giant “booms” of a Hellboy slugfest.

Legendary comic artist Richard Corben provides top-notch art on the long final story, “Makoma,” a bizarre recreation of African myth that didn’t really work for me. The device of having Hellboy experience the legend of an African giant-killer by dreaming himself as the hero while the story is told to him feels a bit hackneyed, even if this old tale evokes several parallels to Hellboy’s own story. Still—it’s a weird legend, and hey, Corben art. (Corben returns this month with the three-issue serial, Hellboy: The Crooked Man.)

Book Eight: Darkness Calls
The most recent volume is the first full-length story since Conqueror Worm, and arguably Mignola’s finest writing, with mood, pacing and compelling interpretation of folklore that’s just top-notch. Continuing his global wanderings, Hellboy is in England as the ancient and ugly witches of Mignola’s dark world try to enlist Hellboy to be their king and lead them to greatness. This does not go well, and our hero ends up in the snowswept world to which he’d exiled the great witch of Russian folklore, the Baba Yaga. She carries quite a grudge, that one, and it’s a showdown that seems to set up another full-length saga with yet higher stakes.

Interestingly, the story does not advance Hellboy’s overall quest, but feels like an organic part of his development. The book is as full of portent and foreboding as any of the myth-advancing stories to date, but is not directly concerned with the destiny question. If Mignola knows anything, it’s how to tease out a storyline.

Of particular note is the arrival of a new artist. Though Corben and Russell guested on short stories in the past book, and there are two side Hellboy volumes of “Weird Tales” in which short stories are done by Mignola and guest artists, we’ve never had a major advancement of the canon handled by someone other than Mignola. The choice of Duncan Fegredo is brilliant—he is Mignola-esque and his own man at the same time. His art is such a perfect fit you forget sometimes that you’re seeing someone else’s lines, someone else’s choices. If Mignola doesn’t draw future volumes, there could hardly be a better choice than this guy. (And, in fact, after that Corben mini, Fegredo draws the sequel to this book, The Wild Hunt, serialized beginning in December. Six-page preview here.)

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There you go. That’s Hellboy. For those craving more (and after this exercise, I am), there are the two volumes of Hellboy: Weird Tales, eight or nine books of non-Hellboy BPRD stories, Hellboy novels, an animated version and more.

Hellboy is the only comic creation I can think of since, what, the early Marvel days in the 1960s, that has spawned an entire franchise. Apart from toys and key chains, there is a broader series of Hellboy-universe comics by other talents, there have been prose novels and short story collections, two movies, an animated series, at least one video game. Ah, but the main Hellboy books — These are the core of Mignola’s work to date, and it puts nearly all of his contemporaries to shame. These books will be around for a long time, but there’s something to be said for being in on it now, for watching the history of as it’s made, one issue or one volume at a time.