Hellboy

AUTHOR: Mignola, Mike; Byrne, John

ARTIST: John Cassady (illustrator); Duncan Fegredo (illustrator); Mike Mignola (illustrator); Mark Chiarello (colorist); Matt Hollingsworth (colorist); Dan Jackson (colorist); James Sinclair (colorist); Dave Stewart (colorist); Pat Brousseau (letterer); Clem Robins (letterer); Richard Corben (cover artist)

PUBLISHER: Dark Horse Comics

FIRST SERIAL PUBLICATION: 1994-

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 1994-2010

Publication History

Mike Mignola established himself as an artist at DC Comics and Marvel Comics, gaining a reputation for moody, dark illustrations with the Batman book Gotham by Gaslight (1989). His creation of the character Hellboy was inspired by a variety of sources, including the works of horror fantasist H. P. Lovecraft. Mignola found humor in matching a large, all-red character fitting the conventional depiction of a devil with the concept of a rough-and-tumble paranormal investigator who approaches dilemmas with a gruff humor and steady resolve.

Hellboy debuted in a black-and-white short in a convention publication for the Comic-Con International: San Diego in August of 1993. A second untitled story (both were referred to as “World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator”) was released concurrent with Seed of Destruction in the Comic Buyer’s Guide. Mignola had initially conceived Hellboy visually, and after plotting the early stories, he asked veteran comic writer John Byrne to help him script the two untitled shorts as well as the first series, Seed of Destruction. After Seed of Destruction, however, almost every Hellboy story has been written by Mignola. Seed of Destruction was published in March, 1994.

Hellboy is not a series character in the conventional sense of appearing in monthly issues. Rather, Mignola has largely told Hellboy’s stories in extended arcs as actual graphic novels that span four or more installments as well as in short stories told in one or two issues. Additionally, a number of Hellboy works (such as “The Wolves of St. August”) were initially serialized in Dark Horse anthologies and specials such as Dark Horse Presents. From the start, Dark Horse intended to release trade paperback volumes of the longer stories as well as collations of shorter pieces. Many of the shorter pieces are not in the chronological order of the longer novels but instead take place at different times in Hellboy’s career, beginning in the late 1950’s.

Plot

The trade paperback collection of Seed of Destruction is dedicated to pulp horror writer Lovecraft and comic artist Jack Kirby. Mignola displays both these influences broadly in his work. Seed of Destruction is set in 1944, when the occultist monk Grigori Rasputin assembles a coterie of like-minded Nazis (including Ilsa von Haupstein) on a small Scottish isle. Rasputin believes that circumstances are right for him to summon the Lovecraftian Ogdru Jahad (seven elder gods of great evil, imprisoned in another dimension, similar to the evil deities in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu stories) and bring about Armageddon on Earth.

At the same time, English paranormal investigator (later the founder of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, or B.P.R.D.) Trevor Bruttenholm has assembled a team in East Bromwich, England, where the psychic Alice Cavendish has foretold that something momentous is about to occur. Rasputin’s Project Ragna Rok, his secret group of Nazi scientists, believes his ritual has not succeeded, because the result of his summoning—a toddler hybrid of demon and human—appears at East Bromwich instead of on their small island.

Hellboy is raised by Bruttenholm and becomes (as billed) the “World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator.” Fifty years later, Bruttenholm reappears at the B.P.R.D. after a failed mission and is killed by strange frog monsters. Investigating Bruttenholm’s last case, Hellboy, Liz, and Abe travel to Cavendish Hall, where they must contend with Rasputin, who reveals to Hellboy that his purpose is to bring about the end of the world. The three manage to kill Rasputin’s physical body, although his spirit returns to task the B.P.R.D.

Hellboy’s origins are explained further in the story “The Chained Coffin.” Returning to Bromwich, Hellboy is given a vision by spirits and learns how a woman named Sarah Hughes, a witch, had bargained with the demon Azzael, having sexual relations with him to gain power. In death, her soul is forfeited to him, and he comes to claim it. Hellboy is born in Hell from this union before Rasputin summons him to Earth.

Hellboy’s stories fall roughly into two categories. Although many stories build upon each other, developing the story of his possible destiny, others are placed at different times in his long career. Those stories that occur out of chronological order are not necessarily stand-alone stories as such because, at times, characters will often appear in multiple tales, further developing the overarching long plot.

In Wake the Devil, the members of Project Ragna Rok bring back to life the undead Vladimir Giurescu. Hellboy and Abe are soon at odds with Giurescu and his supernatural minions. They find that Giurescu is a follower of the witch goddess Hecate. Although Hellboy initially defeats Hecate, the spirit of Rasputin persuades Von Haupstein to sacrifice herself and mingle her essence with Hecate. Hellboy is again informed by both Hecate and Rasputin that he is supposed to be the harbinger of the apocalypse. He again refuses this fate, as he does repeatedly throughout the novels. Later, in the short story “The Right Hand of Doom,” he finds that his gigantic, grafted right hand is particularly important in fulfilling this destiny.

In “Box Full of Evil,” Hellboy must contend with a powerful goblin, Grugach, whose enmity he earned in an early story, “The Corpse.” Grugach allies with an occultist named Igor Bromhead. During his combat with the two, Hellboy is once more informed that he is to be the harbinger of the apocalypse. This foretelling of Hellboy as the eventual avatar of the doom of humankind and civilization is heightened further in “The Third Wish,” when a powerful undersea witch, the Bog Roosh, warns him he must die to save the world.

Hellboy’s destiny makes a significant turn in The Wild Hunt, which delves into Arthurian legend, introducing the sorceress Morgan le Fay. Even as Grugach tries to force Hellboy to assume the role of the destroyer, the hero instead takes up Arthur’s famous sword, Excalibur, proving yet again he is a hero, not a monster.

Volumes

•Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1994). Collects Seed of Destruction, issues 1-4, as well as “World’s Greatest Paranormal Investigator” shorts from Comic-Con International: San Diego and the Comic Buyer’s Guide. Introduces Hellboy’s origin and establishes the nature of the B.P.R.D. and his personality.

•Hellboy: Wake the Devil (1997). Collects Wake the Devil, issues 1-5. Features the return of the Nazi supernatural coterie Ragna Rok, as they bring back a vampire.

•Hellboy: The Chained Coffin and Others (1998). Collects several shorter pieces, including “The Corpse,” “The Baba Yaga,” “The Chained Coffin,” “The Wolves of St. August,” and “Almost Colossus.” “The Wolves of St. August” introduces B.P.R.D. agent Kate Corrigan, and “The Chained Coffin” offers further insight into Hellboy’s origins. “Almost Colossus” resolves the end of Wake the Devil and introduces Roger the homunculus.

•Hellboy: The Right Hand of Doom (2000). Collects, among others, short stories “The Right Hand of Doom” and “Box Full of Evil,” which focus on the Hellboy’s possible destiny as a harbinger of the apocalypse.

•Hellboy: Conqueror Worm (2002). Collects issues 1-5 of Conqueror Worm. Featuring Hellboy’s collaboration with the ghost of World War II-era masked man Lobster Johnson.

•Hellboy: Strange Places (2006). Collects The Third Wish, issues 1 and 2, and The Island, issues 1 and 2. Featuring Hellboy’s battles with the Bog Roosh and Hecate.

•Hellboy: The Troll Witch (2007). Collects shorts “The Penanggalan,” “The Hydra and the Lion,” and “The Troll Witch,” among others. In the stories, Hellboy travels to Malaysia, Alaska, and Norway.

•Hellboy: Darkness Calls (2008). Collects issues 1-6 of Darkness Calls. Hellboy finds himself allied with old enemies to bring down Igor Bromhead.

•Hellboy: The Wild Hunt (2010). Collects The Wild Hunt, issues 1-8. Features Hellboy’s foray into Arthurian and English mythos.

•Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Others (2010). Collects The Crooked Man, issues 1-3; “They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships”; “In the Chapel of Moloch”; and “The Mole.” The Crooked Man features Hellboy’s intercession in an Appalachian ghost story.

•Hellboy: Masks and Monsters (2010). Collects crossovers with characters from other comics groups, including Batman and Starman from Batman Hellboy Starman, issues 1-2, and Ghost from Ghost-Hellboy Special, issues 1-2.

Characters

•Hellboy, the protagonist, is a 6-foot-5-inch-tall, five-hundred-pound red human-and-demon half-breed. Brought to Earth as a toddler, he was raised by the founder of the B.P.R.D. He has dedicated his life to defending the world rather than destroying it. In place of a normal right hand, from the elbow down, a massive and impervious stone hand has been grafted onto his arm. With a blue-collar ethic and a lack of tolerance for sophistry or equivocation, Hellboy succeeds with a blend of perseverance, toughness, humor, and a firm desire to do the right thing.

•Abe Sapien, dubbed an “icthyo sapien,” is a blue-skinned amphibian, capable of breathing underwater with gills. The B.P.R.D. discovered him in a tank labeled with the same date as Abraham Lincoln’s death (thus his first name). An excellent agent, he is intelligent and loyal and has extraordinary aquatic abilities. He is Hellboy’s B.P.R.D. comrade and one of his oldest friends.

•Liz Sherman, another of Hellboy’s closest friends, is a pyrotechnic, able to manifest flame from nothing and project and use it at will. Her control of her powers is tenuous, however; the B.P.R.D. took her in as a teenager after she had inadvertently killed her family. Hellboy clearly is enamored of Liz, yet this affection is understated for most of the series.

•Kate Corrigan is another B.P.R.D. agent. In addition to working with the B.P.R.D., she is a folklore and occultism professor with New York University. After Hellboy urges her to seek more field experience in “The Wolves of St. August,” she dedicates more time to being an agent and less to being an academic.

•Trevor Bruttenholm is the founder of the B.P.R.D. and Hellboy’s foster father. He led a group of soldiers to a site in England of great paranormal significance and discovered Hellboy.

•Tom Manning is the current leader of the B.P.R.D. His role in most Hellboy stories is minimal. He is a pragmatic and conscientious administrator as well as a capable agent.

•Grigori Rasputin is the Russian monk known for his enemies in the court of the Romanovs. In the Hellboy universe, he has been revived by the forces of the Ogdru Jahad for the purpose of bringing them back into existence. His physical form is killed by the combined efforts of Hellboy, Liz, and Abe in Seed of Destruction, but his spirit lives on to orchestrate later challenges to the B.P.R.D.

•Ilsa von Haupstein, a.k.a. Hecate, is one of Rasputin’s followers. In Wake the Devil she is called upon to sacrifice her body so that her essence will merge with that of the witch-goddess Hecate and thus save Hecate (who had been destroyed by Hellboy).

•Roger is a homunculus, or artificial person. Having been created—and having lost all his power—generations earlier, he is resurrected by Liz’s power in Wake the Devil. Fundamentally moral, in “Almost Colossus,” he helps Hellboy stop Roger’s “brother” (an earlier experiment with the form) from becoming a gigantic and ravaging monster, seemingly sacrificing himself to revive a dying Liz. Later restored, he becomes a B.P.R.D. agent, although his mistreatment by the agency eventually causes Hellboy to leave it.

Artistic Style

Most of Hellboy’s adventures have been drawn and inked by Mignola. The latter volumes illustrated by Duncan Fegredo and Richard Corben have striven to emulate (if not actually copy) much of Mignola’s visual style. The first trade paperback collection of Seed of Destruction is dedicated to seminal artist Kirby and pulp horror writer Lovecraft, and, indeed, these two influences are most evident in Mignola.

Renowned comic writer Alan Moore wrote in his introduction to the Wake the Devil collection that in Mignola’s art, “German expressionism meets Jack Kirby.” As in Kirby’s later style, displayed in books such as Mister Miracle (1971) and OMAC (1974), Mignola favors heavy lines, blunt and craggy features, and bulky, large characters.

Since many of Hellboy’s appearances were originally published in black and white (in Dark Horse Presents, for example) and colored later for their trade paperback collections, it is interesting how much the color palette chosen by Mignola (and colored by Mark Chiarello, Matt Hollingsworth, Dave Stewart, James Sinclair, and others) contributes to the mood of the book; rather than flashy and bright, as in Kirby’s work, the colors are dark, muted, and understated, befitting the gothic tone of the series. Additionally, through use of deep shadow, Mignola’s illustrations are minimalist at times. Backgrounds lack the complicated, ornate, busy technology of Kirby’s renderings; rather, they tend to be shadowed halls, dim gothic architecture, and barren landscapes.

Themes

The overall tone throughout the Hellboy series is one of impending doom. From the first stories on, Hellboy is told that he is destined to bring about Armageddon and that he is to free the seven ancient and evil gods of the Ogdru Jahad. Rasputin, Hecate, Grugach, and many other enemies repeatedly tell Hellboy of his fate and that he should stop fighting it; typically, they attempt to entice him with promises that in the new order he will rule. Over and over again, however, Hellboy asserts his free will. Similarly, the seductive allure of power is shown to be dangerous and evil; characters such as Von Haupstein show that they will do anything to further their personal ambitions. They do not mind destroying the world as it is known in order to become all powerful. On the other hand, Hellboy has no interest in personal gain or glory. Instead, he seems to always repudiate his origins, and his physical appearance, in an attempt to do right. Also, his heroism is not purely an act of professional obligation. Even after leaving the B.P.R.D. in Conqueror Worm, he continues to strive against the forces of evil.

Hellboy is in some ways distinguished from other gothic or horror stories in Mignola’s canon, in which his rich appreciation of folklore is evident. Like The Sandman (1989-1996) creator Neil Gaiman, Mignola not only creates his own mythology but also interweaves stories pulled from German, Russian, English, Japanese, and many other cultures. Many of these stories suggest, at least partly, that evil lurks not only in the dark forests of the world but also in the deep woods of the human heart. The dangers, then, are both external and internal. Unlike most, Hellboy’s capacity for evil is externalized in his devilish appearance. However, rather than growing out his horns and taking his place as a lord of demons, he fights for innocence and goodness—and keeps his horns trimmed so that they are mere ridges on his forehead.

Impact

Although the graphic novel form precedes Hellboy, the conception of the ongoing story as a series of novels intermixed with shorter tales constituted a transformation in the way comics worked. While Hellboy was clearly influenced by Gaiman’s work on The Sandman, Mignola does not work on a monthly deadline. Secondly, where as many paranormal comics strive for a forced bitterness and dark cynicism bordering on melancholy, Hellboy has clung happily to its pulp roots. As in superhero stories, most of the tales come down to winning a fight. The series has shown that a variety of elements and sources can be combined in new ways to make for new reading experiences.

More than the building plot and gothic, Lovecraftian nature of his stories and mythos, however, Mignola has established himself as one of the most important artists of his generation. As he has matured, he has transcended the influence of Kirby and accomplished great shifts in tone and mood through shadow and minimalist designs. Contemporary artists look to him as one of their prime influences, just as Mignola once looked to Kirby.

Films

Hellboy. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Revolution Films, Columbia Tristar, and Starlite, in association with Darkhorse Entertainment, 2004. This adaptation stars Ron Perlman as Hellboy, Selma Blair as Liz Sherman, and Doug Jones as Abe Sapien. Rather than adapting any individual work, this film pulls material from Seed of Destruction, Wake the Devil, and The Right Hand of Doom in chronicling initially Hellboy’s appearance on Earth and then, later, the resurrection of Rasputin and his attempt to summon “elder gods” to rule Earth. Hellboy’s romantic interest in Liz, greatly understated in the comics, is developed for greater dramatic effect. Del Toro’s visual depiction of Hellboy’s adventures holds close to Mignola’s renderings, and Pearlman captures perfectly Hellboy’s world-weary, no-nonsense approach to problems. Mignola is credited as a coexecutive producer and was reportedly pleased with the film.

Hellboy Animated: Sword of Storms. Directed by Tad Stones. Film Roman and Revolution Pictures, 2006. An animated adventure in which Pearlman, Blair, and Jones lend their voices to reprising their starring roles. It originally aired on Cartoon Network and then was sold on DVD. Hellboy is lured into a Japanese dreamworld where he must do battle with Japanese demons. The short story “Heads” is integrated into the film’s story.

Hellboy Animated: Blood and Iron. Directed by Tad Stones. Film Roman and Revolution Pictures, 2007. This is the second animated adventure on Cartoon Network, incorporating elements from Wake the Devil. Hellboy, Abe, Liz, and Sydney Leach investigate a haunted house and confront Hecate.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. Universal Pictures and Internationale Filmproduktion Eagle in association with Dark Horse Entertainment, 2008. Largely the same cast returns for this sequel to Hellboy. Although elements from various Hellboy stories appear, the film is largely a new story by Del Toro and Mignola. The romance between Liz and Hellboy is continued, as they have to fight a golden army of mechanical warriors brought back to life by the new, angry king of the elves.

Further Reading

Delano, Jamie, et al. John Constantine: Hellblazer (1988- ).

Gaiman, Neil, et al. The Sandman (1989-1996).

Powell, Eric. The Goon (1998- ).

Bibliography

Cooper, Rand Richards. “Devilish Adaptations: The Punisher and Hellboy.” Commonweal 131, no. 10 (2004): 19.

Mauning, Shaun. “Hell (boy) on Earth.” Comic Book Resources, December 17, 2010. http://www.comic bookresources.com/?page=article&id=29935.

Mignola, Mike. “Interview: Mike Mignola.” Interview by Jason Heller. A.V. Club, July 24, 2008. http://www.avclub.com/articles/mike-mignola,14279.

Moore, Alan. Introduction to Wake the Devil. Milwaukie, Ore.: Dark Horse, 1997.

O’Connor, Laura. “The Corpse on Hellboy’s Back: Translating a Graphic Image.” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 3 (June, 2010): 540-563.