$17.95 from Dark
Horse Comics
Credits:
Story and Art by Mike
Mignola
Script by John Byrne
Colors by Mark Chiarello, James Sinclair, and Matthew Hollingsworth
With Introduction by
*“They call me
Hellboy, and maybe it’s appropriate- - but if I am from Hell, I have no memory
of it. I have no idea what it looks like. But offhand I’d say this is a pretty
good guess.”*
One of the best
exercises a writer can perform is to take the trappings of a familiar story- -
vampires and coffins and bats, for instance, or Superheroes and cosmic villains
and souped up vehicles- - and try to make a story that goes in a different
direction. Turn the reader’s expectations on their head. Some of the best comic
stories were born this way: *Watchmen* is a superhero story, but its actually,
face it, a multi-generational soap opera. *Dark Knight* is a meditation on
myth.
There are several
ways you could structure a story that features Nazi mysticism, Satanic rituals,
and an amnesiac demon from Hell. You could make it extremely self-referential
and dark, go for that hypnotic *Sandman* thing, or the feel of Alan Moore’s *American
Gothic* cycle from *Swamp Thing*. You could make it a decent joke, in the way
that the severely underrated *Blue Devil* turned pop representations of the
Occult on their head. You could go for all-out escapism, like *Raiders of the
Lost Ark.*
*Hellboy,* now- - *Hellboy,*
does something else. Mike Mignola gives us a comic about a huge demon summoned
to earth by Nazis but falls into the hands of the allies during World War II.
The comic is dark and blotchy, heavily shadowed so that almost no-one’s face is
ever seen clearly, and everyone speaks in hushed tones straight out of
Lovecraft. But here’s the turn: Hellboy himself (the demon) becomes not a
cosmic visitor, a big red Phantom Stranger, but instead opts to become a big,
red, muscular Doc Savage. With all its trappings of sinking houses and lost
secrets and demons spawned in muck and unnamable seeping darkness, and all
that, our demon hero jaunts through the story wearing a Columbo Coat and
talking like Mike Hammer. He’s not even particularly sardonic- - this isn’t
John Constantine, here, this is a real demon, and by golly, he’s having a
pretty good time.
He even has a Doc
Savage-style team, featuring a chain-smoking pyrokinetic woman and a mysterious
amphibian man (cousin to *X-Files’* Fluke Man, apparently). Mike Mignola has
gone to the trouble of creating forty years of history for Hellboy, in which
time he’s become “the world’s foremost investigator of the paranormal.”
See? I love it. A
demon comes to earth and what does he do? He becomes Fox Mulder.
I was so pleased by
this story, because it’s fascinating to see a creator take the trappings of one
genre and plaster them onto another. John Byrne writes a magnificent script, of
course, and digs up some wonderful tidbits about the occult to lace the story
with the right references. The bad guy, believe it or not, is Rasputin.
Rasputin, working for the Nazis.
Trappings aside, *Hellboy,*
avoids being deep like the plague, but it’s interesting that it does so. The
hero is immortal, but he’s not deep. Hellboy has about the intelligence of Mike
Hammer- - he’s savvy but not brilliant, more a two-fisted brawler than a Doctor
Strange. (I’d like to see him meet Doctor Strange, actually.) The story runs
along breezily, with the feel of one of those short novels Kenneth Robeson
wrote in the forties, about The Avenger and, of course, Doc Savage. (“My
long-lost adopted father returned mysteriously from a Tibetan expedition and
died. The secret of his death may lie in the crumbling mansion of a woman’s
whose entire family has died searching for a lost idol. Let’s go talk to the
widow.”
That’s what it is. In
*Hellboy,* Mike Mignola takes the trappings of a Goth mope-fest, and gives us
the ultimate homage to pulp.