Hellboy Darkness Calls

If you’re a comic fan with a bent towards the paranormal or the weird, you need to read Hellboy. Even after 14 years in print, the character, the universe, the stories, and the artwork reads and looks like nothing else.

The series starts off in World War II with creepy supernatural Nazis summoning a demon to trigger the Apocalypse. Unfortunately for them, it takes a wrong turn and ends up entering the mortal plane next to the Allies, and looking like a baby with a giant stone hand. The Allies call him Hellboy.

As he grows up, he joins the BPRD, a paranormal investigation outfit and basically goes around ghostbusting and refusing to join various demon goddesses, elder gods, and supernatural Nazis in destroying the world.

This series works on a lot of levels. At its most basic, it’s a really cool Indiana Jones/X-Files-type adventure series, with Hellboy traipsing around the globe, looking for artifacts and searching for the truth behind various myths. The dialogue is good, and the action is cool, because he hangs around with a great ensemble of supporting super-powered characters, including fishman Abe Sapiens, Liz the pyrotechnic, and Roger the golem.

Delving deeper, the series gains resonance and heft because writer-artist Mike Mignola has meticulously researched his myths and legends. The creatures and stories that Hellboy investigates are true to folklore – their characters, powers, weaknesses are all traditional and historically “accurate” as can be. Baba Yaga really does fly in a mortar and pestle. The flying flesh eating heads are nuke-kube, “real” creatures from Japanese myth. Even faeries are given respect – in The Corpse, for example, the events and rituals used in the tale are true to old Irish faerie traditions. This authenticity weaves seamlessly into Mignola’s own cosmology, making it an unusually coherent continuity.