This past Tuesday I went to see the new Hellboy film, starring David Harbour. The movie was based on the first story-arc I had ever read, which means a lot to me, as I had read it entirely by accident, mistaking volume eight, issue one, of Hellboy for volume one, issue one. It is for this reason that the Wild Hunt and the Rise of the Blood Queen are two very important storylines to me.
A brief aside about the way comic reprints work:
As mentioned briefly in the Moebius blog, when a new comic is released, one can purchase the single issue of that book, usually for somewhere between three and five dollars nowadays. That’s a pretty big increase from the ten cent cover-price of books from the 60s. Eventually however, that comic book serial will end, with rare exception, and then it may be collected in the form of what is known as a trade paperback. These paperback books will typically collect five issues or so of the series in each volume until all of the issues from either a particular storyline, or a particular artist, are collected in as many volumes are necessary.
Hellboy got his start in the backs of other comics, much the French-Belgium style Moebius employed, and hasn’t really had many runs of his own. The formats of his books have always varied, and Mignola, the sole creator, in his wisdom would make certain issues with similar structural constraints (they could only be two issues long, they were in the back of another book, they were in black and white, etc.) thematically similar. Mignola, unlike Moebius, wanted to make full stories fit into those two pages, and in trying to think of a way to pull that off effectively, stumbled upon a gold mine. He decided to insert his character into proverbs and fables from throughout the ages and from each and every culture.
The idea fits the character incredibly well, and a few of the stories born of that era appear as cartoons or in film, one such instance being The Chained Coffin.
Neil Marshall’s Hellboy, featuring David Harbour in the titular role is one of the most true-to-form comic book movies I have ever seen. That fact explains both why I loved it so much, and why the critics did not.
The film seeks to blow past 8 full volumes of short stories and the occasional solos series, and goes right for two major solo series, The Wild Hunt…
And Rise of the Blood Queen
In doing so, the movie introduces the audience to a world of self-loathing, and introspective dark humor, all from the mouth of a being resembling the devil himself.
The movie was phenomenal. There was action, humor, and plenty of horror elements, and any person who thinks those elements are only there to make a quick buck off the current trend of adult themed comedy-action superhero movies is not only an utter dimwit, complete bafoon,, and unfounded imbassile, but I could wager that they probably claim to love the Perlman films (which had their share of adult humor before deadpool was the foul-mouthed red guy), and haven’t read many books from the Hellboy series.
As a fan of the books and of the films, I would recommend them to anyone that loves ancient myth, current social commentary, giant monster battles, or laughing. Hellboy is a fascinating and complex character, something that isn’t typical for a superhero movie, and so it is no wonder it suffered the same ill-favoring reviews as Venom upon release.
art by Idan Knafo
In summary, go see the damn movie. It’s not what the academy loves, but if you like having fun, it’s the movie for you. It’s a thrill ride from start to finish, boogieman to baba yaga, and don’t let anyone but your own personal opinion tell you differently.
