While the story of Mike Mignola‘s Hellboy was “finished” in the final BPRD series, BPRD: The Devil You Know, this has not stopped new Hellboy stories set before that. There have been the Hellboy and BPRD series, which I cover elsewhere. But there are some other Hellboy stories that have appeared, and so I will cover them here.
First up is Young Hellboy, which have stories of Hellboy as a boy before the time he joined the BPRD as an agent in 1953. Before that, he was childlike, and the stories are more similar to kid comics. Think Little Lulu or Little Archie et al. We have gotten two so far, Young Hellboy: The Hidden Land and Young Hellboy: Assault on Castle Death. Both have been collected, sadly in hardback only.
In The Hidden Land, it’s 1947 and Hellboy and Professor Bruttenholm are heading to South America to visit a dig there. But some of the religious fanatics that want to kill Hellboy are on the flight and wind up killing the pilots and crashing the plane.
It lands near an island in the Pacific. The island has various giant monsters and a race of intelligent ape-like creatures. And it’s protected by a giant ape. There they meet Scarlett Santiago, the Sky Devil, a younger adventuress stuck on the island. Hellboy knows her from the stories in Thrilling Air Stories pulp magazine. But there is also a threat from the now awakened vampire Queen Vesperra.
And in Assault on Castle Death, it’s still 1947, and the BPRD has just moved to their new headquarters in Connecticut. Hellboy has come down with a fever. At the same time, a religious order, the Brothers of Desolation, has come to kill him. During Hellboy’s fever, Lobster Johnson comes to enlist him in assaulting Castle Death. We know that The Lobster is dead, so is this his ghost or just a fever dream? We don’t know, especially after what happens at the end.
I enjoyed the background we got on Sam, who is trying to help Hellboy.
Will we get more? I hope so.
More strange is Hellboy in Love, which will run three stories over five issues: two for two issues each, the final in the last.
This one is difficult for me as during the whole run of the comics we never see him in any kind of romantic activity, or even a hint of this. I had several issues with Guillermo del Toro‘s Hellboy movies: one being they gave a romantic affair between Hellboy and Liz Sherman, which just never happened in the comic. (But there are other things in the movies that I liked.) However, in the prose stories this was done with a character named Anastasia Bransfield, an archaeologist Hellboy met in 1979. She appeared in Christopher Golden‘s Hellboy: The Lost Army, which is the first Hellboy novel.
In the first two issues, we get “Goblin Night” where Hellboy is protecting a train where goblins have been stealing stuff. This time it’s archaeological items being carried by Anastasia, who Hellboy is meeting for the first time, and the two must pursue them, even into fairyland, to get them back.
The next two issues are “Shadow Theater,” which takes them to Turkey where they face demonic shadow puppets. The last issue is “The Key to It All,” which takes them to India as Anastasia looks for proof of the Suaren Artea. But nothing is every easy.
Finally, we have Hellboy: Bones of a Giant, which is a comic book adaptation of the Hellboy novel of the same name by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden. Set in 1988 Sweden, an unusual discovery is found: a mummified body holding a stone hammer. But lightning prevents any attempts at moving it.
A group from the BPRD, including Hellboy and Abe Sapien arrive. Hellboy picks up the hammer and gets strange visions. He can’t let go of the hammer and at times seems to be possessed by the spirit of Thor. Soon a host of creatures from Norse legend are appearing, the worse being the Frost Giants, which Hellboy must fight and defeat.
At this point, I am not aware of any further such new Hellboy stories. But I hope we see something.
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