Hellboy (1994), Volume 6

May 1, 2006
Mignola's first collection in his popular Hellboy
series (since the 2004 film based on it) features two odd, bleak fables. The first and more successful is "The Third Wish," in which the demonic hero has an enchanted nail driven into his skull and encounters an enormous talking fish who grants her own granddaughters' wishes with fatal consequences. In the process, Hellboy learns that he may be fated to bring about the end of the world. The ending is unremittingly dark, with all the surviving characters trapped by prophecies that have the crushing power of myth. Mignola admits in his notes that he struggled with "The Island," which has to do with "the entire secret history of the world," a dragon, some centuries-dead Crusaders and a bunch of Lovecraftian monsters, and ultimately it doesn't make a lot of sense. Fortunately, Mignola's moody, jagged, chiaroscuro-crazed artwork makes everything look lushly sinister and engaging, even when the story threatens to collapse into action scenes. Hellboy himself is a terrific contrast to his grim surroundings: a hard-boiled demon who shrugs off death itself with a "yeah, yeah" and is convinced, against all the evidence, that he's one of the good guys.

April 15, 2006
In the first collection since his hit (or not, depending who you ask) movie, good-guy demon Hellboy tussles with a fish-witch (not at all like Mickey D's) and a revenant sorcerer in two chronologically successive long stories that Mignola says inaugurate a string of Hellboy jaunts to strange places. The fun begins with the Bog Roosh (i.e., the fish-witch) promising three mermaids that she'll grant the greatest wish of each if they'll pound a nail into Hellboy's noggin. Meanwhile, Hellboy keeps an appointment with a 200-years-dead African witch doctor, who gives him a bell and sees him off into the ocean to encounter the Bog Roosh. After lotsa underwater spookery, H-b washes up on an island to face the revenant, who claims to know the prehistory of God, which entails a crew of malevolent great spirits. Mignola's potent mixture of dynamic though gloomy narrow-palette artwork and dialogue in which wisecracking Hellboy deflates the supernatural villains' windy portentousness makes both stories simultaneously scary and funny. Good to the last panel for horror fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)