Hellboy: Bride of Hell

It's sometimes hard to comprehend Mike Mignola's consistency as a creator, writer, and still occasionally, artist. He has been exploring the same sort of themes, with the same character, and with the same sort of quality writing for so many years. This time Mignola continues developing Hellboy’s relationship with the Catholic Church and his relationships to other demons but throws into "The Bride of Hell" a fascinating parallel and then, startling contrast between Hellboy's employer, the B.P.R.D, and the many other secret organizations at work in Mignola's universe.

Though it's quickly stuffed into the background, it's important to remember that the root of the story is the search for a missing girl and the missing girl's father turning to the B.P.R.D. Most of this story is Hellboy going at it alone, in the shit so to speak, but it hovers in the background of the story, only showing up on the first page or so. The B.P.R.D. isn’t even mentioned by name, just hinted at in the press release narration and made clear via the silent official drinking from his B.P.R.D. mug staring straight at the reader. It's a memorably strange intro to one of the weirder Hellboy stories.
Mignola doesn’t show the organization's inner-workings but he does make a special point to note that it is a special branch of the U.S. government and is made a shining beacon when contrasted with other organizations like the Catholic Church, the Knights of Saint Hagan, King Solomon, and the Asmodeus’ disciples. Even though Hellboy doesn’t complete his mission, the truth of the situation is revealed and solved...and it's all the more disturbing because it doesn't have a healthy conclusion.
The B.P.R.D. shines because Hellboy is its figurehead and main agent. Hellboy lives in a world of grays while Asmodeus and Hagan’s disciple, Fitzroy, live in a world of absolutes. This gets at the main thrust of the Hellboy universe: Hellboy is a descendent of the old world but becomes a hero for the modern world. It’s the cycle that every generation goes through: the young replaces the old. Interestingly, "Bride of Hell" puts all characters and sensibilities up against the wall.

This tension between the past and present, from shifting values and sensibilities to more apparent things like how the world has physically changed is what's going on in something like Ware's Jimmy Corrigan too. Each generation of Corrigans adds its own weight to the succeeding one ultimately dooming the modern incarnation to a muted worthless man-child. Hellboy sees these dying institutions for what they are--demons of the past, like relatives trying to hold him back--and sheds them off with a quip, then punches them in the face. Of course, that’s not enough to get through unharmed. Hellboy kills the demon but his mission is essentially a failure. Even though he’s a champion of practicality and reason, it’s not enough to overcome the brute force of a harsh world and he's confronted with a character he can't save...because she doesn't want to be saved.

That I can review a comic drawn by the legendary, gets-better-with-age Richard Corben and not mention the art is a testament to how strong the writing is in "Bride of Hell".

B.P.R.D. 1947 #1

When Jean Renoir’s 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game premiered in Paris on the eve of the Second World War, moviegoers incensed at the film’s portrayal of a dissolute French bourgeoisie attempted to burn down the theatre. The film was Renoir’s attempt to portray the social circumstances that had again failed to check Europe’s inevitable path to war. Renoir’s countrymen vigorously rejected the film precisely because it showed something about them that they weren’t willing to acknowledge.

This notion of an unwillingness to acknowledge or face up to unwelcome or unsavory truths suffuses the first issue of B.P.R.D. 1947. When scores of former Nazi officers found trying to escape suddenly turn up mutilated, the reaction of many of the former allies is to chalk it up to a sort of balancing of the scales. But as Professor Bruttenholm explains to Sergeant Maes in the second issue of 1946, there are monsters in the world and simply pretending that they aren’t there won’t make them go away.

The same idea is behind the story of the spectators burning down the opera house subsequent to the premier of Jean-Marie de Grigny’s Carnaval des Condamnés. Presumably those unsuspecting opera aficionados saw the monsters that Grigny was witness to at Baron Konig’s island party. But as Robert Louis Stevenson—and Jean Renoir, for that matter—knew, people are the real monsters and this precisely what we don’t like to acknowledge.

So we have monster stories. Of course, when they are done right, monster stories still manage to show us something of the monsters within us and one would be hard pressed to find a more consistent source of great monster stories than Mike Mignola's Hellboy comics.

One of the great ironies of the Hellboy comics is that the thing about which fans of the series complain most loudly—namely Mignola's choice to invite outside talent to help write and draw the books—is precisely what has kept the series consistently interesting and raised the overall quality of the books. Joshua Dysart, who also co-wrote 1946 with Mignola, is one of the most interesting writers in mainstream comics right now. As much as any other writer, Dysart has a perfect sense of the balance between the demands of narrative and the little bits of political and literary erudition that make a story more than a story. In 1946, Dysart recognized that the story's most interesting character was the Russian girl/demon Varvara and the high points of that series generally centered on those moments where her terrifying ambiguity was most apparent.

Both Varvara and Dysart are back in 1947 and are joined by the Brazilian artist/brothers Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon. Anyone uncertain of the ability of this pair to illustrate a legitimately terrifying horror comic need look no further than the recently released Pixu: The Mark of Evil, in which Bá and Moon were joined by Vasilis Lolos and Becky Cloonan. Bá's chunky lines and expressionistic grotesquerie are a perfect foil to Moon's broad strokes and impressionistic dread. The shifts between the two artists' respective illustrations are subtle enough to be unsettling to the reader and yet not so subtle as to defy differentiation.

Somehow, Hellboy has become something of the Rodney Dangerfield of comics series, never quite getting the respect it deserves, in spite of its ever increasing quality. With creators like Dysart, Bá and Moon, not to forget Mignola himself, 1947 promises to be one of the handful of the series's truly great narratives.

Creepy Synchronicity

Subsequent to my analysis of this fantastic panel from B. P. R. D.: 1946 #2, I came across the following photograph of Hitler surrounded by a phalanx of adoring Bavarian children:

Powerful Panels: B. P. R. D.: 1946 #2 by Paul Azaceta

B. P. R. D.: 1946, which was released in a trade paperback this week, is one of the scariest things I have ever read. It is also one of the most expertly executed of the B. P. R. D. series in the sense that each of the genre strains represented in the book--horror, science fiction, detective--is equally developed, with none of them taking precedence over the others. Issue #2 is particularly amazing because it centers on the character of Varvara, the head of the Soviet equivalent of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B. P. R. D.), who, while actually more or less fighting on the side of Professor Bruttenholm and the Bureau, is ten times more terrifying than even the series' villains.

This particular panel shows Varvara as she walks out of a barn after "interrogating" Audo, who has escaped from a mental asylum where he was part of a Nazi program to create an army of vampires. The entire sequence of panels depicting this event is particularly effective as it encapsulates the multifarious and paradoxical nature of Varvara's terrifying magnetism. The juxtaposition of the opposing aspects of her nature is reminiscent of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience, in which he uses the metaphors of childhood innocence and experience to illustrate the two aspects of the human soul.


As the sequence opens, the manner in which she approaches Audo's mother is perhaps a bit less deferential or shy than one might expect from a young girl dressed as she is, but at most the impression is of perhaps a rather precocious child. This precocity gives way to a fully adult arrogance in the subsequent panels as she stares down Dr. Eaton and then condescendingly orders him to close the doors as she brushes past him and into the dark barn, marching unflinchingly toward those hauntingly glowing eyes. Varvara's fearlessness is underscored in the following panel in which Dr. Eaton, his own fear etched in the lines on his face, apprehensively latches the barn door.


One could almost dedicate an entire piece to the panel depicting the moment of the interrogation. The barn door is framed by the tense figure of Dr. Eaton on one side and a silhouette of Professor Bruttenholm's hand clasping Varvara's baby doll, a symbol of childhood innocence left at the door. Azaceta employs a classic cinematic technique in enhancing the terror of the moment by obscuring our view, leaving us to the suggestions of our imaginations and Audo's shrieking pleas.


The panel depicting her exit from the barn presents an excellent demonstration of the tension between text and images in comics. Her words are business-like: she shares what information she was able to extract and alludes to some nebulous "accident" which has befallen Audo. But Varvara's physical aspect clashes with the text in the panel. Her stance is forward, confident; very adult, very experienced. Her facial expression is relaxed, but with a knowing look indicative of experience--suggesting the immediate aftermath of sexual release. Then there is her arm: the splash of color contrasts highly to everything else in the panels immediately surrounding this moment, with the notable exception of the exclamation point extending from Bruttenholm in the subsequent panel. Clearly her arm is coated in blood, but as discussed above, Varvara's expression reflects sexual satisfaction, making the blood far more transgressive in suggestion than if we were dealing with mere physical violence.

The two panels which complete the sequence round out the cycle of Varvara's spiritual metamorphosis. As Bruttenholm rushes into the barn, he gives back Varvara's baby doll, and with it her innocence. As the perspective flips in the sequence's final panel, we see through the carnage in the foreground that Varvara's re-infantilization is complete. Her expression of easy pleasure, of childish innocence, now matches her stature and accoutrements.


One thing that makes this whole sequence so bafflingly satisfying is that at this point in the narrative, the reader has no idea who or what this Varvara is. It is only later in the issue that Professor Bruttenholm finally asks who she is and she responds by sharing a story of Peter the Great and the three demons who helped him defeat the Swedish, giving Russia access to the sea. The panels accompanying this entire portion are an excellent example of just the sort of cinematic montage Brandon discussed in a recent post. Particularly effective is the moment in which Azaceta visually links Varvara to the poetry witnessing demon.

Hellboy - In The Chapel of Moloch

There is invariably some disappointment amongst fans of Mike Mignola's various comics that Hellboy - In The Chapel of Moloch--the first Hellboy story drawn by Mignola since 2005--is only a one-shot, but the format is perfect for demonstrating how far Mignola's skills as a writer have developed during his years spent penning so many books. In The Chapel of Moloch is a fully fleshed narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end (in that order), that features the flights of mythological esoterica that are the hallmark of Mignola's stories and throws in some comments about the creative process in general.

Though I realize that I spilled considerable ink discussing Mignola's narrative acumen in a previous post, it is a topic that is worth revisiting in the context of this new book. Mignola's Hellboy stories have always required a considerable amount of necessary background information and he has not always been as adept at working it into the flow of the narrative smoothly. Considering it is a one-shot, In The Chapel of Moloch includes significant background detail. Mignola works the details of the setting and situation, and the attendant mytho-religious background into the narrative action, making it part of the story.

Compare this to earlier Hellboy narratives in which the first several pages featured little more than panel after panel of Hellboy and Professor Bruttenholm sitting in an office with huge text-filled speech bubbles laying out a tome's worth of mythological minutiae. This made some of those early stories difficult to get into and likely turned off more than a few early readers.

There has been considerable discussion in the circles in which I run about the effect that Guillermo del Toro's Hellboy movies have had on Hellboy comics. The most obvious contribution del Toro made to the Hellboy universe was in helping to develop Hellboy (and Abe and Liz, for that matter) into a fully realized character. It may be that this increased attention to narrative structure and execution has been another, more subtle effect of del Toro's collaboration with Mignola.

It seems somehow telling that in the first Hellboy comic he has drawn in three odd years, Mignola would choose to tell the story of an artist who is possessed by a demon when he creates. While perhaps as much a wink to the readers as an actual comment on Mignola's feelings about the creative process, it is such little details that make Mignola's work so satisfying. Mignola's art throughout the book is filled with such subtle winks and other details that repay repeated readings.


There are some great sequences of wordless or near wordless panels in which the action is advanced in a very economical fashion, but which also include significant narrative information. An example of this is the sequence in which the little monkey-demon climbs up Jerry's back, whispering in his ear and then Jerry begins to sculpt. Jerry's gaunt face and his look of haunted inevitability are terrifying on their own, not to mention the motif he sculpts into the clay.


Mignola also includes these fascinating little juxtapositions in which he links characters or images by mirroring some of their features. In one example, the panel of the monkey-demon running away screaming after Hellboy threw the silver button in his eye faces an image on the opposite page of the awakening statue of Moloch which corresponds almost exactly to the monkey-demon, with Moloch's nostrils standing in for the demon's eyes. A few pages later there is a panel featuring a figure from one of Jerry's paintings atop a panel featuring Hellboy with a similar mirroring effect.


After the destruction of Moloch and the weird thorny-vined heart at his core, Jerry tells Hellboy he will never paint again. To which Hellboy replies that this is not the worst news he has ever heard. While nobody wishes Mignola to give up drawing his comics altogether, if you consider the significant contributions artists such as Richard Corben and Jason Shawn Alexander have made to the Hellboy universe, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world.

Horrific Sublime: Abe Sapien - The Drowning

While it wouldn't be fair to describe Abe Sapien: The Drowning as impenetrable, it is certainly one of the more delightfully elusive comics to be published in recent memory. As Brandon pointed out in his review of the book, Abe's first solo book is in large part about the crisis of confidence and responsibility attendant to his first 'solo' assignment. This peculiar mirroring of form and content aside, there is an awful lot of other stuff going on in the book, the significance of which is not immediately clear.

The narrative and imagery of The Drowning are firmly anchored in the sea, which is appropriate for a story centering on Abe. The shipwreck with which the series opens sets the tone for the book, not only in terms of the centrality of the looming threat represented by the sea, but also the eerie luminescence of Jason Shawn Alexander's art, complemented by Dave Stewart's colors. While the narrative is ostensibly about Abe's attempt to recover the Lipu Dagger from the corpse of the Dutch warlock Epke Vrooman, as the story progresses the focus shifts increasingly toward the legacies of the Sainte Sebastien's twin evils: the 17th century blaze which wiped out the island's leper colony, and the island's history as a hub in the trade of African slaves.


There is a sequence in the series' fourth issue in which the old woman who had conjured the sea creatures who attacked Abe and Agent Van Fleet as they dived in search of the dagger, killing the latter, recounts the island's ignoble history to Abe, evoking the "traffic in flesh," and "innocent blood spilled." The illustrations on these pages depict the shackled African slaves parading down the island's cobbled streets, followed by a panel showing a bound man being savagely whipped, the panel colored completely in lurid blood red. The book's ruminations on the evils of the slave trade, its evocations of shipwrecks and malevolent sea creatures, and the impressionistic ink splatters and celestial light of the illustrations recall the paintings of the English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner, particularly his astonishing Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying Overboard, Typhoon Coming On (1840).

Slavers Throwing the Dead and Dying Overboard, Typhoon Coming On

Shipwreck


Flint Castle

B.P.R.D. The Warning #4

What can one say about a comic book that blends elements of detective fiction with classic sci-fi, horror and even German Expressionist cinema and adds a touch of Art Deco design; all without lapsing into the self-conscious intellectuality of a Jonathan Lethem or Michael Chabon? Not only does issue #4 of The Warning do all of these things, but it does so wrapped in a narrative that is so tightly constructed, so economically conveyed that it could almost serve as an object lesson in how illustrated stories can and should be told.

The issue opens with an amazing full page illustration of the destruction being wrought upon Munich by the weird Art Deco radio robot monsters that were introduced at the end of issue 3. We also learned in that issue that the proto-humans which built these robots had apparently evolved since the Bureau's first encounter with them. This is an important detail, because it gives the threat posed by these creatures an element of the pathological, echoing the struggle between advances in medical science and the constant evolution of disease causing pathogens. The more we learn about the world around us, the clearer the tenuousness of our existence becomes and this is a major cause of fear and anxiety in our post-industrial age.


The confluence of nature and artifice is a major theme in The Warning and it is reflected masterfully in the illustrations. There is a panel in issue 4 in which the team led by Abe Sapien and Johann Kraus is exploring the underground cavern from which the robot machines originated. The differentiation between the stone and earth walls and the fabricated machinery is nebulous. It is fitting that the events take place in Germany as the emergence of a catastrophic war machine from the bowels of Mother Earth recalls the emergence of the Nazi ideology from the nature ethos of German Romanticism. Moreover, the images of the underground factory and the strangely beautiful robots constructed therein also call to mind Fritz Lang's Metropolis.


Mignola's skill as an illustrator is pretty well undisputed, but its amazing how much he has developed as a writer over recent series. The Warning is typical in Mignola's universe in that after several issues in which little happens outside of a broad outlining of setting and incident, things begin to happen and happen very quickly in the fourth issue. It is a testament to the quality of Mignola's writing that information is conveyed with minimal dialogue. When the underground team confronts the proto-human army with their oversized komodo dragons, Abe suggests to Johann that he can take control of one of the dragons by by projecting his consciousness into it simply by shouting his name. In a less well written comic like Walking Dead, the writer might say in twenty words what Mignola did with one and the effect would be a less exciting read.


If Hellboy forms the basis of Mike Mignola's grand 21st Century American mythic cycle, B.P.R.D. is this great genre-smashing vehicle through which many of the tales of this cycle are fleshed out. Mignola's comics work so well as horror stories in part because even as one monster is vanquished, the reader is left with the unmistakable sense of larger threats looming in its wake. Perhaps more importantly, Mignola shows that comics can and should be intellectual and literary, without being Intellectual and Literary.

Hellboy: The Crooked Man #3

The last issue of “The Crooked Man” was legitimately fucking scary. Most horror comics, like horror movies, aren’t actually scary or anything, but Mignola hit this weird anything can happen sense of narrative that when mixed with Richard Corben’s signature art didn’t really read like anything else.

The moment where it suddenly went from noon to midnight, foreshadowed by a striking image of wailing witches flying through the air, the gaggle of down syndrome redneck witches surrounding the church were so rarified and disturbing that it made the appearance of the titular Crooked Man almost an afterthought.

This latest (and final) issue wraps the story up and turns the Crooked Man into an actual character, which really does make him less scary and switches the focus from creeped-out Lovecraft-ian atmosphere to something close to say, Jeeper Creepers. There’s nothing wrong with this and once again, Mignola’s narrative hits this point where the “anything can happen” feeling that only comics give you gets beyond palpable. It’s crazy to see Hellboy pierced by some stakes in the fence thrown by the Crooked Man, and it gets weirder from there.

And Corben’s art is the perfect match to all this. Like the Crooked Man himself, Corben’s work is great because it’s unpredictable. He does lots of weird stuff with perspective, sometimes purposefully giving someone a head that’s a little too big or present an image from some odd angle like it’s got a fisheye lens on it or something. There’s also the weird effect of it being really cartoony but not fun or cute at all. There’s lot of Silver Age sound effects and ‘Looney Tunes’ smoke. It’s all pretty ugly, but it’s never too much.

Mignola’s writing is similar. He treats the Appalachian Mountains the same way he’s treated some weird, fucked-up town in Eastern Europe, which is refreshing because it would be easy to fumble into grotesque caricature dealing with the South. It’s also not too cute and sensitive either. Tom Ferrell’s a skinny-ass redneck, but he’s a human too with fears and concerns who just wants to do the right thing. He’s given an amazing level of bravery when his response to the Crooked Man’s request for the cat bone that’s protected Tom is simply: “…he’s got me. Fair’s fair, I used that cat bone.”

One of the smarter aspects of Mignola’s writing is the way the story never wraps up as quickly as you expect it to. Sometimes this is a bit frustrating and makes a story feel overlong, but it’s a great way of throwing in some final weird emotions that wouldn’t fit if plot--instead of character and emotion--were the sole focus for Mignola. Additionally, it adds a sober, realistic aspect to the story's end. The pathetic creature clutching the gold, Hellboy and Tom walking in the woods the day after, the return to reality after all the supernatural stuff.

Abe Sapien: The Drowning

One of the many things that makes Mike Mignola's constatly-growing Hellboy universe so great is how everything matters. Nothing feels tossed-off or less significant than something else. Certain series aren't "events"--events are of course, the current bane of comics' existence--and certain series aren't more fun or unimportant (except for "Weird Tales" and "Hellboy Junior"). Every "Hellboy" sub-series fills in some chronological holes, answers some questions or poses new ones, and still gives you plenty of cool monsters and usually finds time to sneak up emotionally devastate you somewhere along the way too.

Abe Sapien: The Drowning is probably the best sub-series yet and it comes out today as a trade. A five-issue series that started earlier this year, written by Mignola and drawn by Jason Shawn Alexander, The Drowning tells the story of Abe Sapien's first mission without Hellboy and the mission's absolute failure. Everything about the mission is presented as second-rate, from it taking place on Saint-Sebastien in France (not the famous city in Spain), to constant references from B.P.R.D agents that it's Hellboy that gets all the exciting jobs, to of course, it being placed in the hands of the rather inexperienced Abraham Sapien.

The "hook" of this series, the relating point of it all--if you stripped it off its connection to the Hellboy universe and the mythology of Saint Sebastian, and a bunch of bad-ass water monsters--is the first day of your first big job where everything's gone wrong. Of course, it's not some office job or something, so the consequences are every ounce of Abe's self-confidence in the shadow of Hellboy, and a whole lot of guilt about his perceived responsibility for the death of some B.P.R.D agents. Abe's a really nice and sensitive guy, he doesn't hide his emotions in jokes or hard-ass quotables like Hellboy, he just sort of scrunches up and gets really upset, which makes this series more of a psychological portrait of guilt and learning that the world's fucked, than your typical Hellboy story.

Usually, Mignola buries the emotions behind adventure and Lovecraft-like atmospherics, but here, the most memorable stuff is the moments of Abe freaking out. The plot about the island and the forces that protect a century-dead Warlock are there, but they're muddled even by Mignola's standards--although I think it's supposed to be as confusing for the reader as it is for Abe--and are really, just a vehicle in which we enter into Abe's guilts and fears.

This is some of Mignola's most direct and emotional writing and it's matched quite well by the more realistic art of Jason Shawn Alexander. We're mainly used to seeing Mignola's own art or the significantly more cartoony work of Guy Davis, but here, Alexander's work, a mix of Scott Hampton's wisely sloppy lines and Jae Lee's realism (but none of the rigidity of Lee's art), takes a more sober and overtly serious take on the Hellboy universe, which fits the "it's really, really fucked but it'll be okay in the end, I promise" tone of the story.

In issue #2, there's a particularly affecting dream sequence in which Abe, struggling to get someone, anyone from B.P.R.D on the phone, imagines Hellboy appearing and yelling at him for the failed mission. "What the Hell were you thinking?", a Hellboy-shaped shadow asks, and for a moment we think it's Hellboy to save the day, and on the next page, out of the shadow, he asks "What made you think you were ready for this?". It's followed by a page of others similarly chastising Abe until he finally explodes at the imagined versions of his friends. We're totally in Abe's head for this sequence as it's drawn and presented as realistically as the rest of the issue and it's disturbing to see Abe's friends being so cruel, which only serves to highlight just how overwhelmed and guilt-ridden Abe is at this point; he's paranoid, out of his head, imagining his best friends losing all their sympathy.

The final issue of the series ends with the real-life version of the events Abe imagined in #2. It begins with a solitary image of Abe, sadly perched on a boat looking out at the ocean--actually, quite similar to the Herzog image from Nosferatu I blabbed on about here--and is followed by a reverse angle of Abe apologizing to Bruttenholm, who of course, tells him it wasn't his fault and means it: "It was a bad situation...No one could have foreseen what would happen." The rest of the scene is intercut between Abe and the Professor talking and strangely affecting images back at Saint Sebastien (B.P.R.D clean-up crew, the townspeople, a dead boy), illustrating the aftermath, both happy and sad, of the mission.