How was your Thanksgiving? We did it proper-like here in Boston–dinner at a friend’s house, complete with a 25 lbs. home-brined turkey and the usual culinary excellence I’ve come to expect from Dave and Kara.
Which brings me to Hellboy; not those lousy movies, but Mignola’s graphic novels. (The movies are lousy, with none of that chunky gothic feel that Mignola and his various guest artists bring. Hellboy works because of his insouciant pathos–he knows he’s the harbinger of doom, yet continues fighting evil. I hesitate to use that old “blue-collar” work ethic cliche, but Hellboy’s got it. The movies don’t capture that pathos, and the insouciance degrades into snark.)
Here’s the thing about Hellboy: every story pretty much ends the same. Spoiler alert: Hellboy wins. The stakes, therefore, would seem low. I’ve always insisted that if our protagonist isn’t ever in real danger–see: James Bond, et al.–then we lose interest.
But Mignola solves this problem via both existential danger–Hellboy doesn’t want to accept his destiny as the Right Hand of Doom–and by putting our entire world at risk. Hellboy can’t die (at least, thus far) but our world can. So every issue is a struggle against the world ending. Big stakes? You bet.
A careful reader might ask: Fine, the world could end and all that, but why should we care about the story itself if Hellboy always wins? To which I respond: because Mignola is so good at creating contemporary myths that we don’t notice and don’t care.
Thor always won, right? Every giant, every troll–he’d bash ‘em all. Until the very end. But I kept reading because it was so damn fun. As it is with Hellboy.
Start here. Keep reading. Pay extra attention to this.
Oh, also: Mignola proves that Lovecraft’s greatest gift was developing myths for better writers to expand/contract/modify.
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