Behold the Right Hand of Doom

If you pay any attention to the "What's Keeping Me busy" lists on the right side of my blog, you may have noticed I've been reading a lot of graphic novels and paperback collections of comic books lately. This is largely due to the happy discovery I made a few months back that the Indianapolis Public Library has a rather extensive collection (check out 741.5 for you Dewey Decimal nerds out there) of classic comics (lately I've read some older Justice League of America, Thor, and Superman) as well as plenty of more current stuff (100 Bullets, Y: The Last Man, Fables, Alan Moore's ABC stories). Like any library, there's a few annoying gaps in some of the more popular series, but they've still got enough to have kept me devouring 8-10 books at a time for the past few months. Yesterday, while looking for something else, I discovered that there are also some comic collections to be found in the Young Adult section, including, strangely enough, Mike Mignola's Hellboy. You may recognize the name from the recent movie starring Selma Blair and Ron Perlman as the titular red demon. Having ripped through a couple of collections yesterday afternoon, I picked up the DVD later in the day to see how the movie compared.

The comic itself is pretty great stuff. The drawings are dark, angular and heavy on the black ink, setting the perfect tone for a book that deals with the occult and folk legends. Mignola is obviously influenced by Jack Kirby in his art and H.P. Lovecraft in his writing, but as he explains in some of his collections, he often begins a Hellboy story by drawing on one of Europe's many folk or fairy tales, such as Eastern Europe's vampires, Ireland's Fair Folk, Russia's Baba Yaga, and stories of various Catholic saints. Having an interest in folklore myself, I found myself enjoying these stories. So I absorbed as much of the comic as possible and then watched the movie. I had already seen it once in the theater and enjoyed it, but had no knowledge of the source material at that point. In terms of Hellboy's origin, the movie stays pretty faithful. Hellboy (The Beast of Revelations fame) was summoned to our dimension in 1946 by a reincarnated Rasputin (working with the Nazis) to unlock a dimensional door with his magical stone right hand and usher in seven ancient demons who will begin the Apocalypse. But instead, Hellboy is saved from the Nazis and raised by a kindly professor who founded the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. HB eventually chooses to fight evil, becoming the BPRD's top agent and protecting the very world he was intended to end. The bulk of the movie takes place 58 years after Hellboy first appears, when Rasputin and several of his immortal Nazi henchmen once again try to use Hellboy to unleash the Apocalypse. The plot is loosely based on Mignola's first HB miniseries, Seeds of Destruction, but goes a bit more into Indiana Jones/X-Files territory than the comic ever does. This is mostly in order to sustain a two hour movie and never feels unnecessary or forced. I did have a few gripes: Hellboy himself spews a few too many cheesy lines for my taste, and the introduction of a human "liason" to ease the audience into Hellboy's character seems a little unnecessary, but by and large it's an entertaining movie, and fairly well-done as far as comic book adaptations go. Not a bad day's entertainment for $13 and a trip to the library.