Hellboy Library Edition, Volume 1: Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil by Mike MignolaMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
In the dying days of World War II, Nazis summon a demon to help them win the war but he winds up in Scotland by mistake. Fifty years later, he is the world's foremost paranormal investigator. He is... Hellboy!
For some reason, I never picked up Hellboy before snapping this up on Prime Day on the cheap. I liked Mignola on Doctor Strange, Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment, Cosmic Odyssey, and Batman: Gotham by Gaslight but never got around to his creator-owned work. Until now! I'm twenty-five years late to the party but I wound up liking Hellboy quite a bit.
The two stories contained within are full of Nazi-punching, tentacled, blood-sucking goodness. In the first tale, Hellboy goes up against the man who summoned him and some frog-men who ran into some unpleasantness in the Arctic circle. In the second, his summoner is back for revenge, this time with a vampire and some unfrozen Nazis in tow.
The stories are pulpy fun, not head-scratchers. Hellboy cracks wise but not enough to detract from the stories. Mignola's moody art is the star of the show, with its stark blacks. Mignola draws a mean tentacle. I never realized how much Mignola's art was influenced by Jack Kirby's until this volume. He's like Kirby with a fifty-five gallon drum of black ink and a lifetime of reading pulps and HP Lovecraft.
The presentation in this volume is immaculate. The over-sized library edition really makes the artwork pop. The one drawback is the cover is a magnet for cat hair. My cats were hounding me for food while I was reading and I'll need a lint brush to get all the cat hair off the cover. All that said, it's a gorgeous product.
Hellboy is a fun series that doesn't take itself too seriously and hit all the right buttons for me. I'll be grabbing the other volumes in the series when I can. Four out of five stars.
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