XL Cover Story: Hellboy for Dummies

Not familiar with the monster-fighter with the mano de piedra? Read on and learn about the comic-book hero who's poised to rock the big screen

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Yet he talks like a Stubb's bouncer, carries a gun Ahnold would admire and wears a shorts/trenchcoat combination that makes him look like a big, red version of Silent Bob. He fights demons from other dimensions, but he also tussles with mythical baddies such as the Baba Yaga and historical figures like Rasputin. He's a smooth amalgamation of a few centuries' worth of pulp fiction, monster movies, folk tales, superhero tropes and Gothic fantasy, yet he's the subject of an ultra-modern motion picture.

Who is this Hellboy, and what makes him so much fun?

A hit is a hit

There's a great moment in the first season of "The Sopranos" when Soprano adviser Hesh Rabkin, a former music executive, talks about making a hit record. "A hit is a hit!" he yells. Why? "For reasons we couldn't comprehend or codify."

Making a great comic book hero is not unlike making a great pop single. An artist needs to both capture a cultural zeitgeist and tap into something strangely primal, and if you're absurdly lucky, kids might even remember your character when they have kids.

Who knows why Batman's cape and Superman's "S" continue to resonate? Who knows why kids still get juiced at seeing Spider-Man swing or the Hulk smash? They just do. A hit is a hit.

Now, Hellboy doesn't have the cultural capital of a Superman, but comics reach far fewer people than they used to (thank you, video games). Besides, comparing anything to Superman is like resenting Los Lonely Boys because they aren't the Rolling Stones.

But there's no question that in 1993, Mike Mignola came up with a hit. Born in 1962, Mignola grew up with comics and monster movies. Starting out as an inker on comic books' work-for-hire assembly lines, Mignola has been puttering around the comics industry since the early 1980s, doing fill-in work here, a miniseries there (anyone remember "Rocket Raccoon"? Didn't think so). By the end of the '80s, Mignola had become a cult-favorite penciller, his chunky, dynamic style both expressionistic and nuanced. As the story goes, for the cover of a convention program, he made a jokey sketch of a drooling monster wearing a belt that said Hellboy. The proverbial light went off, and after signing with the upstart publisher Dark Horse Comics, Mignola produced the first Hellboy miniseries with veteran writer John Byrne to make sure the story was actually, you know, a story.

In case you've never picked up a Hellboy comic, here's the short version: During the waning days of World War II, some Nazi mystics, including the apparently immortal Russian adviser Rasputin (aren't comics great?) try to jump-start the end of the world. They fail, but they do succeed in opening a gate to hell through which pops a young demon with a big stone hand. American soldiers capture the l'il boy from hell and raise him on a steady diet of pancakes. Some years later, Hellboy joins the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense and has all sorts of adventures with the B.R.P.D.'s other freaks, including the amphibious lizard guy Abe Sapien and the pyrokinetic Liz Sherman. Fighting all that cannot be otherwise explained on behalf of Uncle Sam, Hellboy is the world's greatest paranormal investigator.

Mignola took over the writing with the next series arc, and the rest, as they say, is history. After 11 years of success it's clear that Mignola has come up with that toughest of all comic creations: a modern icon. These days, now that Mignola has wrapped up the five volumes that make up the primary Hellboy story arc and busied himself working on the movie, he's opened up the further adventures of Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. to other writers and artists. Novelist Christopher Golden has written a couple of pulpy novels starring Hellboy, and the character has become a crown jewel of the Dark Horse stable.

Post-modern and having fun with it

'I always thought I was doing stories that Ed Wood would have come up with. Then I treat it as an art film.'

-- Mike Mignola, in a 2002 interview with Slush Factory webzine

Well, yeah. From the '40s through the '70s that's just the sort of straight-faced, anything-goes absurdity that great comics were built on. But that's not how they're often made now.

Since the mid-1980s, mainstream comic books have been dominated by a feeling of post-modernism, a sense that iconic heroes can only be looked at through the lens of irony.

Starting with the still-brilliant 1986 graphic novel "Watchmen," by Alan Moore and David Gibbons, mainstream comics went through an entire generation in which sophistication comic storytelling was associated with "grim and gritty" cynicism and revisionist references to a more innocent past. Dozens of mediocre titles seemed devoted to the idea that costumed heroes were only cool if they had feet of clay even as they streaked through the clouds.

Moore, for his part, has always felt terrible for this inadvertent part in all this -- it's not his fault he's a genius -- and his all-ages oriented comic "Tom Strong" has tried to reverse this trend. "Hellboy" also feels like part of this backlash against the feel-bad comics, managing the neat trick of being post-modern without being cynical about it.

Like lots of post-modern lit (think Pynchon or DeLillo), Mignola has stated that the book gives him the opportunity to shoehorn in everything that ever interested him about pulp fiction, monsters, myth, heck, about junk culture in general.

The five graphic novels that make up the core of the Hellboy story sport a mise-en-scène straight out of 1930s pulp magazines like "Weird Tales" and "Doc Savage." "Hellboy: Seed of Destruction," the book upon which the movie is based, is dedicated to mid-century comics master Jack Kirby and horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, the clearest antecedents to the whole "Hellboy" concept. Hellboy is forever fighting creatures from beyond what man was meant to know, a classic Lovecraft theme, and his action sequences are practically a tribute to Kirby's 1950s monster comics. (Check out the Monster Blog! at monsterblog.oneroom.org for samples of Kirby's hyper-compressed epics of such never-to-appear-again lumberers as Rommbu, whose Very Name Made Mankind Tremble, Korilla, the Alien Beast-Man, and Spragg, the Living Hill.)

Other books work in vampires, the Baba Yaga and Irish folktales. Mignola was determined to put Hellboy in the context of man's darker subconscious, and in the process created an icon.

It doesn't hurt that the books are gorgeous. As an artist, Mignola has a wonderful control of mood; shadows fall across every conceivable surface, and you'd be hard-pressed to find a bright, "comic-booky" color in "Hellboy's" palette. His craggy linework, as much an homage to Kirby's powerful, squared-off figures, pulses with an elegant energy. As a writer ... well, as someone who cut his teeth on the grim-'n'-gritty Vertigo line of semi-adult comics and continues to find energy in carefully written alternative comics, I think Hellboy's dialogue could be a little more sophisticated, its pacing a little more sure, its intellectual energy a little more upfront.

But were I around 11 years old, I would be in seventh hell, which is exactly what comics need right now. Comics need new heroes who act like heroes without reading like the stilted heroes of old. As Moore himself points out in typically brilliant fashion in the introduction to "Hellboy: Wake the Devil," "the trick ... is not ... in crafting work as good as the work that inspired it really was, but in the more demanding task of crafting work as good as everyone remembers the original as being." This is what a generation of post-modern comic writers have largely failed to do, and it's what Mignola does brilliantly. He has made a genuine icon, totally modern, yet fused with nostalgia. Original, yet suffused with a sense of déjà vu, which makes for exactly the sort of intimate reading experience that can create lifelong comics fans out of any given 11-year-old.

Also, big demons who punch other demons with a big stone hand are really cool.

   More: Hellboy's Infernal Combustion
   More: 'Hellboy' Reviews & Showtimes