Hellboy Redux

After watching the movie on Saturday, a friend lent me several of the Hellboy comics to read. I can see where the movie's visual look comes from: the art in these books is amazing!

As I mentioned in my last post, I thought that a central conflict in the movie was really no conflict at all. Although I thought that the movie did an excellent job making an inhuman character human, I did not see any evidence of the conflicting side to that character's nature. Hellboy is a demon, after all but he never shows that aspect of his character. When he is forced to choose, there is no real choice.

The comic deals with this as well. To be fair to the movie, the comic does not address this very well either. The comic plays to the same strength as the movie: Hellboy is a better human than most humans are. He is like a father to little children: he is strong and reassuring, doing the things that must be done. In fact, he exhibits those traits that a comic reader would hope to see in the best super heroes (like Superman). The fact that the protagonist in the story should be the epitome of evil is a nice twist but one that has little impact on the story. All of the other characters, human and otherwise, accept his presence (in only one story is a human bothered by the fact that he is a demon, but he is dead long before the story starts and his concerns are dismissed perfunctorily). He is decidedly in the human camp and the temptations laid before him in order to convince him to "cross over" are not very tempting.

Having said that, the demon prince who offers him the opportunity to resume his place as a demon takes the refusal in stride. His reaction implies that this change is inevitable and he is willing to wait. I hope that this is developed more.

But on the plus side: the stories are nice retellings of folk tales from Ireland, Norway, Japan and elsewhere. They take the reader to interesting places and treat him to stunning representations of characters and beasts. I admire the scope and depth of Mr. Mignola's knowledge of his material and I can appreciate his spin on the ideas contained therein.

This is a comic I plan on paying more attention to.