The Weirdness of Hellboy
The tale of Hellboy’s return to the silver screen is almost as strange as any tale concocted in Mike Mignola’s cult classic comic. When Hellboy debut in 2004, it was a modest, but not outright success though it was received well by critics. What it did have was the creative visionary Guillermo del Toro behind the camera, and once his last film Pan’s Labyrinth was a critical and Academy Award-nominated success, his desire was to give Hellboy a part two.
 | Where as the Hellboy II: The Golden Army is an entirely new story created specifically for the screen, the plot of the first film was taken predominately from the first Hellboy series Seed of Destruction. But soon the new creatures and characters from The Golden Army will join the Hellboy universe’s rich tapestry of allies and adversaries that are all inspired from sources as varied as Hollywood, pulp comics and folklore. The origin of Hellboy is simple: in 1944, the Nazis combined technology and black magic to effectively change the course of the war. The result of this experiment was the summoning of a child that had the appearance of a devil with red skin, horns, a tail and a right hand made of stone. The child was found and adopted by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm (nicknamed “Broom”), who named it “Hellboy” and raised him as a son at a military base in New Mexico: headquarters of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. |
| Much of this is the same in the movie as it is in the comic book but there are a few differences. One, the Hellboy of the comic is a pseudo-celebrity, a well known agent of the publicly recognized Bureau, which in the comic is more of an international advisory agency funded by numerous governments rather than a division of the F.B.I. In the film B.P.R.D. was based in New Jersey, where as in the comics the organization operated out of a base in Connecticut and later moved to an abandoned research facility in Colorado once occupied by Nazi scientists employed by the US post-World War II. Hellboy himself was given honorary human status by the United Nations in 1952. Like the film, Hellboy gets back-up from Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman. Sherman, a pyrokinetic, has always struggled with her powers: the manifestation of fire. In the comic though, Liz has a much more difficult time with the control and acceptance of her powers and the first use of her power at the age of 11 resulted in the destruction of a city block and the deaths of 32 people. Abe, meanwhile, is an Itchyo Sapien, a merman of sort that was found in Washington D.C. in 1865, although he was originally a London businessman named Langdon Everett Caul. In the film, Abe was a background player, but in the comic he’s a leader in the B.P.R.D. |  |
 |  | The adversaries of the first Hellboy film were Nazi occultists lead by the resurrected mad monk Grigori Rasputin. Now Nazis have remained popular bad guys ever since their defeat in 1945; from numerous volumes of pulp fiction to the Indiana Jones movies, have featured Nazis in the pursuit of supernatural power. And shoot, Rasputin was even the bad guy in the animated Anastasia. It’s much the same story in the comics that Rasputin lead the Nazi project “Ragnarok,” which was supposed to bring about the end of the world, but instead brought about Hellboy. And like in the film, Rasputin dies at the end of Seeds of Destruction, but survives to plague Hellboy and gang again as a ghostly counsellor for other bad guys. |
The sword-wielding Kroenen was also part of the comic, but all he and the film version of Kroenen have in common is the fact that they wear a gas mask and body suit. Ilsa Haupstein, Rasputin’s blonde-haired moll from the film, survived Seed of Destruction only to end up being killed in an iron maiden at the behest of Rasputin’s ghost so that her blood would be a sacriment to the resurrected goddess Hecate. Another key Nazi character from the comic is Herman von Klempt, a disembodied head kept alive in a jar (much like Futurama), who created a species of Kriegaffes, or ‘War Apes,’ to do his bidding. The last appearance of von Klempt was in the mini-series B.P.R.D. 1946.
After the Nazis, Hellboy’s next biggest nemesis is probably the Frog Men, harbingers of the Apcoalypse that first appeared in the initial Hellboy miniseries, but have become a recurring threat in the pages of B.P.R.D., through to the current War of Frogs series. On a more one-time only basis, Hellboy has fought a number of creatures from folklore and legend, including werewolf ghosts in The Wolves of Saint August and Daryl the Wendigo in B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine. Most recently in Darkness Calls, Hellboy faced a mortar flying hag named Baba Yaga and her lieutenant Koschei the Deathless, both from Slavic folklore.
 | But the weirdness of Hellboy’s enemies is nothing as compared to his fellow teammates. We’ve seen Abe and Liz, but The Golden Army will introduce us to Johann Kraus, a psychic medium that now exists purely as an ectoplasmic being that has to be contained in a mechanical, man-shaped suit. Kraus’ comic origin is that he was performing a séance and reaching out the spirit world during the Chengdou disaster in China, described repeatedly in the pages of B.P.R.D. as a “psychic Chernobyl.” Kraus’ powers, as a result of his fate, have increased and he has since become a valued member of the B.P.R.D. Another key Bureau member that almost made the cut into the film is Roger, a homunculus created through alchemy that was first introduced in the Wake the Devil miniseries. A homunculus is a kind of artificial person. As described in the pages of Hellboy one is created by stewing blood and herbs in a jar and incubating it in horse manure. Roger actually has a quick cameo in Hellboy, in the hallway, on display behind Prof. Broom and Myers as they tour B.P.R.D. |  |
But with over 100 comics, the above outlined article only highlights a slim amount of the weirdness that populates every corner of the Hellboy universe. Discover the world of Big Red for yourself with the following list of Hellboy and B.P.R.D. collections from Dark Horse Comics.
Hellboy: Seed of Destruction
Hellboy: Wake the Devil
Hellboy: The Chained Coffin and Others
Hellboy: The Right Hand of Doom
Hellboy: Conqueror Worm
Hellboy: Strange Places
Hellboy: The Troll Witch and Others
Hellboy: Darkness Calls
B.P.R.D.: Hollow Earth and Other Stories
B.P.R.D.: The Soul of Venice and Other Stories
B.P.R.D.: Plague of Frogs
B.P.R.D.: The Dead
B.P.R.D.: The Black Flame
B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine
B.P.R.D.: Garden of Souls
B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground
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