Added 1 new A* page:Today I got myself digital copies of the five remaining volumes of the Hellboy series that were both written *and* drawn by creator Mike Mignola (in total, volumes 1 through 6, plus the latest, Hellboy in Hell volume 1) that I didn't already have; some months back I'd snapped up Hellboy volume 1 in paperback when my brother decided to dig up and clear out our childhood comic collection (we'd stopped collecting in the 90s, which is when volume 1 originally came out, but he must have picked up the collection in recent years), and enjoyed it quite a bit; then last week I finally gave in to curiosity/temptation and got myself the second volume, digitally (they'd all recently arrived on Comixology), and that was a hoot, and after I finished it today I just couldn't *not* get the others, which I am now devouring.
Mignola has a unique, boldly expressive yet enduringly solid graphic style perfectly suited to his taste for stories of exploration of folklore and battle with mythological monsters—plus Nazis. That might sound horrific, but despite vast swaths of pitch black ink, his stories and characters have an unmistakable lightness and charm
that is just so much fun. Did I mention the Nazis?
He's quite the student of folklore, too, and he's had me dashing back and forth to Wikipedia to look up the characters and references he snatches from history, both fictional and (as far as is known) actual, such as Rasputin (I hadn't realized there were so many creepy photos of him : o), Elizabeth Báthory (aka "The Blood Countess" : o), and Baba Yaga, of whom the Russian animals speak after her first encounter with Hellboy:
And he doesn't just know the obvious stuff like that; he seems to have a vast knowledge of smaller scale tales and legends; for instance, his intro blurb to the first short story collected in volume 3, a tale titled "The Corpse" (and yes, it turns out to be quite the charming fellow!), says the inspiration came from "an Irish folklore called 'Teig O'Kane and the Corpse'"—not one with which I expect most casual readers of folklore are familiar!—and then he "added bits and pieces of other English and Irish folktales (the changeling, the bouncing rock, Jenny Greenteeth, etc.), and there you go." Simple! : o And then he takes all these fascinating bits and boils them together into his own adventure stories that are their own thing altogether.
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