Hellboy's success rests on Director Guillermo Del Toro & author Mike Mignola's creativity, offering exciting new takes on every aspect of the supernatural genre.
Credit: Dark Horse
Hellboy, the creation of writer and artist Mike Mignola, has, over time, become one of the most well- known and beloved characters in comics. The comics, like the films, chronicle Hellboy's fight against a wide range of paranormal entities threatening humanity, as he simultaneously struggles to accept his prophesied destiny as the destroyer of the very world he's fighting to save. The first issues focus heavily on Hellboy's battles and investigations with monsters and occult societies before gradually transitioning into more mythological stories and elements. From pulp adventures to sword and sorcery epics and voyages to hell and back, Hellboy comics continue breaking new ground in characterization and creativity, serving as fertile ground for rich world-building.
“Mike Mignola has succeeded in building a world (or cosmos) for Hellboy and his associates and nemeses, and at the same time he has succeeded in building Hellboy into a successful franchise.”
-Scott Bukatman, Hellboy's World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins
Along Came Guillermo
Director Guillermo Del Toro, a massive fan of the comics, then brought the character to life with 2004's Hellboy and 2008's Hellboy II: The Golden Army. Interestingly, the films borrow material and adapt certain scenes from the comics, although both are mainly original in their stories and take on the world and characters. The foundation and themes remain consistent, but there are notable personality differences btween comic book Hellboy and movie Hellboy.
Similar But Different
In the comics, Hellboy is a loner. His relationships with the supporting cast are distant and often under-developed. While there are other people he interacts with, he seeminlgly doesn't have any cose relationships with other charcters in the comics. In fact, his supporting cast received their very own comic, B.P.R.D., while Hellboy leaves them to go off on his own. The films, however, shed new light on who Hellboy is as a person. This is mainly done through Hellboy's romance with Liz Sherman, a human pyrokinetic. In the movies, Hellboy is deeply in love with Liz, to the point where she becomes his link to humanity. The same is true for Hellboy's adopted father, Trevor Bruttenholm. While both the comic and film versions of Bruttenholm adopted and raised the young Hellboy, their father/son dynamic is only explored in the films, making Bruttenholm much more of a presence as audiences grow to understand what the pair mean to each other.
Credit: Dark Horse
A Man, not a Monster
Recent comics have rectified Hellboy's distance towards his friends through new love interests and previously unseen flashbacks emphasizing these relationships, but this was not until Del Toro's films already set the standard. Through the supporting cast, movie Hellboy comes into his own as a character as he struggles to prove to both his friends and himself that he's not a monster.
Expanding on Lore
For Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Del Toro wanted to integrate brand new mythologies into Hellboy's lore. This time around, he decided to explore the creatures and settings of the sword & sorcery fantasy genre through the lens of Hellboy's universe, something the comics had never done before. Del Toro warped the traditionally benign entities like elves and fairies into terrifying embodiments of gluttony and malice by remaining firmly rooted in the occult and gothic aesthetic the previous film and books established. My favorite example is the literal tooth fairies, ravenous winged cannibals that feast on their victims till they leave nothing left, only to begin the cycle once again. Their name's origin is humorously described by Abe Sapien as them feeding primarily on calcium, preferably the teeth. The result of such imagination is a breath of fresh air for both the movies and the overall multimedia of Hellboy, presenting these elements in new and disturbing lights but allowing Del Toro to leave his mark on the fantasy genre overall.
Comments