Hellboy: The Wild Hunt

I've become more and more interested in the crazy universe that Mike Mignola has been creating for over 10 years in the pages of Hellboy and B.P.R.D. Though it started out as a series I read because I heard it was good, across the past few trade paperbacks, it has truly gelled into a series with which I am utterly in love. Perhaps it was the delay between my reading of each volume or a new cosmic awareness that I've recently developed. Whatever the case, the latest volume of Hellboy is all kinds of awesome.



The story of "The Wild Hunt" picks up pretty closely after the end of the last volume, "Darkness Calls", with our titular hero visiting old haunts in England and the witches of the world preparing for war with humanity. Hellboy is invited to take part in a giant-killing party, the Wild Hunt, following which much unrelated to the actual giant killing ensues. As Hellboy's journey to discover more about himself unfolds, Hellboy himself continues to evolve as one of the more three-dimensional characters in comics. Though he started as a "It's Clobberin' Time"-sort of paranormal investigator, Hellboy has become increasingly conflicted in his role on Earth. Can he really ever be human? Should he even try to be? And while Hellboy grows, so too do his supporting characters, especially the Grugach, a tortured fairy stuck in the body of a pig. Watching Grugach foment war against the world simply to carry out his own increasingly impotent revenge fantasy is almost heart-wrenching.

Mignola continues to grow as a master of pacing and though he is no longer the artist of his creation, Duncan Fegredo continues to keep his work Mignola-esque enough to capture the dark, forboding nature of what has always been a horror comic. Yet, as well as being a horror comic, Hellboy serves as a modern fairy tale; at times it reads like the awesomest Grimm/Anderson fan-fiction battle royale ever!



Well, that actually sounds kind of lame...but trust me. For story fans, you get your money's worth with each collection. If you've never read Hellboy, you better go back and purchase 20 volumes of it and its companion book B.P.R.D. Read them all, then pick "The Wild Hunt" up. It and the series as a whole is decidedly Amazing.