The Stop Button
blogging by Andrew Wickliffe
Category: Hellboy
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The opening Hellboy story has, just on the surface, one major problem. Hellboy wrote Abe a letter, the text of that letter is the story’s narration. Hellboy writes letters where he sounds like an expository narrator. How uninteresting. Then it turns out the story’s actually Hellboy’s secret origin (he’s the son of a demon and…
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This teaser for Dark Horse Presents 100 has some great stuff in it… but it also has some unbearably long entries. Chadwick’s Concrete—though it’s always fun to read Concrete assuming the worst about humanity—goes on forever and turns out to be a prologue. It’s a little lame, though Chadwick’s art is decent. LaBan’s Emo and…
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You know, Mignola doing a fight scene isn’t particular impressive. In fact, Hellboy had a fairly boring finish. Mignola tries to maintain the minimalist tone for the fight and so the fight is lame. There isn’t even any resolution to the story itself. It’s just Hellboy versus a big werewolf, who may or may not…
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Mignola looks good in black and white. There are some very effective panels in Hellboy. The writing helps. He knows when to write and when to just let the art do its work. Up until the end of this issue, it’s almost like Hellboy is a passive force in the story. He’s an unknown quantity.…
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This issue features something I never wanted to see… a Paleolove pin-up from Davis. You can tear it out and put bad art up on your wall. His artwork is really weak for the first half, maybe his worst ever. It gets a little better for the second half of the boring installment. The writing…
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Is this issue the first appearance of Hellboy? I think it might be my first full Hellboy (not B.P.R.D.) story. It’s good, but Mignola does something weird with the conclusion. He sets the whole thing up, then has Hellboy come in and reveal it all before the first installment’s done. Makes all the setup a…
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If I recall correctly, Mike Mignola never had Hellboy and Selma Blair’s firestarter get together (romantically) in the comics, even though Hellboy is flame resistant. That filmic development was all Guillermo del Toro’s. del Toro is responsible for everything successful in Hellboy and, subsequently, everything unsuccessful. Hellboy works, which is probably the film’s greatest achievement–it’s…
The Stop Button 