4 out of 5

When you sample stories from the current Hellboy mythology and then glance back at the decades of work done on the characters, it can be tempting to assume that this world – the Mignolaverse – simply grew out of longevity.  And of course, no one could claim “it was all planned” from the start, but this also wasn’t exclusively a happy accident.  One only need to read the first two trades from Hellboy to see that Mignola’s eyes were set in the sky from day one, even if that vision was nudged left or right by helpful editors, as the backmatter of volume 2, Wake the Devil, suggests.

At the end of vol 1, we get some cutaway shots of some familiar Nazis; as a concluding hook, it’s perfect: Slightly weird, slightly ominous, and mainly an indicator that there’s more story to tell.  But what it doesn’t directly indicate – until you get to the next volume – is how big that story is (or showed the potential to be), and how smart Mike is with just littering his world with casual mythology and nit overloading the reader with forced plot points.  So elements that could have been bottled or reserved for traditional ‘the return of…’ stories instead get further call-outs here – Rasputin, The Dragon – while still allowing plenty of room for the foreground story (concerning an ever-returning vampire) to develop on its own terms.  This storytelling style casually rooted the character in a sense of history; the universe was exploding all around us, but effected with Mignola’s light tone and makes-it-look-easy simple yet entrancing layouts so that Hyperborean references and Baba Yaga appearances slide right by.  And the offhand comedy can’t be beat.  Exploding horses?  Entertainment if this quality should be a sin.

But we’ll pretend to be critical and knock off a star for some nits.  One is external to the material, regarding the collection: I do understand the practicality of doing this, but one of the collected issues has an asterisk that refers to a story that appears in the trade after this one.  Chronologically, that story appeared first, hence the reference, but some shorter odds and ends that were published before and after Wake the Devil were rounded up as volume 3 of the trades.  The problem is, if you were like me and reading Hellboy mostly in trade format, you get to that reference and panic: Are you missing something?  Was there a 1.5 trade?  Something uncollected?  When you figure out its in volume 3, perhaps confused you wait until you own that volume, read the referenced story, then return to volume 2.  Is that necessary?  No.  But it’s a little confusing.  Again, I understand the possible reasons why this has been collected as such, and I don’t know if it would’ve been better to stuff that story into this volume or some other solution, but nonetheless: It’s a hiccup.  Secondly, to the quality of the story, once it gets going it’s a blast, but there is a bit of HB tradition (nowadays) to do a folklore exposition dump and then get into the action.  The Mignola team has gotten really slick at incorporating this over the years, but at this early stage, the first few pages of talking heads are a bit of a drag.  Mike is, at the same time, forever refining his style: Some of the action sequences’ choreography is a little off, just not as perfectly intuitive as his work to come.

Flipping back to the positives, Mignola starts to do more of his random image cutaway effect here, only it’s not as random.  It’s a blast to see this slowly evolve.  And colorist James Sinclair adds in a touch more blending over volume 1’s flat colors by Mark Chiarello.  The backgrounds fall a little flat, but we’re getting closer to the balance Dave Stewart would effect.

This material hasn’t aged a god-damned day.