It's hard not to like Hellboy. First created by Mike Mignola in 1993, Hellboy is a supernaturally-spawned investigator of the paranormal and star of a series of short stories and graphic novels which have now been collected into several full-color books by Dark Horse. Hellboy may be popular entertainment, but it is popular entertainment done with wit, intelligence, and a sense of visual style.

Jules Feiffer has written (in The Great Comic Book Heroes) that comic books are “junk.” Of course this was several years before Zap! and the whole underground comics scene, but in any case, the term is used with affection as much as dismissal, in part because the comic book—by virtue of its low, popular culture status—is liberated from certain constraints and pretensions. Feiffer uses “junk” in its broadest, most suggestive sense, as possessing a seductive, pleasurable, allure. Well, if comics are junk, then Hellboy is the good junk. It is an example of what other mainstream comics should be aspiring to. Much of Hellboy's charm lies in its artwork. Stylistically, Mike Mignola owes a heavy debt to the late, great Jack Kirby. Mignola's figure drawing, his layout, his staging of the action all derive ultimately from the work Kirby was doing in the mid-'60s. But that is not to say that Mignola is some sort of clone or that anyone would mistake his work for Kirby's; he has developed his own distinctive graphic style and Hellboy is infused with his sensibility.

One of the things that sets Mignola apart from his predecessor is his strong use of what the Italians call chiarascuro—or the use of highly contrasting light and dark areas to define form, and to create dramatic compositional balance. This use of light and shadow also gives his drawings visual depth and a dark, gritty quality that helps bridge the gap between the realistic and fantastic elements which coexist in his stories. His inking has a clean, fluid quality to it and he's adept at rendering bits of statuary and carvings, bathed in shadow, to act as a somber backdrop to the action. His creative reworking of old engravings and such for title page headings also helps to deepen the mood. The coloring, done by a number of different artists, is uniformly excellent; the use of muted color schemes being particularly effective. In several stories the panels are printed against black pages, which is a nice effect. The production quality on these volumes is also superb. (Each book also has a gallery of Hellboy art by guest artists, another nice touch.)

Adolf Hitler's interest in the occult is well known, if probably exaggerated, and the graphic novel Seed of Destruction (co-scripted by John Byrne) opens during World War II. A team of Nazi occultists have parachuted to a special site in Britain to perform an arcane ceremony which results in the appearance of a strange creature who looks like an infant demon. But a group of Allied soldiers and paranormalists led by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm have gotten wind of this activity through some psychic waves in the ether and are also on hand. Bruttenholm take possession of the child (promptly dubbed Hellboy) and becomes his surrogate father. This historical flashback segment is well handled, with Mignola using both comic strip sequences and illustrations with typeset captions to convey the narrative.

Moving to the present, we find the adult Hellboy visiting an aged and decrepit Trevor Bruttenholm, who's recently returned from an arctic expedition in which his companions, the Cavendish brothers, have perished. They'd been looking for a strange temple in the ice sought by nine generations of the Cavendish clan. All that the professor can remember is the discovery of some ruins and a hideous, tentacled idol.

When Bruttenholm is slain by a bizarre reptilian creature, Hellboy and his colleagues from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense try to track down his killers. The grown-up Hellboy is an immense, bulky fellow with red skin, a tail, and knobby projections on his forehead (which we later learn are filed-down horns). His usual garb consists of trunks, a cartridge belt, and an overcoat whose pockets are stuffed with everything from grenades to amulets. He's a likable guy with a keen sense of loyalty and a sardonic sense of humor. His companions are an interesting lot, too. Liz Sherman is the possessor of vast and barely controlled pyrotechnic abilities and Abe Sapien is an “Icthyo sapien”—an amphibious fish-man of unknown origin who was found preserved in a glass capsule within a sealed and long-forgotten chamber under an old hospital.

The team's investigations take them to the Cavendish home, a dank old New England pile that is slowly sinking into a swamp. Chez Cavendish is filled with paintings of long-departed family members, old sailing ships, and whaling boats being crushed in the jaws of watery leviathans. The team encounters the murderous reptiles, but the real nexus of evil is turns out to be the former-head of the occult Nazi project, Grigori Rasputin. The same Rasputin whose baleful influence over the last Czarina got him ‘killed’ in 1916. But he was reawakened by the Dragon, Ogdru Jahad, “the Seven who are One,” the Serpent who will purify the Earth—a nasty creature(s) imprisoned in another dimension but attempting to return to this one. Rasputin tries to recruit Hellboy—having brought him into being for just that purpose—but Hellboy will have none of it. When Hellboy demurs, Rasputin tries to use Liz Sherman's latent powers—a move that results in catastrophe.

Needless to say, this whole cosmology is very influenced by the writings of H. P. Lovecraft (to whom this volume is, in part, dedicated). It was Lovecraft's contention that the gods and monsters of mythology and occult lore reflect the dim and distorted memories of malevolent beings who lurk just beyond the time/space barrier thirsting to reenter our world and engulf it in dark gibbering chaos. The tentacled creature in the ice is an echo of Lovecraft's dread Cthulhu. One of H. P.'s best stories, At the Mountains of Madness, also takes place in the Arctic wastes and the New England placement of the sea-faring Cavendish clan is suggestive of Lovecraft's own Arkham. I don't think the Hellboy stories possess the sheer creepiness of Lovecraft at his best, however. Of course where Lovecraft's protagonists are usually paralyzed with terror in dealing with the unknown, Hellboy and his companions seem very matter-of-fact, almost blasé, in their confrontations with supernatural forces. They don't like being pushed around by demons and werewolves, and having considerable powers of their own, take a much more aggressive approach towards matters. Also, the underlying deadpan humor that is evoked in these stories would be inconceivable in one of the rather straight-laced H. P.'s tales. Much of Hellboy's humor rests on a sense of the absurd. When Hellboy airlifts into Romania, the locals immediately assume that he's an American, his appearance notwithstanding, and he and agent Corrigan whip out their Paranormal Research and Defense IDs as if in an episode of Paranorm ala Dragnet.

The second volume, Wake the Devil, introduces new characters, but is also a continuation of Seed. Hellboy and his crew are looking for a vampire named Giurescu who they've traced as far back as the Napoleonic wars. It seems that Count Giurescu was mortally wounded on many occasions, but managed to return fully restored each time (the key to his restoration being the goddess Hecate). Giurescu and his vampire wives were recruited by Himmler during WWII, but Hitler distrusted the vampire so the whole brood was executed by stakes through the heart at Dachau. (An interesting narrative touch.) But once more Hecate is arranging to resurrect her favorite. Suspecting that Giurescu is alive, or as alive as the undead can be, Hellboy and company descend upon some moldering castles in Romania. Once again they encounter Rasputin, seemingly destroyed at Cavendish manor, but transformed and regenerated once more with the help of (his mother?) the legendary witch, Baba Yaga. Rasputin acts as a sort of Anti-Christ, saying things like, “Your faith has saved you,” to his disciples. His Nazi assistants, including the icy, voluptuous Ilsa Haupstein, have been preserved in a state of stasis since the war, but they now rejoin him and Ilsa sacrifices herself to become a giant, living iron maiden. Hellboy must do battle with her as well as Giurescu and Hecate and her harpies. A strange artificial man made of organic ingredients steeped in horse dung and given life by medieval alchemy, also makes an appearance.

The relationship between Hecate and Baba Yaga and the Dragon is somewhat murky and trying to figure out who is serving or incarnating which god or goddess is like opening one of those Russian dolls where you find another doll inside and then another inside that, and so on and so forth. That having been said, Mignola treats his material with respect even as he creatively reworks it. Although there is a certain amount of mythological mixing and matching going on in Hellboy, Mignola generally restricts himself to a contiguous area of Eastern Europe and the various elements fit together fairly well. Romania is on the northern edge of the Greek world, home of Hecate and her harpies, and if it seems just a bit odd that a Slavic witch should hide a soul in the Norse tree of life, its not really too much of a stretch. Our knowledge of Norse religion is fragmentary at best and there was a lot of cross-cultural contact between the two groups. After all, it was Swedish vikings who founded the Russian kingdom of Kiev.

The Chained Coffin and Others is a collection of shorter pieces. Several people have told Mike Mignola that his lead-off story, “The Corpse,” is the best Hellboy tale yet, and the artist now agrees—although at the time he first did it, he thought it a failure. Well, his friends are right: It is a rambunctious tale in which humor and pathos mix. It is unexpectedly witty, rich in Gaelic folklore, full of surprises and told with uncanny graphic verve.

The story centers on a baby who has been stolen from his Irish peasant parents by the Faerie folk, i.e., the Little People, the Children of the Earth, the Daoine Sidh of Celtic legend. In order to get the infant back, Hellboy has to lug the corpse of Tam O'Clannie—much beloved by the Faerie King—until he can find a place to give him a proper Christian burial. But the dead arise to deny him repose, crying out “No room!” at every turn. Finally Hellboy has to fight Grom (a man/boar) and Jenny Greenteeth (a ghoul who tries to make a snack of Tam's arm) before he can put his charge to rest. The tale is told with great macabre zest, but with an edge of melancholy as well, for the Children of the Earth are dying off and soon their king will lead them into the shadow world and the “Sons of Adam” will no longer see them.

Another tale relates how Baba Yaga lost her eye to Hellboy. “A Christmas Underground” is about saving the soul of a woman snared by a demon, and “The Wolves of St. August” concerns an entire clan cursed with werewolfism. “Almost Colossus” is a follow-up to Wake the Devil. Here Hellboy and agent Kate Corrigan are attempting to track down the artificial man, or homunculus, that Liz Sherman released. Liz is dying, because in reanimating him, too much of the life force was expunged from her body. In this volume, and to a certain extent, Wake the Devil, there is more of an emphasis on the purely supernatural rather than extra-terrestrial or extra-dimensional aspects of evil priests and religious incantations play a role and records of the Inquisition are used as evidence of past unearthly manifestations. Tactically speaking, there is a danger in this insofar as references to the Inquisition might forcefully and uncomfortably remind readers that the supernatural events have no basis other than in the “confessions” of suspects who were hideously tortured by those same religious authorities in the middle ages. This invites a deflating and rather ugly reality to intrude upon the fantasy. But that is a minor flaw. The real problem confronting Mignola is his reliance on formulaic plot development; in just about every piece an unearthly menace is identified, an inevitable bang-up occurs between Hellboy and the menace which culminates in a climactic battle in which the foe is destroyed—but never quite completely. Villains in Hellboy can be impaled, blown up, incinerated, chopped to pieces, etc., but if a single molecule of them remains floating about, they end up back in the picture somehow. Although it might seem quixotic to object to endless fisticuffs in a mainstream book like Hellboy, I'm not so sure that it is a pointless objection. To a certain extent Mike Mignola has become a victim of his own success—he's already transcended some of the limitations of his genre; now, if he wants to keep his series fresh and interesting, he needs to deal with the challenge of constructing his stories without relying on the rather simple narrative structure of the superhero comic.

Hellboy and his companions—even the non-powered ones, like Kate Corrigan—are appealing, interesting characters, but so far their personalities have only been sketched in, so there's room for exploration there. Both Hellboy and Abe live in a world of humans, yet are physically very different from those around them. One would think that a day in the life of an Icthyo sapien must be quite odd. Given the success of “The Corpse,” Mignola's continuing practice of reworking old folktales might also prove a fruitful source for different sorts of story ideas in the future. But however he does it, the trick that Mignola needs to pull off, is that of creating new stories that go beyond the predictability of genre convention, but at the same time retain all those qualities that make Hellboy enjoyable and interesting.