Hellboy

• 1. A Name by Accident

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  Hellboy, the comic book hero created by Mike Mignola, arrived on Earth inside a fireball on the 23rd of December 1944. He dropped into the ruins of a church in Bromwich, England, where Allied soldiers were encamped. Only moments earlier, the mystic Grigori Rasputin had overseen an occult Nazi ritual called Project Ragna Rok. Its aim was to awaken a force known as the Ogdru Jahad and turn the tide of the war. At first, nothing appeared to happen.

  Then came the child. The soldiers were shaken by his sudden appearance, yet they soon realized he posed no danger. One onlooker remarked that the creature looked "like a little boy." Professor Trevor Bruttenholm murmured a single word, "Hellboy," and without meaning to, he had given the baby a name.

  That accidental label would stick to a creature who grew into a red-skinned giant with a tail, cloven hooves and a stone fist. Who sent him, and what was he meant to do on Earth? How does something born in Hell grow up to guard people against the dark? And how did a quick sketch of a monster in the early 1990s become a long-running comic series?

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• 2. Born in Hell

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  On the 30th of April 1574, at a Witches' Sabbath, a sixteen-year-old witch named Sarah Hughes summoned the archdemon Azzael. Azzael held the rank of archduke of Hell. Hughes consorted with him and, without realizing it, conceived his son.

  More than four decades later, on the 5th of October 1617, she lay dying inside a church in East Bromwich, England. She confessed everything to her two children, both of whom served in the clergy. The instant she died, Azzael appeared to claim his unborn son. He burned her children to death for trying to drive him away. Then he carried Sarah down to Hell, where she too was consumed by flame.

  The newborn, half demon and half human, had his right hand cut off. In its place went a huge stone limb, later known as the Right Hand of Doom. When the other princes of Hell learned what Azzael had done, they condemned him. He still managed to send his child away moments before they stripped him of his powers and froze him in ice, much like Lucifer in Dante's Divine Comedy.

  The story Strange Places discloses where that hand came from. It once belonged to Anum the Watcher, one of the angels who watched over the young Earth. Anum later helped bring the Ogdru Jahad into existence. After he sealed them away, his fellow spirits destroyed him. Only his right hand survived. The Hyperboreans, the first race of man, preserved it until it reached Azzael, who grafted it onto his newborn son.

  Because that hand made and bound the Ogdru Jahad, it is also the key that can "loose and command" them. Doing so would bring about Ragnarok, the destruction and rebirth of the world. The comics never explain how this would work, only that someone intends to try, with or without Hellboy's consent. The 2004 film turns the idea into a literal key. Turning it twice in a special obelisk, secured by Rasputin, would release the Ogdru Jahad.

  Astaroth and others claim the hand can also awaken the great Army of Hell. That army is said to be strong enough to shatter the boundaries between Heaven, Hell and Earth and let its wielder rule all Creation. The prophecy has never come true, because Hellboy keeps refusing his destiny.

  Most stories show that the arm does not need to stay attached to him for its true purpose to work. One suggestion holds that it would become useless if he died while wearing it. He has therefore decided that the only safe course is to keep it and protect it.

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• 3. Raised by the Bureau

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  A United States Air Force base in New Mexico became the infant Hellboy's first home on Earth. Soon afterward, Bruttenholm and other paranormal experts founded the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, known as the B.P.R.D., to combat occult threats. Bruttenholm served as its first director. The young Bureau at first held custody of the boy, but in March 1946 Bruttenholm formally adopted him.

  Hellboy grew at astonishing speed. He learned to crawl within a week, and he was walking and talking at one month old. By the age of eight he looked fully grown. After that, he barely aged across the sixty-plus years that follow.

  Though he was raised in secret at first, the world learned of him by 1947. He became a media darling of the Atomic Age and appeared in LIFE magazine. His looks rarely provoke shock or alarm. As a child he began filing down his horns, a habit he kept into adulthood. The stumps left on his forehead resemble goggles.

  On the 6th of August 1952, a special act of the United Nations granted him honorary status as a human being. A week later he joined the Bureau as a full-time agent. With years of experience behind him, he quickly became its best investigator and field operative.

  Kate Corrigan, a professor of folklore at New York University, worked alongside him. So did Abe Sapien, an amphibian humanoid, and Liz Sherman, a young pyrokinetic who can start fires with her mind.

  Despite his fearsome looks, Hellboy is gruff but shows none of the malevolence long attached to demons. He has an ironic sense of humor and, by one description, smells of dry-roasted peanuts. The stories credit this gentleness to Bruttenholm, who raised him as an ordinary boy. That same man would not live to see Hellboy's career reach its turning point.

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• 4. Cases for the Bureau

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  Fairies once swapped a young girl named Alice Monaghan for a changeling called Gruagach. Hellboy rescued her on one of his early missions, which ruined Gruagach's hopes of an easy human life. In Russia, he shot out the eye of the witch Baba Yaga, who had been kidnapping and eating children. Both Gruagach and Baba Yaga nursed lifelong grudges.

  Seed of Destruction changes everything. Hellboy goes looking for Bruttenholm, who vanished during an expedition to the Arctic. He finds his adoptive father only to watch him die at the hands of a frog monster straight out of Lovecraftian horror.

  The trail leads Hellboy, Abe and Liz to Cavendish Hall, a mansion where Rasputin has set a trap. He hopes to lure Hellboy into embracing his destiny, and he is helped by Sadu-Hem, one of the 369 spawn of the Ogdru Jahad. Abe, controlled by the spirit of an ancestral Cavendish man, impales Rasputin. Liz's firestorm then burns up the bodies of both Rasputin and Sadu-Hem and destroys the hall. Soon after, a visit to Bromwich Church gives Hellboy a glimpse of his own conception more than three hundred years earlier. He learns he has two human half-siblings, a nun and a priest, whose spirits remain bound to the place where they died.

  Romania supplies the next test in Wake the Devil. Someone has stolen an ancient box holding the corpse of Vladimir Giurescu, a Napoleonic officer who was in fact a vampire before he was "killed" on the order of a fearful Adolf Hitler. The thief is Ilsa Haupstein, a surviving member of Project Ragna Rok, revived from suspended animation. The goddess Hecate turns out to be the source of Giurescu's rebirth. Hellboy destroys her original body by forcing her into sunlight, but Rasputin unintentionally hands her Ilsa's body, locked inside an iron maiden. Hecate swallows Hellboy and tells him his purpose is to destroy worlds. He denounces that destiny and returns to his own reality. Before this, he had summed up his attitude plainly: "I like not knowing. I've gotten by for fifty-two years without knowing. I sleep good not knowing."

  The warlock Igor Bromhead and his master, the demon Ualac, capture Hellboy in Box Full of Evil. They restrain him by speaking his True Name, Anung Un Rama, which translates as "and upon his brow is set a crown of flame." They want his normally invisible Crown of the Apocalypse to boost their power. The theft backfires. Without the crown, the name is no longer accurate, so it loses its hold on him, and he kills Ualac's mortal body. The archdemon Astaroth drags the demon and the crown back to Hell. Astaroth is later revealed to be Hellboy's paternal uncle.

  In Conqueror Worm, the ghost of his childhood hero Lobster Johnson and Roger the Homunculus help him stop an alien entity from reaching Earth. Surviving members of Project Ragna Rok are behind the scheme. Hellboy also learns that the Bureau has planted a bomb inside Roger in case he ever turns on them. Disillusioned, and ready to look deeper into his origins, he resigns and becomes an independent detective. Free of the Bureau, he soon heads to Africa to spend time with a witch doctor.

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• 5. Strength and Limits

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  An MG 42 machine gun once put many rounds into Hellboy's chest, and he destroyed it anyway. His strength exceeds the one-ton base limit, which the stories tie to both his demonic heritage and extensive physical training and bodybuilding. He heals quickly from almost any injury and is immune to disease. He can also understand ancient and magical languages.

  He has torn down a large tree and hurled it at an opponent. He has thrown opponents weighing at least four to five hundred pounds. He has survived a sword through the chest, severe werewolf mauling, a beating with heavy iron tongs, falls from great heights and crushing boulders. Still, he is far from invulnerable, and conventional weapons can injure and bloody him.

  In the film version, he is immune to all fire and burns, including Liz Sherman's flames, and to electrocution. The films also show him practicing necromancy, animating a dead man's body so it can give him directions. In the 2019 reboot, he raises an entire army of the dead after embracing his power as Anung Un Rama. In the comics, the dead Russian nobility tell Baba Yaga that he may not be slain even by supernatural means. They say he appears to be as deathless as her warrior Koschei.

  The story Pancakes finds Hellboy two years old yet looking somewhere between six and ten in human terms. In Nature of the Beast, set in 1954, the ten-year-old Hellboy looks fully grown. His body matures far faster than he actually ages. The comics leave the lifespan of a demon or half-demon undefined, ranging from decades to many thousands of years. In the films, the Bureau describes his aging as "reverse dog years."

  His jacket and utility belt hold holy relics, horseshoes, herbs and hand grenades. His oversized revolver, named The Samaritan in the Guillermo del Toro films, incorporates iron once used to forge a church bell. Hellboy freely admits his aim is terrible, so he often prefers swords, spears and his massive stone fist. He has no formal combat training. Decades of experience as an investigator make up for it, and improvisation fills the gaps.

  Curiously, his spilled blood sometimes makes lilies sprout, which the stories treat as a supernatural sign of his good nature.

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• 6. Exile and Excalibur

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  Three mermaid sisters seize Hellboy and drag him beneath the sea to a witch called the Bog Roosh. She grants each sister one wish in exchange for him. The first two are tricked and killed by their own wishes. The third is cleverer, and she asks for a missing piece of her father's grave.

  The Bog Roosh intends to destroy Hellboy completely and so prevent the apocalypse. At the grave, the father's ghost tells his daughter that the only way to honor him is to save Hellboy. She does. When the Bog Roosh sees she cannot stop the apocalypse, she lets Hellboy kill her in the ensuing battle. The third sister becomes the new Bog Roosh and frees the souls of drowned sailors that had fed her predecessor's power. Then she releases Hellboy and leaves him lost at sea.

  Several years adrift pass in Strange Places, spent drinking with the ghosts of sailors. Hellboy reaches a mysterious island, where Hecate insists once more that the two are bound together and must destroy the world. Hellboy, true to his values and somewhat drunk, brushes her off. Deeper inland, a long-slumbering Sadu Hem attacks him, and their fight carries them into a temple at the island's center. The creature stabs him through the chest, apparently killing him. While dead, he talks again with the witch doctor, who somehow brings him back. He wakes to find his spilled blood soaked into the corpse of a long-dead mystic, who revives as a more demonic looking version of Hellboy. The mystic threatens to force all humankind to worship the Sadu Hem. Hellboy fights him and wins. Rattled, he sails for England, to the dismay of Gruagach and the council of fairies who have been watching over him.

  Six years later, Darkness Calls finds him in England amid a power vacuum, after Bromhead crippled Hecate in Italy. Hellboy refuses to serve the witches as their king and lands in the dimension of Baba Yaga. There he defeats her champion, Koshchei the Deathless. Back in his own reality, he finds Bromhead monstrous and in agony after trying to seize Hecate's powers. Hellboy gives him a merciful death.

  The Wild Hunt begins with an invitation from the Osiris Club to join a hunt for giants. The club betrays him and leaves him to die. He survives and, though offered a way out, chooses to fight the giants. As the battle goes on he grows more bloodthirsty and demonic, regaining his senses only when every giant is dead. Alice Monaghan finds him. Since he rescued her as a girl, she has become a close companion to the faeries of England. She takes him to Mab, Queen of the Faeries, who hints that his mother's ancestry entitles him to a crown.

  A trap leaves Alice nearly fatally poisoned, and the pair go to the castle of Morgana Le Fay to save her. To enter, Hellboy must fight Eligos, a high-ranking demon from Hell. He wins with help from one of Eligos's slaves, in return for a promise to remember that slave when he rules Hell. Inside, Morgana tells him that through his mother he descends from Mordred, which makes him the rightful ruler of England. She also warns of Nimue, a long-imprisoned witch freed by Gruagach, who wants to conquer England. Morgana shows him the sword Excalibur, and he declines to take it. Astaroth then returns and tells him he is destined to kill Satan and rule Hell. Hellboy fights a demonic illusion of himself, which explodes in a fireball and seemingly kills Alice. Convinced she was right, he takes up Excalibur and finds himself on a hill with Alice alive beside him.

  The Storm and the Fury sees the pair travel across England, raising an army from the noble dead. At a pub, Hellboy decides he no longer wants the sword and suggests Alice leave it in a lake. They share a kiss, and he asks her to move to America with him once Nimue is beaten. To reach Nimue's fortress he needs Baba Yaga's magic, and the price is his eye, which he finally gives up. Nimue is now completely possessed by the Ogdru Jahad and seeks to destroy the world. Storms rage across England as they fight, and Hellboy beats her with a sword given to him by the ghost of Vasilisa. As the dragon collapses, Nimue's ghost plucks out his heart, damning him to Hell.

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• 7. Descent into Hell

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  The Abyss, the outermost part of Hell, is where Hellboy lands, and Eligos attacks him almost at once. Edward Grey, a British paranormal investigator who ended up trapped in Hell, rescues him. Grey has been watching over Hellboy for many years.

  Three spirits then visit him. The first shows him his own birth in Hell and his father's imprisonment. The second shows him Satan, whom he murders as prophesied, though he does not remember doing it. The third shows him the sleeping army of Hell that his Right Hand has the power to awaken.

  His fully demonic half brothers Lusk and Gammon, manipulated by Astaroth, attack him next. All three die, and Hellboy tumbles back into the Abyss. Grey saves him again and persuades him to commit to his new life in Hell. Between helping lost souls, Hellboy gradually learns that Hell's aristocracy has gone into hiding or been killed by its own slaves. They panicked at the thought that he might kill them all.

  His half sister Gamori sets powerful spirits called the Furies on him, and they poison him. The Furies then turn on her, dooming her to destroy what remains of Pandemonium, the capital city of Hell. Eventually, in fully demonic form, Hellboy hunts down the last rulers of Hell and destroys them with help from their slaves. He then returns to a home on the beach, where three glowing shapes meet him.

  In B.P.R.D: The Devil You Know, the final arc of the story, Hellboy returns, resurrected. He fights beside his original companions, Liz Sherman and Abe Sapien, against the rising Sadu Hem and a small band of demons who want to conquer Earth. The team defeats the demon Yomyael, who is possessing a young girl named Varvara. Once free, Varvara reveals she is Rasputin's daughter, and she resurrects him. Hellboy and Rasputin fight one last time, and both die.

  As a ghost, Hellboy is shown the remaining path to the end of the world by Edward Grey. B.P.R.D. agents save a small part of humanity by guiding people to shelter underground. On the surface the Sadu Hem reign briefly, until the Osiris Club uses Hellboy's severed Right Hand of Doom to summon the Ogdru Jahad to Earth and kill it. Hellboy takes the hand back, killing the club in the process.

  He sees Liz Sherman, somehow still alive, and tells her to unleash the full force of her fire, burning down the world. With the world gone, Hecate appears before him once more in her Iron Maiden form. She assures him that nothing he could have done would have prevented any of it. He tries to fight her but realizes how tired he is of violence. He steps inside her Iron Maiden form, and his blood revives the world.

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• 8. Drawn from a Monster

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  In 1991, Mike Mignola drew a snarling, muscular demon for a Great Salt Lake Comic-Con promotional booklet and printed the words "Hell Boy" on its belt buckle. The figure looks little like the final design. Decades later, Mignola reflected, "I added the Hellboy name at the last minute, and it made me laugh. I wasn't trying to create a character. I just wanted to draw a monster." Mondo recreated this "First Hellboy" as a statue in 2015.

  Mignola had no plan to do anything serious with the drawing, but he liked the name. He had also grown interested in creator-owned comics. It made more sense to invent characters for the stories he wanted to tell than to squeeze existing ones into them. As he put it, "I knew the kinds of stories I wanted to do but just needed a main guy." At first, Hellboy was meant to be one member of a team of five. Mignola dropped the idea because he could not think of a team name he liked.

  A more recognizable version appeared on the cover of Dime Press #4, an Italian fanzine, in May 1993. This Hellboy has the horn stumps and the oversized stone forelimb, but his skin is gray.

  The first multi-page story ran in San Diego Comic-Con Comics #2, published by Dark Horse Comics in August 1993. It was four pages in black and white, with a print run of roughly 1,500 copies. Hellboy visits an American ghost town and meets Anubis. Mignola had never written a comic story, so he conceived the tales and worked with the established writer John Byrne, who wrote the scripts.

  Next Men #21, in December 1993, brought Hellboy to a full-length, nationally distributed comic and showed him in color for the first time. Inside that story he is a fictional comic book character drawn by Mignola, and the cast of Next Men recognize him as one. A poster for Hellboy comics had appeared in the background of a panel in Next Men #14 months earlier. The first self-titled series, the four-part Seed of Destruction by Mignola and Byrne, ran from March through June 1994.

  After a short mini-comic in May 1994, Mignola began writing Hellboy without Byrne. Later stories came from other creators, including Christopher Golden, Guy Davis, Ryan Sook and Duncan Fegredo, especially after the B.P.R.D. spinoff series launched in 2002. The 2008 one-shot In the Chapel of Moloch was the first Hellboy comic with Mignola's script and art since The Island in 2005.

  In a 2012 interview, Mignola said his Hellboy is modeled on his father, a veteran of the Korean War who has traveled widely and has a "been there, done that" attitude. He contrasted this with the del Toro films, where Hellboy is bottled up in a room, mooning over the girl he cannot have. Of his own version, Mignola said, "With my Hellboy, there were no girl problems."

  The miniseries Conqueror Worm won a 2002 Eisner Award for Best Limited Series, and The Art of Hellboy won a 2004 Eisner for Best Comics-Related Book. Mignola took a 2000 Harvey Award for Best Artist for his work on Box Full of Evil. Darkness Calls won a 2007 Eagle Award. In 2011, IGN ranked Hellboy 25th among its Top 100 Comic Book Heroes. The comics writer Alan Moore recommended the series, singling out Wake the Devil.

  The character also moved into other formats, including two straight-to-DVD animated films. The video games include Dogs of the Night in 2000, The Science of Evil in 2008 and Web of Wyrd in 2023. Four live-action films followed 2004's Hellboy, with The Golden Army in 2008 and a 2019 reboot. The most recent, The Crooked Man, arrived in 2024.

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