Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #1-4

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #1-4

Originally released in 1994

Written by Mike Mignola and John Byrne

Art by Mike Mignola

I changed my plans rather suddenly; yesterday, I found out that there was a Humble Bundle featuring a bunch of Hellboy comics and spin-offs, so I got that, and I'm giving the series a try today. (My original plan for today was to continue with Grant Morrison's Batman, but I doubt I'd be able to make much of a dent in that; I do intend to read it once I'm done this blog, though) I'm only vaguely familiar with Hellboy as a franchise - I'm pretty sure I've seen one of the Ron Perlman movies, and that would have been years ago.

Towards the end of World War 2, a Nazi attempt at summoning a demon goes awry, and the demon winds up appearing at a church where some kind of unspeakable horror happened.  Allied forces, including a medium, are waiting there, knowing something is going to happen but not knowing what, and they effectively adopt the demon, dubbing him Hellboy.

The book opens with a dedication to Jack Kirby and H.P. Lovecraft, among others, and I can see the inspiration.  With Lovecraft, it's aesthetics, as seen with the statue above; with Kirby, I can see elements of Etrigan (a demon fighting on the side of good) or Orion (a protagonist struggling against a darker nature) in there, though it could be more likely due to his body of work as a whole (Fantastic Four, New Gods, etc.) and how it helped set the bar for comics as a medium.

When his father figure, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, is murdered in 1994, Hellboy and his coworkers, pyrotechnic Liz Sherman and fish-like man Abe Sapien, question Emma Cavendish, whose family funded the expedition to the Arctic that Bruttenholm went on that seemingly led to him being killed. Cavendish lives in a rotting mansion, and for nine generations, the men of her family have tried to find some sort of secret hidden in the Arctic, with this latest attempt costing her the lives of her sons.

As Abe investigates the foundations of the house, Liz finds that her room is full of frogs; Hellboy goes to check on her after hearing this, but he arrives too late and she's vanished.  Mrs. Cavendish has been working with the person who originally summoned Hellboy in exchange for getting to see her sons again, though this proves to be a fatal euphemism.

The summoner doesn't seem to have aged a day in fifty years, but Hellboy is attacked by giant tentacles that burst through the floor before he can question the man further.

Luckily, the wizard is happy to explain - Hellboy's massive right hand contains the power to command an ancient and powerful seven-headed serpent demon called the Ogdru-Jahad, and the wizard wants to use it to bring about the apocalypse.  He'd rather have Hellboy at his side, but Hellboy firmly refuses.

The wizard's head regenerates, and as he mentions the first time that someone tried to kill him, it becomes clear who this man is: Grigori Rasputin, Russian mystic and healer who worked for Russia's tsar before the Communists took over, and whose death (he was allegedly poisoned, stabbed, shot, and thrown into a river for good measure, though some of it was seemingly exaggerated) is the stuff of legend.

Rasputin still intends to summon the Ogdru-Jahad and bring about the apocalypse, using the power of the captured Liz as a conduit to free the serpent and unleash it upon Earth.  He offers Hellboy one last chance to work for him willingly, but Hellboy is adamant that he won't bring about the end of the world.

As Hellboy fights off the frog demon that Rasputin conjured, it seems like he's about to complete the ritual before he's impaled with a harpoon that Abe found beneath the house.  The ritual fails and the house collapses around them, but even when reduced to a skeleton, Rasputin refuses to die.

Hellboy has a flexible premise - as part of a team of paranormal investigators, he can encounter just about anything and everything, from Egyptian gods to Nazi brains in gorilla bodies. I'm so glad that Humble Bundle released a digital collection of these comics, since Dark Horse Comics doesn't seem to have a digital comics app like Marvel and DC do.  If this first volume is any indication, I think I'm going to enjoy this series.