Tag Archives: Hellboy

Hellboy: Wake the Devil (by Mike Mignola) Horror Review

Posted on by Arleigh

“We are not enemies. We are the agents of change. To that end we are bound together.” — Hecate

By the time Hellboy: Wake the Devil begins, Mike Mignola has already made clear that Hellboy’s world is not one where the dead stay buried or where ancient evils remain confined to history. Building on the groundwork established in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, this graphic novel moves deeper into the peculiar mixture of pulp adventure, Gothic horror, occult conspiracy, folklore, and apocalyptic myth that makes Hellboy so distinctive. It is a darker, stranger, and more confident continuation, one that expands Hellboy’s world through vampires, witches, ancient ruins, Russian legends, Nazi occultists, and the ever-present suggestion that the past is not buried so much as waiting to rise again.

Where Hellboy: Seed of Destruction had to introduce readers to Hellboy, the B.P.R.D., Rasputin, and the ominous question of the hero’s intended destiny, Hellboy: Wake the Devil benefits from being able to assume some familiarity with the larger premise. It does not waste time reintroducing every concept or explaining Hellboy’s origin in exhaustive detail. Instead, Mignola plunges directly into another supernatural crisis, trusting the reader to follow the fragments of history, prophecy, and folklore that emerge along the way. That confidence gives the book a more distinctive identity than the first graphic novel, which was highly entertaining but still carried some of the structure of a traditional early-1990s superhero adventure.

This difference also reflects Mignola’s greater control over the material. While Hellboy: Seed of Destruction was co-plotted and scripted by John Byrne, Wake the Devil feels more purely shaped by Mignola’s own creative instincts. The writing is leaner, stranger, and more willing to leave mysteries partially unresolved. The plot remains accessible, but it is not interested in handing readers a complete guidebook to its mythology. Rather than explaining every occult reference, historical figure, or supernatural artifact, Mignola presents them as pieces of a much larger hidden world. That approach gives the story a dreamlike quality, as if Hellboy has stumbled into a folktale that has been unfolding for centuries without him.

The story begins with a stolen corpse, an opening that immediately establishes the book’s grim tone. This theft is connected to Vladimir Giurescu, an ancient vampire whose resurrection becomes the central threat of the graphic novel. Giurescu is not presented as a familiar, romantic version of Dracula, nor is he simply another monster for Hellboy to punch through a wall. He is an old-world figure tied to European violence, occult ritual, aristocratic power, witchcraft, and death. Mignola makes him feel ancient in the best sense: not merely old, but connected to a past so deep and cruel that modern people cannot fully comprehend it.

Giurescu’s presence is one of the book’s greatest strengths because he embodies the kind of villain Mignola handles especially well. He is frightening not because he constantly performs elaborate acts of violence, although the story has no shortage of monstrous imagery, but because he carries the weight of history with him. His return does not feel like the arrival of a single antagonist. It feels like a buried nightmare opening its eyes. Mignola’s supernatural villains often possess this quality. They are dangerous as individuals, but they are even more dangerous as evidence that Hellboy’s world is built over ancient horrors that have never truly disappeared.

The plot also brings back Ilsa Haupstein, one of the Nazi occultists introduced in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction. Her involvement gives Wake the Devil a direct link to the previous story without making the book feel like a repetitive sequel. The Nazi occult material remains important, but Mignola wisely expands the scope beyond it. The conspirators and occultists are no longer the entire center of the story. They become one part of a wider mythology involving vampires, witches, old relics, secret histories, and supernatural forces that existed long before the twentieth century. The result is a story that feels more expansive without becoming bloated.

The title carries an interesting irony, since Hellboy himself is constantly associated with the devil because of his red skin, horns, tail, and demonic appearance. People who encounter him often assume that he must be monstrous, dangerous, or connected to evil. Yet Wake the Devil again makes clear that Hellboy’s appearance has little to do with his moral character. He may look like a demon, but he is still the person trying to stop the resurrection of an ancient vampire and the spread of occult evil. The real devils in the story are the people and creatures who seek power through murder, ritual, resurrection, and the exploitation of forbidden knowledge.

Hellboy’s moral simplicity is one of the series’ most enduring strengths. He is not simple in the sense of being a shallow character, but he is direct about what matters. He does not spend pages agonizing over whether monsters should be stopped. If something evil is threatening innocent people, he goes after it. He complains, gets irritated, takes a beating, delivers a dry joke, and keeps moving. That makes him an ideal protagonist for Mignola’s world. The setting is filled with cryptic prophecies, ancient names, hidden archives, and supernatural mysteries, but Hellboy gives the reader someone grounded to follow through it all.

His humor remains especially important. Wake the Devil is a dark book, full of graves, corpses, ruined buildings, occult rites, and creatures whose existence seems to violate the natural order. Without Hellboy’s blunt attitude, the material could become overly solemn. He does not make light of the danger, but his presence keeps the graphic novel from collapsing under the weight of its own mythology. Hellboy has the energy of a hardboiled detective dropped into a nightmare, even though his methods usually involve a massive stone fist rather than a revolver and a fedora.

The B.P.R.D. supporting cast also becomes more meaningful in this story. Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman are not merely background teammates, even if Hellboy remains the main focus. Abe’s intelligence and aquatic strangeness make him a natural fit for a universe filled with lost civilizations, secret knowledge, and evolutionary mysteries. Liz, meanwhile, carries a more tragic and dangerous presence because of her pyrokinetic powers. She is not simply a character who can shoot fire at monsters. Her abilities are tied to fear, isolation, and trauma, which gives her a vulnerability that contrasts sharply with Hellboy’s more durable and outwardly confident persona.

The relationship between these characters reinforces the unusual nature of the B.P.R.D. It is not a brightly polished superhero team assembled to save the world in matching costumes. It is an organization of people who have been pushed outside ordinary society, whether by their appearance, their powers, or the bizarre things they have experienced. Hellboy, Abe, and Liz are united less by traditional comic-book camaraderie than by shared alienation. They understand dangers that ordinary people would struggle to believe, and that creates a quieter emotional bond beneath the monster fights and supernatural investigations.

Visually, Hellboy: Wake the Devil is a major achievement. Mignola’s artwork is not built around realism or dense anatomical detail. Instead, it relies on dramatic shapes, bold shadows, exaggerated silhouettes, and a masterful sense of composition. His pages can make a single doorway, tomb, hallway, or distant figure feel ominous. A black shape against a pale background becomes threatening because Mignola knows precisely how much information to withhold. His art frequently suggests that the real terror is not necessarily what readers can see, but what might be waiting inside the darkness beyond the panel.

The book’s use of architecture is especially striking. Castles, crypts, underground chambers, cemeteries, churches, and ruined interiors are not just places where the action happens. They feel like extensions of the story’s ancient dread. Heavy stone walls, towering doorframes, deep corridors, and massive areas of black create the impression that Hellboy is moving through a physical landscape built by history itself. The settings seem to contain memories. Every abandoned room and buried chamber implies that something dreadful once happened there, and perhaps never truly stopped happening.

Matt Hollingsworth’s color work adds enormously to this atmosphere. The palette is often muted and moody, dominated by dark blues, sickly greens, faded browns, purples, and deep black shadows. This restraint makes the bursts of red more powerful, whether the red comes from Hellboy himself, blood, fire, or supernatural violence. The colors give the pages an aged, almost storybook texture. It can feel as though the reader is looking at a collection of old illustrations from some forbidden European folktale rather than a conventional comic book.

Mignola’s pacing is equally important. Wake the Devil knows when to pause and let the mood settle. There are moments where a character simply stands before an open grave, explores a silent corridor, or confronts an object that hints at a terrible history. Those quieter scenes make the action scenes more forceful. Hellboy does not fight with the slick agility of a typical superhero. He crashes through doors, falls through floors, gets thrown into walls, and responds to impossible threats with the stubborn endurance of someone who has spent his whole life being sent into terrible places.

That physicality helps make Hellboy feel vulnerable even when he is clearly superhuman. He is powerful, but he is not untouchable. He gets hurt, overwhelmed, deceived, and placed in situations where brute strength alone is not enough. The Right Hand of Doom is visually iconic, but it is not a solution to every problem. Hellboy survives because he is resilient, practical, and unwilling to give up when the supernatural situation becomes more complicated than expected.

The story’s deeper theme is the danger of seeking power through forbidden knowledge. Nearly every major threat in Wake the Devil grows out of someone trying to revive, exploit, or control something that should have remained lost. Characters pursue immortality, occult strength, revenge, or access to secret history, only to discover that ancient evil does not become manageable merely because someone has learned its name. Mignola draws heavily from Gothic vampire fiction, but the story also has the broader cosmic unease that defined Seed of Destruction. The horrors here are not merely monsters with weaknesses. They are fragments of a much bigger darkness.

At times, the book can seem deliberately cryptic, particularly for readers unfamiliar with the expanding mythology of Hellboy. Mignola introduces artifacts, historical references, mystical forces, and supernatural figures without always providing a detailed explanation. Yet that ambiguity is largely part of the appeal. The comic does not make its world feel small enough to be completely explained in a few captions. Instead, it invites readers to feel the weight of a hidden history that Hellboy can only partially understand.

Ultimately, Hellboy: Wake the Devil is an essential chapter in Mike Mignola’s larger saga. It confirms that Hellboy is not merely a clever premise about a demon who fights monsters for a government agency. It is a singular world of pulp adventure, folklore, Gothic horror, vampire mythology, wartime conspiracy, and dark fantasy, all filtered through Mignola’s unmistakable visual imagination. The graphic novel deepens the mythology while preserving the straightforward pleasure of watching Hellboy enter a supernatural disaster, trade a sarcastic remark with a monster, and refuse to let ancient evil dictate his fate.

If Hellboy: Seed of Destruction introduced a hero resisting the destiny imposed upon him, Hellboy: Wake the Devilreveals the scale of the haunted world surrounding that struggle. It is eerie, violent, funny, mysterious, and visually beautiful. Most importantly, it shows that Hellboy’s greatest strength is not the Right Hand of Doom or his ability to survive battles with creatures from nightmare. His true strength is his refusal to let monsters, prophecies, occult conspiracies, or his own infernal appearance determine who he is.

Hellboy Saga

Artist Profile: Alex Maleev

Posted on by Arleigh

Alex Maleev’s work stands out because it makes superhero comics feel physically inhabited rather than merely illustrated. His figures are not polished icons frozen in clean, declarative poses; they look exhausted, wounded, watchful, and frighteningly close to the people one might pass on a city street. Through textured linework, severe shadows, photographic reference, digital manipulation, and painterly color, Maleev developed a noir-inflected visual language that lends even familiar Marvel characters a sense of emotional weather. The grime on a wall, the hard light on a face, or the oppressive darkness surrounding a figure can carry as much narrative force as dialogue. His approach favors mood, intimacy, and psychological pressure over conventional superhero spectacle, which is why his pages often feel closer to crime cinema or an urban thriller than to traditional four-color adventure comics.

That sensibility found its defining expression in his celebrated collaboration with writer Brian Michael Bendis on Daredevil. Maleev was not simply illustrating Matt Murdock’s stories; he helped redefine the character’s world as a bruised, morally unstable, and deeply personal version of Hell’s Kitchen. The Bendis–Maleev run brought a grounded visual credibility to Daredevil’s civilian life, legal battles, criminal enemies, and private anguish, making every close-up and every dimly lit room feel consequential. Their earlier work on Sam and Twitch, and subsequent collaborations including Spider-Woman, Moon Knight, Scarlet, New Avengers material, and Halo: Uprising, demonstrate how adaptable that partnership could be. Still, Daredevil remains the central achievement: an acclaimed run whose visual atmosphere helped establish the template for a darker, more adult, and more psychologically intimate kind of Marvel storytelling.

Maleev’s legacy is therefore not just that he produced memorable covers, faces, or grim cityscapes, but that he expanded what mainstream superhero art could communicate. At a time when the genre could easily default to glossy anatomy and kinetic bombast, he proved that visual discomfort, ugly realism, silence, and shadow could be as powerful as a splash page. His art also helped legitimize a more hybrid, mixed-media mode of comics illustration—one that uses painting, photography, design, and sequential storytelling without treating any of those tools as mutually exclusive. Emerging from Bulgaria’s comics scene before becoming a major American-comics figure, Maleev built a body of work that remains immediately recognizable: moody, tactile, cinematic, and relentlessly human.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (by Mike Mignola) Review

Posted on by Arleigh

“Imagine the good this boy could do. I know what he is, what he might grow into, maybe even what he’s meant to be. But I also see what he can be. He just needs a little guidance and someone to set a proper example.” — Trevor Bruttenholm

Mike Mignola’s Hellboy: Seed of Destruction is more than the opening chapter of a popular comic-book universe. It is a foundational work of supernatural adventure, combining pulpy monster fiction, wartime conspiracy, Gothic imagery, Lovecraftian apocalypse, and a surprisingly human story about identity and free will. First published as a four-issue miniseries in 1994 and co-plotted with John Byrne, the graphic novel introduces Hellboy with striking confidence. The mythology already feels vast, the visual identity is fully recognizable, and the title character arrives as one of the most distinctive heroes in modern comics: a cigar-smoking red demon with a stone right hand, a sarcastic sense of humor, and a stubborn refusal to become the monster everyone expects him to be.

The premise is immediately compelling. In the final days of World War II, Nazi occultists conduct an elaborate ritual intended to summon a weapon powerful enough to alter the war’s outcome. The ceremony is overseen by Grigori Rasputin, who is reimagined here not simply as the notorious Russian mystic but as a servant of ancient, world-ending forces. Allied soldiers disrupt the ritual, but instead of the apocalypse the Nazis hoped to unleash, they discover a small red-skinned demon child transported to Earth. That child becomes Hellboy. He is taken in by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, founder of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, and raised not as a weapon or scientific specimen, but as a son.

That decision gives Hellboy: Seed of Destruction its emotional center. Hellboy looks like the obvious villain of his own story. He has red skin, filed-down horns, a tail, cloven feet, and the massive stone right hand known as the Right Hand of Doom. He appears as though he should stand alongside Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, or Satan himself. Yet Mignola’s central idea is that origin does not have to determine destiny. Hellboy may have entered the world through an act of evil, and powerful supernatural forces may expect him to fulfill an apocalyptic role, but he chooses another path. As an adult, he works for the B.P.R.D., investigating paranormal threats and protecting humanity from the very kinds of monsters he might be expected to join.

The main story takes place decades after Hellboy’s arrival and begins when a death close to him forces the past back into the present. The loss gives the investigation a personal urgency and propels Hellboy toward the hidden truth behind his own origins. As he follows the trail, he becomes entangled in a conspiracy involving Rasputin’s return, surviving Nazi occultists, forgotten rituals, buried secrets, and the terrifying possibility that Hellboy himself may have a role in an event far greater than any single monster attack. The plot steadily expands from a personal mystery into a threat with apocalyptic implications, but it never completely loses sight of Hellboy as a character caught between the person he has chosen to be and the fate others want to impose upon him.

Hellboy is joined by fellow B.P.R.D. agents Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman. Abe, an amphibious investigator with a calm, analytical nature, provides an effective contrast to Hellboy’s bluntness and impatience. Liz, a pyrokinetic woman whose connection to fire comes with emotional burdens of its own, brings a more vulnerable and tragic element to the team. In this first volume, they are not yet as richly developed as they would become in later stories, but their presence establishes the B.P.R.D. as something more interesting than an ordinary superhero team. These are not polished celebrity heroes in colorful costumes. They are unusual, damaged, and often isolated people employed to confront dangers that the public cannot know exist.

Mignola’s art is the graphic novel’s defining achievement. Even among the strongest comics of the 1990s, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction feels visually singular. At a time when much of mainstream superhero art emphasized intricate rendering, oversized muscles, and hyperactive action, Mignola worked through silhouette, shadow, stark design, and carefully controlled negative space. His figures are often blocky and stylized, but they are never lifeless. A few lines can convey fear, exhaustion, anger, or resignation. A large black shape can become a doorway, a corridor, an abyss, or a threat the reader cannot fully see.

Mignola does not use darkness merely to make the comic look moody. His shadows are active storytelling tools. Characters disappear into them, monsters emerge from them, and entire environments seem to exist only partially in the light. A seemingly empty room can become frightening because its far wall is swallowed by blackness. A frozen landscape can feel ominous because it leaves its characters exposed beneath an enormous blank sky. His layouts often evoke old pulp-horror illustrations, German Expressionist cinema, Gothic architecture, folklore engravings, and vintage monster movies. Rather than presenting a sleek modern superhero world, Mignola creates a universe that feels ancient, secretive, and half-buried under centuries of superstition.

The color work deepens that atmosphere. The pages use earthy browns, faded blues, icy whites, sickly greens, and vivid flashes of red to create a world that feels both dreamlike and decayed. Hellboy’s red skin makes him instantly recognizable within Mignola’s compositions, especially when he stands against a field of black shadow. He often resembles a burning ember in a world of darkness: visually connected to the supernatural realm around him, yet refusing to be extinguished by it. That visual contrast captures the character’s place in the story. Hellboy belongs to the darkness in a literal sense, but he continually chooses to stand against it.

The writing is more exposition-heavy than some later Hellboy stories, but it serves an understandable purpose. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction has to introduce Hellboy, the B.P.R.D., Rasputin, the Nazi occultist threat, the supernatural cosmology, and the significance of the Right Hand of Doom in a relatively short space. John Byrne’s scripting helps organize the material and gives the narrative forward momentum. Certain explanations have the recognizable rhythm of early-1990s genre comics, but the story’s atmosphere remains strong enough that the mythology rarely feels like a dry information dump. Mignola and Byrne create the impression that readers are seeing only a small piece of an immense occult history, one filled with ancient gods, forgotten disasters, and forces that have been waiting in darkness for centuries.

The pacing is deliberate rather than relentlessly action-driven. Mignola allows scenes to breathe, lingering over ruined architecture, old artifacts, empty corridors, haunted chambers, and moments of tense silence. The dread accumulates gradually. When action erupts, it tends to be sudden, heavy, and physical. Hellboy is not an acrobatic hero who glides through combat with effortless grace. He breaks through doors, trades blows with monsters, absorbs punishment, and keeps moving forward. His heroism has a blue-collar quality. He treats fighting the impossible as difficult, unpleasant work that nevertheless needs to be done.

That quality makes him especially effective within the story’s Lovecraftian framework. Traditional cosmic horror often centers on human helplessness in the face of forces too vast, ancient, and indifferent to comprehend. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction preserves that feeling, particularly in its suggestions of ancient beings and apocalyptic forces beyond normal understanding. However, it gives readers a protagonist willing to confront that terror rather than collapse before it. Hellboy cannot necessarily understand every supernatural threat, and he cannot erase the ominous circumstances of his birth, but he can refuse to cooperate with the fate laid out for him. His defiance is not naïve optimism. It is a hard-earned, practical moral stance: he will not let anyone turn him into a weapon, and he will not stand aside while innocent people are endangered.

The relationship between Hellboy and Bruttenholm gives that moral stance its weight. Bruttenholm represents the compassion that allowed Hellboy to become something other than an instrument of destruction. He does not deny Hellboy’s demonic origins, but he refuses to treat those origins as a permanent verdict. Their bond lends real emotion to the graphic novel without overwhelming it with melodrama. Mignola’s best moments of feeling are often restrained, expressed through silence, body language, or a brief line rather than a lengthy speech. This restraint suits Hellboy himself. He is not a character who easily verbalizes grief, fear, or tenderness, but those feelings are present beneath his rough exterior.

The graphic novel also has an important place in Hellboy’s larger cultural legacy because it served as the basis for Guillermo del Toro’s live-action film Hellboy. The adaptation draws from the comic’s wartime origin, B.P.R.D. framework, Rasputin-centered occult threat, and larger supernatural mythology, helping bring Mignola’s character and visual world to a wider audience. Even so, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction stands firmly on its own as the original expression of that world: darker, quieter, and more reliant on the power of shadow, silence, and graphic design than any adaptation could fully reproduce.

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction is not entirely flawless. The exposition can occasionally be dense, and Abe and Liz are not yet given the emotional complexity they receive in later Hellboy stories. The book also has the understandable burden of establishing a great deal of lore in a short opening arc. Yet those limitations are minor beside its achievements. Mignola creates a complete aesthetic universe from the beginning, one populated by ancient horrors, occult conspiracies, cryptic prophecies, and damaged people trying to do the right thing in a world that often seems hostile to human life.

Ultimately, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction remains a landmark graphic novel because it places mood, design, and character above conventional superhero spectacle. It is not simply about a demon punching monsters, even though it delivers that pleasure exceptionally well. It is about a creature born under the shadow of evil who insists on defining himself through his choices. Hellboy’s greatest strength is not his stone fist, supernatural durability, or ability to survive encounters with horrors beyond human comprehension. It is his refusal to become what he was made to be.

Here’s The First Trailer for Hellboy!

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

I’m like really trying hard to think of something to say about the first trailer for the upcoming Hellboy film but, to be honest, it just kinda seems like almost every other super hero trailer that I’ve seen recently.  You’ve got some one liners.  You’ve got some glowering extras.  You’ve got some hints of extreme violence.  You’ve got a cheesy song playing in the background for some reason.  (Mony Mony?  Really?)  It’s like they took the trailers for Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy and they just forced Hellboy into them.

That said, I liked both Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy…..

Anyway, Hellboy will be released on April 12th, which is often not a great sign when it comes to films like this.  (An April release generally means that the studios is hoping to make a quick buck before the summer blockbusters come along.)  On the plus side, Neil Marshall’s usually a pretty good director.  So, we’ll see what happens!

Horror News: Hellboy reboot Poster Released

Posted on by Arleigh

Hellboy The Wild Hunt

The Hellboy reboot has been a tad polarizing with fans of the films pretty much wanting the film to fail because it’s not Guillermo Del Toro and Ron Perlman doing Hellboy 3. Then there are fans of the source material who have faith that this reboot will skew more towards the horror origins that it’s creator had in mind when he created Hellboy and the BPRD.

In fact, the reboot will take ideas from two of the character’s later trip down horror lane with the story arcs from Hellboy: The Wild Hunt and Hellboy: The Storm and The Fury.

Hellboy The Storm and the Fury

While news came down that the release of the Neil Marshall-helmed Hellboy reboot has been pushed up by several months, there’s at least some very good news relating to the BPRD’s number agent.

A new poster for the film has been released courtesy of Entertainment Weekly and we see David Harbour in full Hellboy make-up with unbroken horns, flaming sword and the Right Hand of Doom very much present. This Hellboy also seem to be a bit more worn and scarred from previous fights with a much more demonic visage than the Guillermo Del Toro/Ron Perlman incarnation.

The film won’t be out in the theaters until April 12, 2019, but this cast and crew and this poster is just helping drive my interest in this reboot towards hype level.

Hellboy

Quickie Review: Hellboy: Blood and Iron

Posted on by Arleigh

Guillermo Del Toro will forever be one of the heroes of comic book fans everywhere due to his bringing Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comic book franchise from the printed page to the silver screen. He first brought the Big Red Guy with the 2004 film adaptation of the same name. The film was a modest success and brought the titular character to a whole new group of fans. In 2008, Del Toro came out with the bigger and more epic sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army. What some fans of the character sometimes forget or didn’t even realize was that in-between these two films were two direct-to-dvd releases of the animated variety. The first to come out was Hellboy: Sword of Storms in 2006. While I enjoyed that animated film it would be the follow-up dvd release, Hellboy: Blood and Iron which truly captured the essence of the comic books even moreso than the two live-action films.

Hellboy: Blood and Iron would combine parallel storylines about Hellboy and his surrogate father’s, Trevor Bruttenholm, encounter with one Erzsebet Ondrushko also known in occult circles as Elizabeth Bathory the Blood Countess. According to the film, Erzsebet would bathe in the blood of innocent, young girls. The film also makes Erzsebet a follower and disciple of the Mediterranean goddess of witchcraft and sorcery, Hecate.

One storyline would play out in reverse chronological order and take place in 1939 as a much younger Trevor Bruttenholm travels to Eastern Europe to investigate a series of murders that locals have attributed to the return of the Blood Countess. The other storyline moves to the present as Hellboy and his teammates from the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense) investigate the supposed hauntings of the estate of a wealthy businessman. This would be an estate that would be the center piece of a sort of haunted amusement park with the Blood Countess and the legends surrounding her as the main attraction.

Hellboy: Blood and Iron does a great job of mixing action, horror and the occult without one or the other overshadowing the rest. The film takes some of it’s ideas from Mike Mignola’s (creator of the Hellboy franchise) Hellboy graphic novel, Wake the Devil, and screenwriter Kevin Hopps does a good job of taking those ideas and creating something new yet similar as well. The film also benefited from the return of the cast of the live-action Hellboy films to voice their respective characters in this animated film. There’s Ron Perlman in his gruff and sardonic best as the title character. Selma Blair returns to voice Hellboy’s closest friend in the redheaded pyrokine Liz Sherman with Doug Jones and John Hurt rounding it out as Abe Sapien and Trevor Bruttenholm.

The animation is not the highest level but for a direct-to-dvd affair it more than holds up and really captures the look and feel of the comic books it was based on. Yet, while an animated film this one wouldn’t be appropriate for little kids to watch. For a “cartoon” it’s quite violent with themes of witchcraft, vampirism and blood sacrifice prevalent from beginning to end. It’s actually quite scary in certain sections especially whenever the resurrected Erzsebet appeared. I don’t think most animated films ever involved a sequence of a tub full of fresh, hot blood waiting to be used as bathwater.

For those willing to learn more and understand the appeal of the Hellboy comic books to legions of fans this animated film was a good example. Hellboy: Blood and Iron was great from beginning to end especially how it interwove not just the vampiric and pagan legends surrounding Erzebet Ondrushko, but also little tidbits of information and character development which added to the backstory of not just Hellboy but those closest to him. Plus, this animated film had two character’s whose names were variants of the name Lisa.

Review: 100 Bullets Vol. 1 – First Shot, Last Call

Posted on by Arleigh

“I never told you to kill him. I just gave you the opportunity.” — Agent Graves

Brian Azzarello’s 100 Bullets stands as one of the strongest examples of mature storytelling to emerge from DC’s Vertigo imprint. From the outset, the series announces itself as something more than a standard crime comic. It is a hardboiled noir thriller, but one that pushes beyond mere style and atmosphere into the terrain of moral ambiguity, personal trauma, revenge, and consequence. In that sense, it recalls the classic detective and crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, and Raymond Chandler, while also feeling like a darker, more intricate evolution of the hyper-noir sensibilities Frank Miller explored in Sin City.

It would be easy to compare the two and simply declare one superior to the other, but the truth is more complicated than that. Sin City thrives on stark immediacy: its stories are blunt, violent, and stripped down to their most primal elements. 100 Bullets, by contrast, is more layered and methodical. Its stories take their time, constructing a web of motives, betrayals, and hidden histories that slowly reveal themselves. That extra complexity gives the series a different kind of power. Where Miller’s work depends on the force of simplicity, Azzarello and Risso create something that feels colder, more deliberate, and more psychologically unsettling.

The first collected volume, First Shot, Last Call, serves as a perfect introduction to the series’ central premise and tone. It introduces Agent Graves, the enigmatic figure who functions as the series’ catalyst and perhaps its most important symbol. Graves looks like the kind of man who has walked out of a government conspiracy, a private war, or a decade-long nightmare and come out the other side untouched. He approaches recently paroled Dizzy Cordova with an offer that sounds impossible: an attaché case containing a gun, 100 untraceable bullets, and proof that the people responsible for destroying her life are known and reachable. The choice, however, is entirely hers. Graves does not force revenge; he simply places it within reach.

That premise is the genius of 100 Bullets. On the surface, it is a crime story built around assassination, hidden conspiracies, and the promise of vengeance. But underneath, it becomes a series about free will and the burden of choice. The question is never just whether a character will kill. It is whether revenge can ever truly heal the wounds that created the desire for it in the first place. Azzarello understands that vengeance is seductive precisely because it feels so simple. It offers closure where life has given none. Yet the series continually suggests that closure is an illusion, and that the acts people commit in the name of justice or revenge often become the first step toward deeper destruction.

Dizzy Cordova is a strong opening example of this theme. She is not written as a simplistic victim, nor as an idealized avenger. She is angry, wounded, and psychologically cornered, but she is also complicated and fully human. Her eventual decision feels earned because the story understands her pain rather than merely exploiting it. Azzarello writes her as someone whose past has stripped away the comfort of easy morality. The same can be said of Lee Dolan in the second major story arc. Dolan’s life has been shattered by an accusation that contaminated both his public identity and his personal relationships. He, too, is offered Graves’s case and the temptation of retaliation. But his response is different from Dizzy’s, and that difference matters. It shows how carefully Azzarello constructs his characters as individuals rather than as variations on a single revenge fantasy.

What makes these early stories especially effective is that each one feels self-contained while also contributing to a much larger design. Even in this first volume, Azzarello is laying the groundwork for a sprawling narrative that will eventually run exactly 100 issues. The structure gives the series an unusual density: every issue matters, every choice matters, and every seemingly isolated encounter feels like it may be part of a larger hidden architecture. That sense of design keeps the book from ever becoming repetitive. Instead, it feels like a slow-burning conspiracy thriller where the real mystery is not just who is manipulating whom, but why these people are vulnerable to manipulation in the first place.

Eduardo Risso’s artwork is the perfect visual counterpart to Azzarello’s writing. His style is often described in relation to other noir-influenced artists, but it would be inaccurate to call it merely minimalist. Risso’s pages have a cinematic rhythm that gives the book a visual identity all its own. His compositions are deceptively economical: characters are posed with dramatic clarity, shadows are used with purpose, and every panel seems designed to move the eye like a camera tracking through a scene. Even in moments where little physical action occurs, there is a sense of tension and motion in the framing.

Risso also has a strong eye for character design. His people are not rendered with perfect realism, nor are they reduced to exaggerated caricatures. Instead, they occupy a space that feels stylized but believable, which is ideal for a story like this. Their faces and bodies communicate attitude before they even speak. That matters in a noir story, where so much of the drama lies in what characters conceal as much as what they reveal. The women in particular are drawn with a confident sensuality that reflects the hard-edged world of the series without reducing them to empty decoration. Characters like Dizzy Cordova and Megan Dietrich feel distinct not just because of Azzarello’s writing, but because Risso gives them physical presence, posture, and visual identity that reinforce who they are.

What is especially impressive is that Risso’s art enhances the noir mood without becoming self-conscious about it. The book never feels like it is trying too hard to imitate classic crime fiction. Instead, the visuals and writing work together to create a world that is stylish, dangerous, and morally unstable. That balance is difficult to achieve, and 100 Bullets succeeds because both creators understand that atmosphere alone is not enough. The mood has to be supported by character, and the character has to be supported by consequences.

100 Bullets: First Shot, Last Call is therefore more than just a strong debut volume. It is a declaration of intent. Azzarello shows that he is willing to write adults as flawed, desperate, and self-deceiving people rather than as heroes or villains in any conventional sense. Risso, meanwhile, gives the story a visual voice that is sleek, uneasy, and unmistakably noir. Together, they create a comic that is intelligent, hard-hitting, and deeply memorable.

As an opening volume, it does exactly what it should: it hooks the reader, establishes the mythology, and makes clear that this is a story about choice, consequence, and the cost of acting on one’s darkest impulses. More importantly, it does so with confidence and style. 100 Bullets earned its reputation not because it imitates the best noir stories, but because it understands what makes noir endure: wounded people, dangerous opportunities, and the terrible freedom of deciding what to do next.

Guillermo Del Toro Leaves The Hobbit

Posted on by Arleigh

Sad news for Tolkien fans worldwide as Guillermo Del Toro has announced that he will be leaving the planned two-part film project to adapt J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel, The Hobbit. As his announcement on TheOneRing.Net explains the many delays to the start of the project has made his role as director to the two films untenable. He had signed up to spend three years in New Zealand to do the films and has even moved his family to have them closer to him during the process, but the constant delays to getting an official start date would mean he would need to spend double the time he had originally signed up for.

These delays have made him put on the backburner his own film projects which seem very close and dear to him. He still has to finish off his Spanish Civil War Trilogy (The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth being the first two). There’s also his wish to do a third Hellboy film (the second film setting up what could be an epic closing to the franchise). Then there’s his dream project to bring to the big-screen a film adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s novella, At the Mountains of Madness.

With Del Toro now gone as headliner for the two Hobbit films there’s surely going to be new rumors about who shall replace him. There was major scuttlebutt that Sam Raimi was in the running in the beginning before Del Toro signed on. I wouldn’t be surprised if Raimi’s name came up once again. He definitely has free time now that he’s off the Spider-Man franchise. Will Jackson do another “out of left field” decision and tap Blomkamp to take over for Del Toro. I think that’s a brave move if it happens, but also one that could backfire and stunt Blomkamp’s career. He’s already been part of plans to adapt a major franchise only to have it taken away from him.

In the end, it looks like The Hobbit may just end up not being made or, at the very least, not make a 2012 release date many insiders have set it two-part film for.

Source: TheOneRing.Net