Hellboy: Weird Tales

In order to fill in the gaps and to make us all feel better, Hellboy and the gang have been taken under the wings of mixed group of artists and storytellers, some questionable and some rather talented, allowing other people to work with what Mike started and try to give us that fix we want. And while they arent Mignola and you can tell it a few times way too much, some do an outstanding job of filling in and dosing up all the Hellboy junkies out there in need of a quick fix.

Now before I continue and rain praise on this parade that could be taken in many different lights, I have to let you in on a little secret. Im actually a Hellboy junkie, fan of just about anything Mike Mignola touches, and I like following the stream that flows from that magically-tasty trough. Ive gone to lengths to follow the BPRD sagas that have been coming out, tracking down one-shots of Abe Sapien before the TPB and finding the little hints Mignola has dropped here and there, so Im not what you would call "unbiased party." Ive followed quite a few forgettable drops in the artistic bucket just to catch three-four pages of a character I cant seem to get enough of, and Im assuming that most people that would go out and purchase this have to be at least a lower grade of obsessive like myself. For anyone that isnt and is not familiar with the concept of the BPRD, they research the paranormal and they try to remedy those problems. More often than not that results in a little fist-to-face action, and more often than not it also involves some really strange recounts. For anyone unaware of who Hellboy is, there are a few books out there to answer a question that Im not even going to begin tackling here.

In the Weird Tales installations, there were some rather high notes and quite a few stories. I personally enjoyed seeing a lot of them dedicated to the off-the-beaten-path characters, too, like Liz Sherman and Baba Yaga. While I wouldnt go as far as to say that anything truly meaningful to Hellboy or the BPRD takes place in them, Id say that they contain a lot of what youd expect. Sometimes that unfortunately translates into something that I, as a reader knowledgeable in Hellboy, abhor because the writers feel they I have to be reminded of some of the essentials. Other times it also means that we get art that isnt the greatest in the world (and, once or twice, that I wouldnt have let my pet use for diaper duty), and the short stories we find are just that and they arent really allowed to shuffle things around. A few times, however, everything hits just right, a demon kid breathes a little fire and sets everything ablaze, and I sit thinking that everything therein is just plain creepy. A little Baba Yaga comes to count the fingers of the dead, Hellboy does something interesting or recounts a tale of his youth, and Roger even finds his way into the fray. This happened enough times in the mix, at least once per comic edition to the Graphic Novel, so it made it pay off pretty well and made the other portions and complaints vanish. In fact, it was kind of surprising because I expected a disaster with Mignola off working on the Hellboy movie.