Hellboy: Darkness Calls shows how much Mike Mignola has growth as a storyteller. The earliest Hellboy tales were fairly straight ahead adventure stories disguised as gothic horror. The first volume, Seed of Destruction, thrived on mixing monsters with a fairly adventurous spirit in equal measure. But as time has moved on and Mignola has written more adventures, the tone has shifted away from standard genre work and moved more toward building a modern myth with some adventure and some horror thrown in to add color.
Mignola has called Strange Places (Hellboy volume 6), the end of chapter one of Hellboy’s life. He’d given Hellboy the closest thing to an origin story that the character is likely to get and had him alone, lost and searching for a purpose. In Darkness Calls, the latest Hellboy adventure, the character has found a temporary sanctuary with an old friend when even older enemies come hunting for him. Yes, Darkness Calls is an adventure as Hellboy’s enemies seize an opportunity to attack him when he’s down but Mignola has written more than a simple good versus evil story. He’s written a story that operates on many levels now that we understand some of where Hellboy comes from and what was his original world-crushing purpose (one that he shook off as soon as he appeared on Earth.)
Hellboy kind of stumbles through this book, reacting to the many colorful threats and enemies who attack him relentlessly. The Baba Yaga, the one eyed witch, launches her major attack on Hellboy, using the noble, powerful but cursed and deathless Koshchei as her pawn. Koshchei and Hellboy’s massive battle leaves its scars on both the physical and the mythical dimensions. Graugach, the literally pig-headed little monster doesn’t attack but spends the book searching for another great weapon to use in the future against Hellboy. The ever mounting threats even connect back to Hellboy’s earliest adventures. In some ways, Hellboy has been fighting the same battle for the last fifteen years. Mignola manages to keep the story going, revisiting the same threats over and over again without ever making them stale.
Mignola is creating a new, synthesized mythology in the pages of Hellboy. Hellboy’s enemies aren’t just other monsters or standard costumed villains. The witch Baba Yaga is from old Slavic folklore and Koshchei the Deathless is Russian. And they exist perfectly well within a world that has blended all nationalities and types of myth. Chicken legged witches exist perfectly fine in a world that also has talking Nazi apes. Hellboy is big enough to absorb them all and blend them together around a central character.
Other artists have drawn Hellboy before but Mignola has never handed off the pen and brush for a Hellboy story this large before. Duncan Fegredo joins Mignola this book and manages to stay perfectly authentic to the style that Mignola has established without losing his own, unique and singular drawing style. Mignola’s artwork has always been about defining the darkness, bringing shape and form out of complete blackness. Sharp shadows very dark scenes have always been the strong visual element in Hellboy and Fegredo doesn’t miss a beat. It would be easy to look at this book and not realize that Mignola wasn’t drawing it. But when you look at the line and composition, it’s perfectly Fegredo, with a certain looseness that Mignola is incapable of. It’s not quite as tight and controlled as Mignola has become over the years but it flows and is just as shadowy as Mignola ever was.
Hellboy: Darkness Calls is the eighth Hellboy volume but it’s also a new beginning for the character who now knows who and what he is and yet rejects it all. Hellboy isn’t a character of destiny and fate or, at least, he doesn’t want to be. He’s a man who just wants to be left alone to live his life even as everyone lusts after the power that could be his. Mignola’s doesn’t get enough credit as a master storyteller as he has spectacularly built Hellboy’s life and story. Darkness Calls is as fresh and new as Seeds of Destruction was back in 1993.
Hellboy: Darkness Calls
Written by: Mike Mignola
Drawn by: Duncan Fegredo
Colored by: Dave Stewart
Lettered by: Clem Robins
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1 response so far ↓
1 Zac in CA // Jul 31, 2008 at 7:09 pm
I had to read this one twice to make sure I knew what was going on; it took a fair bit of close-reading (and ruminating on the story-thus-far) to get a handle on why that enormous gathering of witches went to war with Hellboy in the first place.
It’s pretty new for Mignola to really tease his audience like this, too: I’ve read the series up to this point, but I can’t fathom who the “queen of blood” who will “set the world right” could possibly be. I keep thinking that I should be able to piece it together, but it could well be that I’ll have to wait for Volume #9 before I can answer the question, “What’s in that box?”
I definitely agree that Mignola is trying to work on a new mythology, one with Hellboy at its center. It’s interesting that Hellboy, once a Beowulf-ish monster-slayer with a Jesus-in-the-desert theme of choosing to contain his true power on Earth, is now a bit of a walking plot device: having left the BPRD, and the context of assignments, targets, and objectives, the underworld is let loose upon him, all seeking the power of the Hand of Doom. That’s got to get old, sometimes, but it’s pretty exciting to read!
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