Written by Mike Mignola and John ByrneArt by Mike Mignola
I've recently come to the realization that I should have been reading the books that make up the Mignola-universe for the last decade or so. Being a typical comics fan, with more than a touch of undiagnosed OCD, I am undertaking The Hellboy Project; the goal is to read the entirety of the cannon work Mignola has done in publication order. To that end, I am heavily indebted to a list posted on the Dark Horse forums, as the trades seem to be running stories out of their original order.
The inaugural volume
of this long running series is something I read when it first came out, but wasn't really all that interested in. To be fair, even when reading it, nothing was familiar past the very beginning of the first issue.There is a lot of setting stuff up going on here, as Mignola establishes his central characters Hellboy, Abe Sapien, and Elizabeth Sherman. He also introduces Professor Bruttenholm, only to kill him off quickly, and some frog-like creatures which I assume are the same ones that will be showing up quite a bit in BPRD.
For a first outing, this is perfectly fine. Mignola's artwork always look nice, and it's especially fine in this book, as he works at establishing a visual vocabulary for the series. There is definitely enough to keep me sticking around (I don't know what I was thinking back in the day).
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