HELLBOY: CONQUEROR WORM

Written & Illustrated  by Mike Mignola

Colored by Dave Stewart

    I long ago decided to wait for all Hellboy projects to hit a trade collection before picking them up. This doesn't tend to represent any saving of cash in most instances, but I've just never found Mignola's work to hold up well under serialization. It's a single-sitting read for me or nothing when it comes to Mignola, and in particular when he's telling a Hellboy story.

    While I've generally found Mignola's artwork ill-suited to mainstream assignments (his best Batman work was generally when he was doing Victorian-era Batman Elseworlds tales) he found his niche with the creation of Hellboy and some of the other operatives of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. Slump-shouldered,

   In this story, originally published in four parts, the BPRD has sent Hellboy out on a mission with Roger the Homunculus, who's been implanted by Bureau scientists with an incendiary bomb. Their objective is the ruins of Hunte Castle in Austria.  At the end of World War II, American costumed-adventurer Lobster Johnson led an Allied attack on Hitler's space program, based in that selfsame castle. Johnson did his damage, but not before the Nazis were able to launch the first man into space. Now, sixty years later, Hellboy and Roger are sent to intercept the returning capsule, and its single passenger... who is somehow still alive.

   Nazis and mysticism, what a mix. If there's a weak point in this story it's simply that there's nothing to cause the plot of this one to stand out from the standard Hellboy fare. Certainly that puts it in good company, but it did leave me feeling a trifle empty as in many ways it's a sequel to another tale, Wake The Devil. I suppose it's just that the menace proves to be one of those Lovecraftian dooms from beyond the stars that never seem to strike me as a goal one would really have much rational reason for bringing about. Power? Immortality? Revenge? Sure, those might be considered hackneyed, but if so it's only because they're drives that enable us to walk a little ways in the scary shoes of the villains. Nihilism is something most of us can understand to some degree, but embracing it with any relish is such a contradiction as to render the initial impulse doubly perverse. Come to think of it, maybe it's a perfect choice. Who's scarier, someone looking to extort millions of dollars so he can live life in luxury, or someone whose sole desire is to die and take everyone else with him?

   A third of the way into the tale it became obvious that a, if not the driving theme of the story has more to do with the true nature of noble humanity, a quality we really only see in three distinctly non-human characters and, perhaps, in a man who's now a ghost. Moreover, the flip side appears to be that it's the humans who have, to various degrees, cast off or otherwise numbed their humanity - all in a good cause, of course. The cumulative effect is that one very much comes to root for Hellboy and Roger. Sure, one's essentially a demon and the other's an artificial being of centuries-old science and magic, but paradoxically they're the only characters in the mix who are truly likeable. Moreover, they're the only ones who are truly to be trusted. They're nice people, plain and simple. To be perfectly honest, I find myself more interested in just spending time with those two than in the rest of the adventure, which frankly seemed more a distraction save for when it created the circumstances to allow us to see how pleasant, selfless and honorable a sort Roger is. However, I suppose Hellboy: Teatime wouldn't have been a big seller. Anyway, wacky, mystic nazi plots gone awry and would-be destroyers of humanity are intrinsically fun menaces, at least when taken from the safety of this side of the page.

   This arc is significant in marking a turning point for Hellboy. I don't want to make too much of it, but I suspect it'll be central to future stories.

   Though I obviously wouldn't have a clue which ones they are nor how many of them there are, I'm told this collection includes additional story pages not presented in the original 4-issue printing. Chalk up another reason for waitin on the trade editions. It also includes a 5-page sketchbook section.

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                                                                                                                                 Mike N.