10 Amazing Hellboy Spin-Offs Mignola Fans Must Read

He was there at the start to usher Hellboy into our world and would return for our hero's final fight. As such, the comics' version of real-life Russian mystic Grigori Rasputin has quite reasonably been seen as one of Hellboy's signature adversaries. Certainly anyone who came to the comics from the big screen version, in which Rasputin was the first film's villain, will likely see him as the character they most consider Anung un-Rama's nemesis.

It took until 2017, though, for Mignola to give us a comic that really focused on Rasputin himself. Voice Of The Dragon, which ran from November 2017 to March 2018, fills in the all-important gap between the historical Rasputin's assassination in 1916 and his comic book counterpart's work with the occult wing of the Nazi Party to summon the Beast Of The Apocalypse in 1944 (the events of the first ever Hellboy story: Seed Of Destruction).

Voice Of The Dragon gives background not only to what brought Rasputin to that fateful opening story, but also to Hellboy's adoptive father Professor Bruttenholm, seen here as a young man on his first mission.

In the story a seance leads to the young Bruttenholm parachuting behind enemy lines into Nazi-occupied Europe in search of "The Master" leading the Nazis' occult experiments. Capture by the enemy leads to the first confrontation between the two men who will seek to pull Hellboy in the direction of saviour or destroyer.