10 Amazing Hellboy Spin-Offs Mignola Fans Must Read

Over the years Hellboy has had his fair share of encounters with other fiction icons, from Batman to Sabrina the Teenage Witch. These have tended to be non-canonical crossovers, though. One iconic pre-existing character has, however, made his way into the official canon of Hellboy stories: Frankenstein's monster.

The monster, known here as in every pedant-defying version by his creator's name, encountered Hellboy when being pitched against him in the ring during the former's brief career as a Mexican Lucha Libre wrestler in the 50s. (Yes, that is a thing that actually happened). After that popular appearance in the Hellboy story House Of The Living Dead, Frankenstein was given his own spin-off miniseries in 2015.

In this gothic monster story, Frankenstein escapes his Mexican captors to hide underground. Grappling with his existential guilt surrounding his own nature and past actions, he recalls his life as a bare-knuckle boxer and circus freak, while in the present grappling with the creatures that dwell beneath the Earth.

Although intended at the time as a single standalone miniseries, Frankenstein Underground has spawned its own series. Currently being issued by Dark Horse, Frankenstein Undone starts with the monster lost and abandoned in the nineteenth-century Arctic and serves further to bridge the narrative gap between Mary Shelley's gothic novel and Mignola's modern pulp fictions.