Anyone familiar with Mike Mignola's Hellboy will attest to just how easy it is to access, and with so many of the Dark Horse character's greatest hits being self-contained stories, it makes sense as to why he's found himself on 'best of' lists every other year.
The most recent one-shot, Krampusnacht, continued the trend Mignola established some twenty years ago, but it's The Corpse that makes for the character's best solo story. Set in 1959 during Red's early years with the B.P.R.D., the story finds Hellboy in Ireland to track down a kidnapped child. This being a Hellboy comic, a supernatural angle was always going to be involved, and it soon transpires that the child (Alice Monoghan) had been replaced by a disguised Gruagach. These two characters would go on to play a pivotal role in the character's comics, but there's another reason why The Corpse is so compelling - the atmosphere.
This issue exudes an abundance of charm and horror - the kind that would define Mignola's creation going forward - with Hellboy forced to deliver the corpse of one Tom O'Clannie to his rightful resting place in order to save Alice.
The dialogue is wonderful, the story is classic Hellboy through and through, and the fact it stands alone makes it all just that little bit better.
WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well.
In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.
