Sometimes Hellboy can be dark, poignant or tragic and sometimes it can be joyously bonkers pulp action fun. Von Klempt, a Nazi scientist's head in a jar with a massive swastika emblazoned across his forehead and a penchant for scientifically enhanced gorillas, definitely falls under the latter category. Over the course of various comics and flashback, we see von Klempt's background as one of the leading lights in the Nazi space programme designed to bring aliens back to Earth to defeat the Allied powers and then, when that failed in a blazing inferno that removed his (somehow still living) head from his body, attempting to build a vampire army to invade America. Even though his head-jar was thrown off a cliff, presumably killing him for good, von Klempt remains one of Hellboy's most entertainingly madcap pulp villains.
16. Memnan Saa
Memnan Saa is probably the villain (or human character villain, anyway) that recurs most throughout the Hellboy universe and has struggled with a great variety of characters in different time periods. Obviously a riff on the slightly dated stereotype of the sinister Oriental mystic, a la Fu Manchu, Memnan Saa is revealed after some time to be, in fact, a persona assumed by previously slightly out of his depth British Victorian Egyptologist and wannabe sorcerer Martin Gilfryd (like Iron Man 3's Shane Black, Mignola clearly realised that there is no place for a straight up version of a "Mandarin" type in a 21st century comic). Having tangled with 19th century witchfinder Sir Edward Grey and in the 1930s with pulp action hero Lobster Johnson, Memnan Saa became a real threat as the B.P.R.D. Plague of Frogs arc headed towards its conclusion. Always a shady figure with the ability to astral project and enter characters' dreams or give them visions, Memnan Saa remained all the more sinister even when seeming to do good, simply through his motives being so hard to follow.
