Hellboy: 10 Comics You Should Read Before Seeing The New Movie
Get to know the World's Greatest Paranormal Investigator before he's back on the big screen.
There's a new Hellboy movie out in cinemas this week, courtesy of The Descent, Centurion and Game Of Thrones director Neil Marshall and starring Stranger Things' David Harbour as the big red monster-fighting demon.
It's the third big screen appearance for Anung Un Rama, an impressive record for a character outside the stable of the big two comics publishers Marvel and DC. What this does mean, though, is that the audience's familiarity with the character is likely to come more from his past movie appearances, of which the new film is a complete reboot, than the rich history of Hellboy comics and their various spinoffs.
Since first appearing in 1993, there's been a whole quarter century of Hellboy on the page for movies to draw from, meaning that it can be a bit intimidating for a new fan to know where to start with the comics. What do you need to read to feel in the know about what's likely to happen in the new movie?
Fortunately, Mike Mignola's Hellboy remains one of the most accessible comic books of all time. Read these and you'll instantly be able to convince your friends that you've been a Hellboy expert all along.
10. Hellboy: Seed Of Destruction
Whether you're a new movie franchise or a new comics reader, it probably makes sense to start at the beginning. So here we are.
Recently reissued as a 25th anniversary special, the first Hellboy miniseries was published in the spring and summer of 1994 and outlined the origins of our hero: accidentally summoned to earth by the Russian mystic Rasputin working for the Nazis to try and end World War II by bringing about the apocalypse.
Seed Of Destruction already served as a major inspiration for Guillermo Del Toro's original Hellboy movie and the character's 1940s "birth" formed a memorable prologue to that film, so don't expect quite so much direct adaptation of this comic series in the new version. Clips from the trailer do suggest, however, that we will see some form of prologue or flashbacks to young Hellboy arriving in this world in a ruined chapel in the Midlands village of East Bromwich.
Seed Of Destruction also provides both an origin and ending for Hellboy's surrogate father figure, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, who both adopts the young demon when he arrives and is killed by a frog-like monster when the action flashes forward to the nineties.
Played by Ian McShane, a reimagined Bruttenholm also appears in the new movie. What are the chances that he makes it out alive?