Hellboy: 10 Comics You Should Read Before Seeing The New Movie

This 1995 one-shot, in which Hellboy returns to his East Bromwich birthplace to have a psychic vision of his true origin, reveals more about the character's backstory than we first got in Seed Of Destruction. It's a plotline which wasn't considered relevant for Del Toro in the story he was trying to tell in the original movie, but does play into Hellboy's connection to the mythic history of England and witchcraft that the new movie draws on.

The Chained Coffin is the story of Hellboy's mother (fans who only know him from the movies may be surprised to know that Hellboy even had a mother). Sarah Hughes was a seventeenth-century English witch who had a deathbed repentance. The titular coffin is where her dead body was chained inside the East Bromwich chapel, guarded to save her soul by a priest and a nun for three nights.

In his vision, Hellboy sees that the priest and nun were killed by the demon Azzael who carried Sarah down to Hell, revealing that the child that Sarah and Azzael conceived together in a Walpurgis Night ritual decades earlier was yet to be born. That child is Hellboy himself.

His dual ancestry of an English witch and demon prince will become significant in later stories that build on Hellboy's right to rule in both Earth and Hell, a thread that the new movie may pick up on and explore more than the earlier film series.