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

In the follow-up to Darkness Calls, Hellboy joins the legendary wild hunt (another part of real folklore) to kill the giants that periodically rise from their graves to wreak havoc on the English countryside. A version of this scene is in the trailer for the new movie.

Meanwhile, a demon slaughters a whole village and Gruagach uses the blood to resurrect Nimue in a sort of reverse communion. We know that Gruagach is Nimue's faithful ally in the movie, so chances are that he could be the one to resurrect her there as well.

The Wild Hunt is also the story that reunites Hellboy and Alice and sees them travelling in fairy realms, meeting such mythical characters as Queen Mab and Morgan Le Fay, and learning more of Hellboy's nature and destiny. Morgan reveals that King Arthur's usurper Mordred (in this version the child of an incestuous union between Morgan herself and Arthur) had a daughter with another witch, beginning a long line of witches descending all the way to Hellboy's mother Sarah Hughes.

Or, to put it another way, Hellboy is not just a prince of Hell, he's also the heir to King Arthur, and therefore the true King of England, and must draw Excalibur from the stone in order to have the power to defeat the Blood Queen.

A lot of the promotional imagery from the new movie shows Hellboy with a sword in his hand, so it wouldn't come as too much of a surprise for this Arthurian element to play into the movie's story.