Lots of folks have told me to read Mike Mignola, most recently Craig Fischer. So when I saw the second volume, “Wake the Devil”, at the library the other day I figured I’d give it a shot.
And the verdict is…eh. Either the hype is way out of proportion, or “Wake the Devil” isn’t the thing to read. For whatever reason, though, and however you look at it, volume 2 of Hellboy is a thoroughly mediocre piece of genre nothing. Characterization barely exists, while the plot mostly involves various monstrous super villains making ominous portentous speeches and then getting their slimy butts kicked as Hellboy cracks wise and talks tough. If you think Lee/Kirby were geniuses of pulp construction — then, yeah, this still wouldn’t be especially good.
For that matter, Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series, which is somewhat similar in its reliance on mythological baddies and in its video-game one big-boss-battle-after-another structure, is significantly wittier and more inventive — and, for that matter, more viscerally suspenseful. Riordan’s characters are kids; they’ve got great powers, but they’re not always sure how to use them, and when they fight monsters they’re scared. In Lost Hero, there’s a scene where one of the kids, Leo, has to rescue his friends from a bunch of cyclops, and finally lets loose with the fire powers he’s been afraid of, and he blasts them.
He pointed one finger in the air and summoned all his will. He’d never tried to do anything so focused and intense—but he shot a bolog of white-hot falmes at the chain suspending the enging block above the Cyclops’s head—aiming for the link that looked weaker than the rest.
The flames died. Nothing happened. Ma Gasket laughed. “An impressive try, son of Hephaestus. It’s been many centuries since I saw a fire user. You’ll make a spicy appetizer!”
The chian snapped — that single link heated beyond its tolerancepoint—and the engine block fell, deadly and silent.
“I don’t think so,” Leo said.
Ma Gasket didn’t even have time to look up.
Smash! No more Cyclops—just a pile of dust under a five-ton block.
I wouldn’t make any claims for that as great literature, but it’s exhilarating and awesome and fun, with a nice Looney Tunes timing, and you care because he was at risk and you’re rooting for him and then he triumphs.
But Hellboy is the impassive undefeatable gunslinger from the beginning. He never seems to doubt his ability to win, and the comic never doubts it either. He just blasts one baddy after another, be they vampire, lamia, or whatever. You never feel exhilarated or impressed, or even interested. The comic is one long crescendo, without any build-up or melody. It starts off irritating, and by the end you just wish it would shut the fuck up. Even the gratuitous deaths of some minor extra side-protagonists can’t elicit much more than a shrug. Some action movie cannon-fodder got offed. Might as well have killed a storm trooper. Ho-hum.
The utter lack of emotional resonance means that the good guys and bad guys become virtually interchangeable. It’s true that the bad guys are clearly labeled as Nazis — but even so, it wasn’t clear why I should root against them. They didn’t actually seem to care about Jews or racial purity from anything that they said; they just wanted to destroy the world. And halfway through, I wanted to destroy Mignola’s world too. If a dragon from the deep rose up and swallowed Hellboy and the earth as well, leaving the second half of the volume just big, blank, black pages, I would have said, hey, the story’s over, I don’t have to read anymore, cool. I’d even enjoy seeing Hellboy have his boasting and wisecracking shoved up his infernal and impassive ass-crack. It’s true that most of the villains were boring and stock too, but their constant defeat did lend them a kind of pathos. The one sad guy who reanimates his friend as a head in a jar only to have them both killed shortly thereafter; Rasputin (yes that Rasputin) whining to his mama at the end because Hellboy beat him again — I mean, I don’t want to read any more about either of them, really. They’re no rat creatures. They just have slightly more personality than Hellboy. It’s not a high bar, but better to clear it than not.
Bad guy boasts. Hellboy boasts. Bad guy gets stomped. Repeat.
The clumsiness and the lack of inspiration in “Wake the Devil” does lead to a kind of brute, Neanderthal genre insight, though. The comic really isn’t about anything but good guys and bad guys hitting each other, those “good guys” and “bad guys” designated by arbitrary fiat. One side is good, the side you root for, which wins. The other is bad, the side you root against, which loses. That’s the algorithm — the ideologies (destroy the world! bathe in blood! whatever!) barely register as anything but an overheated garble of rhetoric. The cops stomp their hellboots on that whining, sneering face for all eternity — and who cares what the face tries to say before the boot comes down? Behold the Superman as anti-fascist fascism — the devil who beats the devil.
you keep using that word “facism” but I don’t think it means what you think it means.
For what it’s worth, Wake the Devil comes pretty early in Mignola’s now 200+ issue Hellboy-verse story (and for the most part it is one enormous ongoing story) and is – I think – the first one that he wrote solo (possibly even his first solo writing gig? Someone who can be bothered to look it up on GCD can correct me on that I’m sure).
It’s hard to argue with a lot of your points above but Mignola and his BPRD right hand man John Arcudi have, over time, woven an enormusly complex and compelling story out of what was a pretty basic idea (Good monster man fights bad monster men). Reading the whole Hellboy/BPRD run up to date over a month or so was an exhilarating experience that has me absolutely hooked and eagerly awaiting each new installment.
Funnily enough, after I’d got up to date I bought the Hellboy Companion off ebay and found it to be notably lacking in anything that I’d found compelling while reading the comics – reading the summaries and character profiles just made the whole thing seem needlesly convoluted and quite boring. Reading in summary failed absolutely to capture the magnetic draw that the comics themselves now have for me.
If you’re inclined to give it another shot, characterisation-wise you might get more out of the companion title BPRD, where the focus (at least to begin with) is less on the monsters and more on the ‘ordinary’ folk tasked with disposing of them. It starts slow, but once Arcudi comes on board it just gets better and better. And Guy Davis’ wonderfully creepy art is a big plus point too.
Well, there’s some fuzziness, sure. In this case I’m talking about the linking of, and conflation of, order, force, and the good.
What do you like about Hellboy, Darryl? Does the series get better further on?
Or am I just supposed to enjoy the art and the story doesn’t matter much?
Yeah, I wondered if people enjoyed it as it got more complex over time.
Maybe I’ll try BPRD at some point. I got through half of the next volume (mostly short stories) and it was pretty pointless, so not sure how interested I am in more Hellboy….
I guess the quibble I would have with your characterization here (and I only read the first volume of Hellboy, though I liked the movie) is that rather than say that the good/evil dichotomy is all just rhetorical, I’d say it’s pretextual.
Superhero and genre fans like violence in their narratives, so it makes sense to create a straw “evil” character or characters against whom the violence can be directed while retaining a veneer of morality. Or as I’d tell my sometimes-horrified mother about the copious death-dealing I was doing in video games circa age 8 or 9 — “It’s ok, Mom, those were bad guys.” Duh, right?
On the one hand this goes to deep, mythic, Rene Girard stuff — the need for violent urges to be expressed against a single target, so as to keep the peace. But on the other hand it’s just an excuse to consume garbage.
I agree with your point that there’s certainly superhero (and other genre — “epic” and “military” fantasy and sci-fi, much of “urban” fantasy, private detective stuff in the Chandler school) narratives that handle this in a more or less productive way, and others that handle it in a less or less productive way, so to speak. I prefer not to name names so as to not reveal my sacred cows, or gore anyone else’s.
“Well, there’s some fuzziness, sure. In this case I’m talking about the linking of, and conflation of, order, force, and the good.”
In some ways this is actually addressed in the story as it unfolds – the “good guys” of the BPRD, while throwing all of their efforts into exterminating a race of demonic frogs to save mankind, actually start a chain of events that effectively doom the whole planet. Mignola and Arcudi double-hand this with a metaphysical, mythological end of the world in Hellboy running alongside a real, physical end of the world in BPRD. It’s good stuff.
The arbitrary divide between “good” and “evil” becomes a major theme as the series progresses. Hellboy’s character becomes clearer and the art gets better (it was always fantastic); for me it’s been very much a cumulative effect. I’ve liked the series since volume 1, but by now it’s one of my favourite comics, and often quite moving. (This is all Hellboy, by the way, I haven’t read much BPRD.)
Admittedly the short-story anthology volumes aren’t my favourites, and feel less essential once Mignola starts relinquishing art duties.
I also wasn’t a big Mignola fan originally. I came on board after I saw the movie….something about the emotionality of the characters appealed to me. The first issues I bought were drawn by Richard Corben, and were a good part of his best recent work…Makoma is very good. Then I bought a few of the TPBs drawn by Duncan Fegredo. Those are very well drawn but a little overly rendered for what the things need, I think and Mignola’s writing is, well, sort of abbreviated. But after that I got a few of Mignola’s own issues and after the busy density of Fegredo I was relieved—Mignola’s art has a certain spare elegance, and it and the writing have a mood of their own and leave a lot of breathing room. I like them well enough. I haven’t read the early issues.
Oh, and Dave Stewart’s color and Clem Robins’ lettering are also elegant and make for an exception to my usual disgust with digital resolves.
I’d agree with James that Dave Stewart and Clem Robbins contribute mightily to the HELLBOY/BPRD titles. Stewart is skilled at establishing a specific, fairly narrow color palette for each scene, and then deviating by degrees from said palette for narrative reasons. His digital colors work because he begins from a place of restraint rather than slathery over-indulgence.
Noah, I don’t think I specifically recommended HELLBOY to you, because I’ve always preferred BPRD to HELLBOY. There’s a lot to recommend Mignola’s art (the spot blacks, a “poster aesthetic” that preserves the reader’s flow from panel to panel) but I actually prefer Guy Davis’ more cartoony art and John Arcudi’s BPRD scripts, which connect to the broader, cumulative Mignolaverse story more than the HELLBOY titles.
That said, HELLBOY is still worth reading: his status as the “impassive undefeatable gunslinger” might apply to the early stories, but…
Craig, I should have said you were pointing me towards the hellboy-verse, rather than towards Hellboy in particular. (I’m not familiar enough with all the titles to even know the differences at this point.)
There’s a lot of ’em.
Yeah, John Arcudi can be quite a good horror writer; besides his BPRDs I really liked a story he did with Bernet in an issue of Solo. Guy Davis also has a lot going on. But mainly now I pretty consistently buy the Hellboys by Mignola on his own or with Corben, it is one of the very few mainstreamish titles I keep up with.
I actually prefer Mignola’s spare writing over the more traditionally soapy BPRD. Guy Davis’s art is great, but the digital SFX suffer in comparison to Mignola’s, too.
But Hellboy is the impassive undefeatable gunslinger from the beginning. He never seems to doubt his ability to win, and the comic never doubts it either.
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Granted, I haven't read Wake the Devil in years, and I tend to prize Hellboy short stories over longer "books", but this has never been my experience of the Hellboy character at all. One of the more charming aspects to the character is his combination of unflappable and flustered… he's sort of the comic book equivalent of Harrison Ford's panicked eyes in the Indiana Jones movies.
Past that somewhat small point, though, taking about Hellboy in terms of a pulp plot machine ignores the rhythmic and tonal aspects that I consider Mignola's great strengths. The use of negative space, color, and lettering in conjunction with the flustered-tough-guy dialogue, anti-climactic action plots, and deeply researched use of folktales results in a pretty special comic, I think. I actually stopped reading more or less when it switched to a multiple artist "universe" of longer stories, because to me the value was in the short bursts of Mignola's particular interests and idiosyncrasies, both in his writing and his art.
As I think about it more, I'd say actually Wake the Devil is the "wrong" book. The longer, more plot-oriented works are somewhat boring to me. If you ever try again, I think the short stories in The Chained Coffin are probably a stronger pick. Though I also expect it's all just not to your taste, Noah…
Yeah…got halfway through the chained coffin and stopped because I was completely uninterested. I’m going to talk about the art a bit in an upcoming post I think.
I’m willing to believe that Hellboy gets less unflappable over time. In Wake the Devil, though, he’s way less interesting than (say) Bruce Willis in Die Hard.
I’m halfway through rereading Wake the Devil, and I think Jason Michelitch pretty much covered everything I could… For me the virtues of the comic include:
The unveiling of one lovingly crafted Universal horror film set after another,
The “You are a participant in our occult faux-scholarship” breaks that slow the tempo and add context to each issue,
The tonal tension between the heightened, flowery, gothic speak of the baddies and the curt tough-guy sound bites of Hellboy,
Some surprisingly effective facial renderings, including the portraits of the vamp-guy’s women and the Nazi lady’s icy yet delighted expression when Rasputin offers her undead immortality.
My justification of H:WtD may boil down to “Me likey,” but since Noah’s argument hinges on his individual response, I think it’s reasonable to respond with my own affective fallacy. Still, if Mignola doesn’t have you at hello, there’s probably no reason to try to love him.
Hmm. A lot of that is about the art, which I think I’ll address tomorrow. The rest is about tempo and genre mash up (horror vs. superhero) which I have to say I just don’t find very effective. Why is it different than hundreds of other versions of bad guy rant, superhero wisecrack?
Maybe if they switched it and the bad guy was wisecracking while the superhero ranted. That’d be kind of fun. I presume someone must have done that at some point, but I’m not thinking of any examples….
Offhand I’d say Arkham Asylum gestures toward ranting, or at least outbursting, hero, and sassy villain. Dark Knight, a bit, too.
I agree the rhetorical contrast thing is not new, but I think Mignola does it well, or at least amps up the virtuosic gothic villain blarney, then douses it with the curtest possible raspberry response, and it makes me laugh.
You might try The Amazing Screw-On Head comic, which is much the same but with the gags dialed way up, to see more clearly what I find so enchanting about Mignola. The humor is more muted in Hellboy.
Granted, I haven’t read a lot of Hellboy but he really isn’t an “impassive undefeatable gunslinger” most of the time. About 60% of his victories are due to dumb luck.
It’s difficult to find any reviews of Hellboy or Mignola-universe stuff that aren’t ravingly uncritical. I’ve read almost all of Hellboy, and I am not impressed with how Mignola’s art style has devolved over the years into rushed, sloppy, simplistic deformities. Over the course of the trade paperbacks, there is a steady decline in the quality of story, narration/dialog and art that smells of overwork and under-thought. When Mignola turned over the art to Duncan Fegredo for the epic run that led up to the current “Hellboy In Hell” series, it was a breath of fresh air for both story and artwork. The Fegredo-drawn issues deliver the complexity of storytelling and Kirby-esque sprawling, cosmic conflict that were missing so frequently in the middle of the Hellboy series.
“Hellboy In Hell” is just barely tolerable. Mignola’s art looks like it was drawn half-size and blown up. Moving into #5, it feels as if Mignola doesn’t want to write Hellboy anymore and is simply writing amusing little horror tales with Hellboy standing around in the shadows observing.
I cannot stand the art of the overpraised Guy Davis on “BPRD.” I downloaded and read a lot of “BPRD,” hoping to get turned on, before admitting that I intensely dislike Davis’s loose-caricature style. For my taste, the best writing and art currently being done on a Mignola title is the “Baltimore” series. I love Ben Stenbeck’s attention to detail on “Baltimore”, as well as on the first story arc of “Witchfinder.”
I thought the BPRD flashback series “1946”, “1947” and “1948” were interesting, involving and well-crafted, though I found the continuation into “Vampire” to be depressing and nihilistic. The current day “War On Frogs” storyline was boring and repetitious – I had had enough of the frogs the first time they appeared in Hellboy. The storylines, artists and characters in the newest BPRD books don’t much interest me; I didn’t “get” the Black Flame as a villain and certainly don’t want to read dozens of issues drawing out his return.
The Mignolaverse ain’t all great and ain’t all crap. I wish there were more nuanced criticism out there.