Today on the site Joe McCulloch brings us the week that is, with a detour into Hellboy.
Last week saw the release of the tenth and final issue of Hellboy in Hell, which is not necessarily the last Hellboy comic creator/writer/artist Mike Mignola will ever draw — there is definitely some wiggle room left through which the character might return — but clearly is meant to function as a potential ‘ending’ to the Hellboy series, at least as far as its title character is concerned. I’m going to discuss the comic a little, so skip down to the capsules if you don’t want it spoiled.
The image above is not from Hellboy in Hell; it’s from issue #5 of the 2006 miniseries B.P.R.D.: The Universal Machine, a comic mainly drawn by the much-missed Guy Davis, though Mignola himself, as you can see, opted to draw the closing pages, as they commemorated the death of a popular supporting character, Roger the Homunculus. The series was in large part about how death is not permanent in these types of horror/fantasy/superhero stories, so in the end Roger makes an affirmative choice to remain dead, and thereby not repeat the cycles of violent combat that had come to define his life… and perhaps action comics themselves, with their popular franchise characters revised, relaunched, rebooted ad infinitum. This itself can be a sort of hell for the characters, but because Mignola is running the show he can grant Roger a genuine, eternal peace.
Elsewhere:
Gil Roth interviews Jim Ottaviani.
Kate Beaton announces a new book.
Comics-related: The great artist Nicole Eisenman is discussed here. Her work continues to amaze me, and is very much narrative and of a certain kind of cartoon-related art.
