Hell Notes: Lobster Johnson

Logo by Tim Daniel

The Lobster, more commonly known to readers as “Lobster Johnson,” is one of the most enigmatic characters in the Hellboy Universe. Even within the comics themselves, it seems no one really knows who or what he is, and many characters still dismiss him as an urban legend. Yesterday the latest miniseries Get the Lobster kicked off and next week the third trade paperback, Satan Smells a Rat, hits the shelves, so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do a Hell Notes about him.

Please note, this column contains spoilers for those that have not yet read up to and including Lobster Johnson: Get the Lobster #1.

THE EARLY 1930s

February 1932, the body of gangster Donny “Mints” Parker was discovered with a claw-shaped symbol seared onto his forehead. This was the earliest known Lobster appearance. From 1932 to 1938 the Lobster waged war with the gangsters and Axis spies in New York City and Chicago. There were over a hundred victims of the Lobster, though some counts puts that number as high as two hundred and fifty. And that, my friends, is pretty much all the denizens of the Hellboy Universe really know about the Lobster. But there’s so much more to him.

Mr Isog and Arnie Wald.

Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand is chronologically the first major Lobster story. Set in February 1932, about a week after the body of Mints Parker was found, the Lobster was looking into a mysterious attack by native American ghosts… or more accurately, gangsters in phosphorescent paint pretending to be ghosts. It was all part of a plan by Mr Isog, a tiny man in a white suit, for bootlegger Arnie Wald to buy up property in Manhattan cheaply.

Police were utterly baffled to find bodies of gangsters dressed as native Americans with claw symbols branded on their foreheads. Less baffled was reporter Cindy Tynan of the Herald Tribune, who set out to get to the bottom of it all and in the process made herself a target. Luckily for her, the Lobster had a wary eye on her and came to her rescue. It was primarily through Cindy’s eyes that we were introduced to the Lobster and his world in this story. His headquarters in a warehouse in Brooklyn showed how serious the Lobster was with crime fighting. He seemed ready for a war, and had amassed a crew to help him.

The Lobster himself was rather brusque and focused, but Cindy got his attention rather quickly when she proved she could get one step ahead of him at times. With her help, the Lobster located Arnie Wald in a country club and decided to pay him a visit.

Wald’s henchmen claimed to have shot him multiple times, but when the Lobster emerged he appeared unharmed, although he did keep to the shadows. Perhaps they never hit him at all. Meanwhile, Arnie Wald escaped and had Mr Isog call in a mystic, Kamala, and her husband, Raimund Diestel, to take his cheap property plan to the next level. Those of you who read my column last week will know Raimund Diestel was an incarnation of the Black Flame.

Raimund began burning buildings and causing general mayhem, so it wasn’t long until the Lobster showed up, guns blazing, yelling, “There’s a special circle in Hell for arsonists! You can test out your black fire when you get there!” I just love the Lobster’s dialogue and the way he recklessly throws himself into harm’s way. Sadly, Lobster Johnson’s crew members sometimes think they are just as invincible and end up getting themselves killed.

In this particular case, Max Massimo’s death proved to be a valuable instrument to the Lobster’s enemies. Through a bloody ceremony, Kamala was able to learn the location of the Lobster’s hideout from Massimo’s corpse. Soon Arnie Wald and his goons descended on the place with the Black Flame in tow. Meanwhile, Mr Isog had learned the location where the Lobster had hidden Cindy Tynan and blown it up. Fortunately for her (though not for one of the lobster’s crew, Theo), she had been more interested in getting her story than keeping herself safe… which for once actually put her outside of harm’s way.

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Meanwhile the Lobster had killed all of Wald’s men and Wald had fled, leaving only the Black Flame. The Lobster, never one to take half measures, took care of him by shooting him with an anti-aircraft gun…

The Black Flame was revived almost immediately by Kamala, but when Cindy Tynan showed up and ran her down, he lost the will to fight. As for Wald and Isog, those two managed to escape when they tricked the Lobster into a house full of cannibals.

Yes, cannibals. You've got to love Lobster Johnson.

The latest trade paperback, Satan Smells a Rat, takes place over the rest of 1932 and into 1933, featuring various run-ins with all manner of criminals connected to the broader Hellboy universe. In The Prayer of Neferu he came up against the Heliopic Brotherhood of Ra during the unwrapping of a mummy stolen from the Metropolitan Museum. They proved to be an unworthy challenge for the Lobster, but Princess Neferu and her servant Ptahmos very nearly killed him. The mummy unwrapping is particularly ominous in light of the fact that in 1859 Panya was unwrapped by the same society. That can’t be a good sign.

A fate that almost befell Manhattan.

Caput Mortuum saw the Lobster go up against Germans angry about their government having to constantly pay war reparations in the wake of the First World War. They had decided to release a gas over Manhattan to melt the populous to express their discontent. This is my favourite Lobster Johnson story to date, showing how reckless the Lobster he can be with his own life while being extremely careful with the lives of others. He takes great care to make sure the innocent crew members of the zeppelin are safe, but throws himself out a window without a parachute or a second thought.

Satan Smells a Rat had a rather curious moment in it, when the Lobster was seen outside the window of a speeding train, and then vanished when shots were fired at him. It’s moments like these where he doesn’t even seem human, like he’s a ghost, and yet in A Scent of Lotus he’s wearing a bullet-proof vest. What kind of ghost does that? He bleeds too.

In A Scent of Lotus he came up against the Crimson Lotus (a witch, an Axis agent, and Captain Daimio’s grandmother). She had a bunch of weird-looking monkeys with mask-like faces at her disposal. For me, this story is the creepiest, and I can chalk it all up to one panel… the one to the right there.

Seeing the Lobster screaming, and seeing that glimpse of an eye behind his goggles ran a chill down my spine. Those who see the Crimson Lotus usually do not survive to tell anyone, so that the Lobster saw her alone should give you an idea how much danger he was in. This encounter led to the Lobster catching J. Edgar Hoover’s attention and that of his Federal Bureau of Investigation. We’ll see how that plays out in Get the Lobster.

Speaking of which, yesterday’s issue had some very interesting developments. The Lobster is now in the hideout we’ve seen in flashbacks from B.P.R.D., and Bill and Bob have finally joined the team. We’ve entered the Lobster’s golden age. Oh, and there’s also a cyborg wrestler, and a vicious dwarf with scars all over his head, and mysterious shadowy figures watching the Lobster from a rooftop. It’s kicked off to a great start.

The Lobster's new digs.

THE LATE 1930s

Now we’ll have to jump ahead a bit. The Lobster was active from 1932 to 1939. Beginning with The Burning Hand John Arcudi and Mike Mignola have been telling the story chronologically, currently up to October 1934 with Get the Lobster. Before then, stories featuring the Lobster mostly involved the latter half of his career, so there’s a bit of a gap in the middle for now.

We’re going to jump from 1934 to June 1937, to the first Lobster Johnson miniseries, The Iron Prometheus. Professor Kyriakos Gallaragas and his daughter Helena had been working on a prototype Vril Energy Suit powered by a device known as “Anum’s Fork.” For the last three weeks they had hired a Mr Jim Sacks as a lab assistant, a rather unusual choice since he only had a fifth-grade education. When strange men broke into their laboratory, Jim was sent away with the V.E.S. to stop it falling into the wrong hands. He was pursued by Nazi agents, monks that can turn themselves into yetis, and the Lobster. Lucky for him, the Lobster got to him first.

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While Jim was kept in the safety of the Lobster’s sewer hideout, the Lobster started looking into the strange monks tracking the V.E.S.. They were the Chutt, a legendary tribe a warriors and madmen, led by a man who called himself Memnan Saa. Memnan Saa has a long history in the Hellboy universe from 1836 until his death in B.P.R.D.: The Black Goddess. He was one of the primary antagonists during the Plague of Frogs cycle, and here in The Iron Prometheus he was already setting grand plans in motion as he tried to obtain Anum’s Fork so that he could summon Vril. With the Lobster on his trail, Memnan Saa’s hideout was soon located.

The Lobster vs. Dr Waxman's Lobster

Now here the Lobster demonstrated an uncharacteristically sentimental streak. He knew the V.E.S. was what Saa really wanted, but when Jim Sacks expresses his desperate desire to save Professor Gallaragas and Helena, the Lobster allowed himself to be convinced. Yes, the V.E.S. was a powerful weapon and could be used against Saa or the Nazis, but Jim was naïve and his judgement was somewhat of a liability. Nonetheless, it was a risk the Lobster was willing to take. Jim certainly was an asset, taking down most of the Chutt warriors himself, but he carelessly activated a booby-trap that led to his capture and death.

Meanwhile, the Lobster was left fighting Dr Waxman, an old enemy he thought he had left for dead back in early 1935, and Victor, some sort of cyborg with lobster-like mechanical arms. Just when he had the upper hand (or claw), the Lobster was entangled by a giant snake and a vision of Memnan Saa warned him: “I have no quarrel with you. You cross me this one time, but I would have you survive it … so long as you never raise a hand against me.” The Lobster replied by dropping a grenade and blowing the building apart. Spectators observed that no one could have survived the explosion, and yet the Lobster did, even though he was right on top of it, restrained by a giant serpent. There is clearly more than just good luck at work here.

The Lobster went on to rescue Helena, though it was too late for her father. He pursued Memnan Saa, but he got away. Saa later appeared in a vision shortly afterwards while the Lobster was unconscious. Saa branded him with the mark of the Twin Serpents, damning him, and cursing him to serve him until the end of his days. Though it was only a vision, the pain of the brand was enough to stir the Lobster to consciousness. Before the end of the adventure, the Lobster had a run-in with Nazis and blew up a submarine, but the important thing here was his interactions with Memnan Saa. They would hang over him for a very long time, even beyond death.

In 1938, in the first Lobster Johnson story to be published, The Killer in My Skull, Detective Norvell Cooper was investigating the deaths of four scientists from Zinco-Davis Laboratories. In this story Detective Cooper didn’t recognise the Lobster’s associate Bob, but he seemed to recognise the Lobster himself well enough, so this story is likely set in the early days of Cooper’s interactions with The Lobster. Unlike the police earlier in the Lobster’s career, Detective Cooper was extremely co-operative. Together they tracked former Zinco-Davis employee, Stanley Corn, and battled his giant brain of doom. At the Lobster’s advice, Detective Cooper never wrote up a report on the incident and destroyed all evidence.

1938 wasn’t all giant brains and mad scientists though. The Lobster and his crew were still hunting Memnan Saa. Then Bill fell down some stairs, hit his head, and died. Lester was stung by a non-lethal African scorpion while asleep in London and subsequently died. Bob was found after he had apparently hung himself. At this point the Lobster stopped his search. With only Harry left, he had had enough. The pair of them worked on two final cases after that, then President Roosevelt recruited him.

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In Colorado, February 1939, the Lobster was working for the U.S. military when he failed to stop a Nazi saboteur destroying a train full of American troops and scientists bound for the Manhattan Project in New Mexico. His unnamed companion was killed in this incident.

March 20, was the last mission of the Lobster. He was sent to Hunte Castle in Austria to put a stop to the Nazi space program. When he and the American troops with him attacked, there was an explosion. It was believed all parties were killed, bringing the Lobster’s career to a close. Afterwards the U.S. government denied the existence of the Lobster or any of his rumoured missions for them.

FROM THE LOBSTER TO LOBSTER JOHNSON

But a good story never dies, and the Lobster’s lived on in the form of pulp adventure stories written by retired police detective Norvell Cooper published in Weird Detective magazine. He wrote eight Lobster stories in his short career beginning with “The Long Arm of Death” in September 1940 and ending with “Death Means Justice” in February 1942. Norvell claimed he had worked with the real Lobster, though he had never known his true identity. The Lobster’s alter-ego, the wheelchair-bound millionaire Walter Johnson, was a complete fabrication. Though he maintained the stories were based closely on real events, it seems they are at best exaggerated in the extreme, especially since the Lobster’s exploits often destroyed major New York landmarks, including the Empire State Building… twice.

The Lobster’s stories didn’t stop at the pulp magazines though. By the end of 1942 he had begun to appear in comics by writer Adam Horowitz and artist Isaac “Janky” Rosen. Their Lobster was based in Europe in the thick of World War II fighting Nazis, Hilter, zombie Nazis, zombie Hitler, vampires, werewolves, and Frankenstein Hilter. With the close of the war, Horowitz and Rosen attempted to turn the character into an alien-battling spaceman which led to the series ending after 38 issues in 1946.

The Lobster also had some time on the silver screen beginning with 1945’s “The Phantom Jungle,” a thirteen-part serial which inexplicably placed the Lobster in Africa on the trail of mad scientists and fighting mutant Altanteans. It was described by critics as “amazingly terrible.” A second serial was much more faithful to the source material, returning the Lobster to New York City and based loosely on Norvell Cooper’s novel “Empire of Death.” The Lobster was portrayed in both serials by Vic Williams, a former singing cowboy who was clearly far too old and too heavy for the part.

In 1951, the Lobster returned again, this time as Lobster Johnson, a series of Mexican films by writer/director Eduardo Fernandez. The addition of Johnson to the title appears to have been taken from the Lobster’s alter-ego from the original novels by Norvell Cooper, but Lobster Johnson is a markedly different character to the one that appeared in the pulps.

Most of the films began with a large black car, driven by a woman in a black dress and veil, pulling into town. In the back seat of the car was a corpse or a mummy which, at the setting of the sun, would turn in Lobster Johnson, the masked crime fighter. Lobster Johnson fought aliens, Satan, and even Death on one occasion. There were at least nine of these films (including “Lobster Johnson vs. Black Magic,” “Lobster Johnson vs. the Inferno,” “Lobster Johnson and the Circus of Hell,” and “Lobster Johnson and the Ring of Death”) although some historians put this count as high as twelve. The last of these films was made in 1959, and in the 1960s were distributed in the United States in an extremely edited and poorly dubbed state. Many did not make any sense at all.

There were no surviving good prints of the original films, however there were rumours acclaimed Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro was interested in a big-budget remake of the franchise. Whether there was any truth to these rumours is unknown, and the recent hell that has been unleashed across the globe makes it unlikely any such film will eventuate in the near future.

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THE 2000s

I mentioned earlier that the Lobster’s career ended in 1939. Well, that’s not entirely true. In Hellboy: Conqueror Worm he appeared yet again. It began with Hellboy and Roger being sent to investigate the ruins of Hunte Castle. Hellboy mentioned Lobster Johnson’s relation to the case, which was immediately dismissed by B.P.R.D. director, Dr Thomas Manning. Later Dr Manning found a mysterious card…

On the way up the mountains to Hunte Castle, Hellboy, Roger, and their guide, Laura Karnstein, encountered an elderly Nazi wandering aimlessly in the snowy mountains. He was executed by Laura (actually Inger von Klempt, granddaughter of Nazi scientist, Herman von Klempt who was a part of the Nazi space program). Now this is where it gets strange. The corpse of this Nazi later got up and turned into the Lobster, then began hunting down Nazis, killing them and burning the Lobster claw symbol onto their foreheads.

When he encountered Roger, he recognised him as an ally, and the two proceeded into Hunte Castle fighting side by side. The Lobster informed Roger that the sole survivor of the Hunte Castle incident, Herman von Klempt, was alive and at work in the castle. The Lobster’s choice of words were curious, as they implied he himself did not survive.

During the Conqueror Worm’s emergence from the space capsule, the Lobster guided Roger, drawing his attention to where it was most needed. While Hellboy and Roger dealt with the Conqueror Worm and von Klempt, the Lobster hunted down Inger and killed her. And when Roger was being eaten from the inside out by the Conqueror Worm, he aided Hellboy in saving him, sacrificing his own life in the process.

Roger and Hellboy buried him in the mountains and marked his grave with a cross. In this story the Lobster appeared as he always did in the 1930s, just like any other living man. By all rights he should have been a ghost, but how many ghosts have bones? And if he was not a ghost, then what was he?

During B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground the Lobster appeared yet again, this time by possessing Johann Kraus’s ectoplasm, and shooting an unconscious Liz Sherman with ectoplasmic bullets. These bullets did not hurt her, but rather freed her from the clutches of Memnan Saa’s psychic control. Memnan Saa however was knocked from his feet, and his face was cut from the attack. Afterwards, the Lobster vanished and Johann returned to himself.

Johann was possessed again in B.P.R.D.: The Black Goddess. Like before, he used this opportunity to strike out at Memnan Saa, although this time his efforts were far more futile.

Ultimately it was Liz that killed Memnan Saa, and with no way to strike at his enemy, it seemed the Lobster became stuck, unable to relinquish his possession of Johann’s ectoplasm. Unlike the Lobster that appeared in Conqueror Worm, this form seems to only be partially aware of his surroundings, often talking to himself or giving nonsensical replies when spoken to.

Kate Corrigan and her boyfriend at the time, Bruno Karhu, travelled back to Austria in B.P.R.D.: King of Fear in an attempt to free the Lobster’s spirit and return Johann back to normal. The took him to the place where Roger and Hellboy had buried him several years earlier. The Lobster stood before his own grave, commenting that he felt sad. But taking him to his grave did not bring him peace, and it did not free Johann. It was only when the Lobster found the spirits of the Nazis that had died in Hunte Castle that he could finally let Johann go, as he launched himself into battle with those ghosts, determined to inflict justice.

And just like that the Lobster was gone, leaving us with a whole heap of questions.

THE LOBSTER’S CREW

Before I get to the questions, I want to take a moment to shine the spotlight on the Lobster’s crew. These characters are a huge part of the Lobster’s mythology, and they absolutely deserve a mention.

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Harold “Harry” McTell: Harry is one of the four original members of the Lobster’s crew. He worked at “Anderson & Son Automobile Sale and Repair” and once saved the District Attorney’s sister, making him something of a local hero. He and reporter Cindy Tynan seem to have hit it off, and though they aren’t quite an item yet in Get the Lobster, there’s certainly a spark there.

Between Get the Lobster and The Iron Prometheus there is a definite physical change in Harry. It appears his jaw has been broken and never quite set the same, and his posture has become slumped. It seems to me that he has taken some injuries that never quite healed.

Harry was the sole survivor of the Lobster’s crew. When the Lobster left in service of President Roosevelt, Harry enlisted in the Republic of China Air Force and to help fight the Japanese while continuing his search for Memnan Saa. He tracked Saa throughout Europe, but when he lost his leg in Korea he was never able to pursue his revenge for his fallen friends. However, he did find where Memnan Saa lived, information he was eventually able to pass onto the B.P.R.D. as an elderly man in his nineties.

Lester: Another of the founding members, Lester is not in on the action as much as Harry, and doesn’t seem to have his natural bravery. In The Burning Hand when the Black Flame was resurrected, he was the first to turn and run, while Harry stayed fighting at the Lobster’s side. Keep in mind, at this point the Lobster had only been active a little over a week. This was very early days.

By 1933, in A Scent of Lotus, Lester had found his bravery, ready to charge into a burning building where the Lobster was fighting an Axis agent. He even made himself a target of the Crimson Lotus’s wrath when he took her picture, proving that she exists.

Lester was a bit of a fanciful guy. He enjoyed reading “Astounding Stories of Super Science” and was ready to believe in Atlanteans and spaceships at a moment’s notice. When the Lobster began tracking Memnan Saa, his job was to follow leads abroad, a task that led to his death by non-lethal scorpion.

Max Massimo and Theo: These two were the other founding members of the Lobster’s crew. Unfortunately they didn’t even survive the first month. Max followed the Lobster’s example and recklessly threw himself into the path of danger, however he didn’t have the Lobster’s incredible luck or relative indestructibility. He was set on fire by the Black Flame and his remains were used in a ceremony by

the witch Kamala to learn the location of the Lobster’s headquarters.

Theo, a Romanian with an easy-going attitude, was tasked with guarding Cindy Tynan. He kept her company for three days secreted away in a hotel room before she tricked him and sneaked out. It was lucky that she did too, because the hotel room was blown up by Mr Isog shortly after.

Bill: We haven’t really seen much of Bill in the comics so far. He made his first chronological appearance in Get the Lobster, but he may have been around before then, as it was implied he was already a part of the group by then. He seems to be the mechanic of the group, looking after the electrical works and ferrying people in and out of the Lobster’s lair in the sewers, navigating around the cannibals that lurk down there. Bill’s a no-nonsense kind of guy, definitely not the sort to believe in Atlantean spaceships despite the strange things he has seen while working with the Lobster. He was killed in 1938 while investigating Memnan Saa.

Robert “Bob” Isherwood: Bob made his first chronological appearance in Get the Lobster as the newly recruited member of the Lobster’s crew. Bob’s coming brings his technical expertise to the operation, an ability that will prove invaluable. In The Iron Prometheus he was shown to have a very good understanding of what the Vril Energy Suit was, even if he didn’t understand how it worked, and in The Killer in My Skull he was able to fashion a device to track the rogue brain and block its powers. While he is the last of the core crew members to join the team, he was the first crew member readers were introduced to.

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Bob died after he had apparently hanged himself in 1938 while investigating Memnan Saa.

Cindy Tynan: Not officially a part of the Lobster’s crew, Cindy has been a major player in the early years. However, she’s a reporter for the Herald Tribune, so while she has been very useful, she has the potential to be a real thorn in the Lobster’s side too. In the past she had been in a relationship with Detective Jake Eckerd, but they broke it off when he felt that she was using him to advance her career. Later, when she became involved with the Lobster’s activities, Eckerd attempted to date her again as a way to gain information about the Lobster. Cindy caught him at it, and pointed out the irony.

There’s no sign of Cindy in the later stories. Did something happen to her, or was she simply not involved in those stories? She’s a character I really enjoy, so I admit this makes me a little nervous.

Norvell Cooper: Again, Detective Cooper was never a part of the Lobster’s crew, but he did work with him, and went on to write a bunch of fanciful stories about him. He hasn’t appeared in any of the earlier stories, and given his apparent unfamiliarity with Bob in The Killer in My Skull and the way Bob explains certain things about the Lobster to him, it seems that his working relationship with the Lobster was in its very early days. I doubt Detective Cooper will have much of a role if he even makes an appearance before 1938.

WHAT IS THE LOBSTER?

I’m seriously asking this, because I honestly don’t have a clue. He bleeds, he limps, he gets bandaged up, but he also gets shot and survives explosions way too easily for it to just be luck. Whenever people write about his appearance in Conqueror Worm they always refer to him as the ghost of Lobster Johnson, but he didn’t really appear particularly ghostly to me. He seemed just as alive and real as he did in the 1930s… that is to say still pushing the boundary of what we call human, but not really crossing it either. But what if his appearance in that story really was the way we’ve always known him? That moment when the dead Nazi pulls himself up out of the snow and becomes the Lobster… what if this has been happening in the 1930s too? In The Burning Hand when Arnie Wald’s goons opened fire on the Lobster and report to Wald that they definitely hit him, what would it mean if they actually did hit him? What if they killed him? What if one of the dead goons that had just had justice inflicted on him by the Lobster then stood up and became the Lobster?

It’s a crazy theory, I know, and one I don’t have a lot of confidence in to be honest, but I went back and checked. Every time the Lobster is apparently in a situation in which he’d be killed, there was always a corpse that had just had the Lobster’s justice inflicted on it nearby. Unfortunately, in the Hunte Castle incident, all the bodies were destroyed in an explosion, leaving the Lobster without a body… until sixty-one years later when Inger executed the surviving Nazi in the mountains, finally serving justice on him.

Justice is very important to the Lobster. When he was prevented from killing Memnan Saa in The Black Goddess he became trapped in Johann’s ectoplasm. He was left wondering, “Justice. Where is the justice?” Then, when he was in Hunte Castle and found the spirits of all the dead Nazis, he said, “There. There it is,” and his spirit was freed. This concept of justice is more than just his drive, it seems tethered to his very soul.

I’m a little vague on the finer points of this theory, because it is a crazy one. But then, whatever Mignola has in mind is pretty crazy too, as he said in an interview with Comic Book Resources last December:

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“One thing we discussed when John started the book was me saying: Here is my ‘true history’ ― and ‘true history’ was in major quotes ― for Lobster Johnson’s family tree. It’s weird. It’s intended to be something that if you heard it, you’d go, ‘That can’t possibly be true.’ And you can use it or not . . . So my major contribution is that I tried to throw in some really weird shit that, amazingly, John is using.”

If you’re like me, you’re wondering what he meant by “Lobster Johnson’s family tree.” And maybe we’ll start getting more clues about that in Get the Lobster. Back in April, Mignola had this to say about the Lobster’s origins:

“I did make up a background for Lobster Johnson. I just didn’t know that we’d ever use it. But when John started writing the book, I said, ‘If we involve a character like a reporter’ ― which was John’s idea ― ‘should we ever get around to her digging in to who this character is, that’s maybe the one way to explain a little bit of who he is.’ “

Well, she’s certainly digging in the first issue. I wonder what she’ll uncover… But in the meantime, I really want to hear theories, especially the really wild ones.

THE FUTURE OF THE SERIES

The other thing that came out in CBR’s December interview with Mignola was him talking about the finite length of the Lobster Johnson series. After all, the Lobster was only active for seven years, and the first three are nearly done already. We already know how Lobster Johnson’s story ends, and Mignola confirmed in his interview, the final Lobster Johnson story will likely serve as a lead in to Conqueror Worm, but between now and then there’s still so much to do!

In Spring 1935, the Lobster is due to come across Dr Waxman and the Cossaro brothers. Eventually he’s got to meet Norvell Cooper and have a few adventures that stretch the limits of credibility (and possibly destroy a famous New York landmark). And at some point he and Harry are going to bump into the Steel Hawk and a German with pet alligators and a some rather interesting clothes.

Not only that, but so far all of the Lobster’s stories have taken place in New York City, but he also spent some time in Chicago. Hell, I’d love a whole trade of short stories in Chicago. Yeah, Lobster Johnson in Chicago sounds like a great trade…

Speaking of trades, Lobster Johnson – Volume 3: Satan Smells a Rat will be out next Wednesday. You’ll definitely want to pick that one up.

Another Hell Notes done! That was the longest one I’ve ever done (not something I want to make a habit of). As usual, I’m all for theories. Feel free to talk about Lobster Johnson, his crew, and the many plot threads unfolding in Get the Lobster in the comments section below. I’ll be back with another Hell Notes in March. It’s going to be a big month for Mignolaversity…