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Hell Notes: Zinco Industries

By | July 18th, 2013
Posted in Annotations | 3 Comments
Logo by Tim Daniel

The world has been steadily going to Hell for a while now, but contrary to popular belief, it isn’t always ancient Ogdru Hem and their various spawn behind everything. Sometimes, it’s Zinco Industries. If it’s something really bad, it’s practically guaranteed it’s Zinco. They’re involved with all the major turns for the worst, and unlike the all the horrors raging across the planet, they’re not even on the B.P.R.D.’s radar.

...even though they're always looming in the background.

But they’re certainly on Mignolaversity’s radar…

Please note, this column contains spoilers for those that have not yet read up to and including B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Return of the Master.


Mr Zinco

It was in the second Hellboy miniseries, Wake the Devil, that the Zinco fiasco began. Roderick Zinco was a rich man, but his life had no purpose. Then Rasputin, the mad monk, appeared to him one day and gave him a gift: a purposeful life.
Doctor Karl Kroenen,
Leopold Kurtz,
Isla Haupstein
So Roderick travelled into the Arctic Circle where he uncovered the surviving members of Project Ragna Rok and pledged his life and resources to them.

Unfortunately, Zinco Industries was (and still is) one of the B.P.R.D.’s suppliers for various equipment. Whether by design or by some outside influence, likely supernatural in nature, the Bureau’s Zinco-supplied equipment started misbehaving…


While things were going catastrophically wrong for the Bureau, everything was going just as planned for Roderick and the Ragna Rok Nazis… until he recovered a certain head from a ruin in South America. Von Klempt created a rift between Leopold Kurtz and Doctor Karl Kroenen, leading to Kroenen stabbing his comrade. When Rasputin learned of this, he blinded Roderick in his fury. Roderick stumbled around, until he bumped a button that blew the Arctic Sanctuary to rubble.

That was the last we saw of Roderick, but Zinco Industries was still alive and well.


Mr Pope

Mr Pope was Roderick Zinco’s assistant back in the Wake the Devil days, but by B.P.R.D.: The Black Flame he’d become the company’s CEO. The board members weren’t exactly happy with him though. Pope had been selling off assets rapidly and pouring money into Research and Development, all the while asking doubters to trust his vision for the future.

And his vision included frogs. Pope had the R&D department growing frog monsters from tadpoles, teaching them to speak, pacifying them, and acclimating them to his presence. Pope’s vision also included some crazy Nazi stuff. He had his own private chamber full of relics from World War II, specifically from the war criminals the Steel Hawk, the Crimson Lotus, and the Black Flame.

The corpse in the glass case is the original Black Flame.

Fake black flame
The Black Flame was of particular interest to him. He had his R&D team build him his own Black Flame armour, complete with a blue flame to mimic the appearance of the mysterious black flame. In this suit, and with the aid of his trained frogs, Pope was able to call wild frog monsters to him and ship them back to Zinco’s labs. He even wore the Black Flame armour to fire the Zinco board members afterwards. I guess he really liked wearing it.

Real black flame
With the board out of his way, Mr Pope kicked his plans into high gear, using the frogs to replace the fake black flame of his suit with real black flame. This flame was key to summoning Katha-Hem, but Pope mistakenly believed this would allow him to control the mighty Ogdru Hem when it arrived. Only when it was too late did Pope realise this was not the case, as the frog monsters he thought he was controlling were revealed to have been using him all along.

Katha-Hem was eventually destroyed (thankfully), but in the aftermath Mr Pope was dragged away by the frogs and the Bureau never learned of Zinco’s involvement.

Continued below

Mr Pope appeared again in B.P.R.D.: King of Fear, but he was a man transformed. Now only a burning corpse, there was no trace of the arrogant man that fired the Zinco board members, or the pitiful creature used by the frogs and begging for forgiveness. The Mr Pope in this story was humbled. He understood his duty to both lead and serve the frog monsters, while accepting that he was not at the centre of all that was unfolding. He knew that role was for another.

His plans to lead an army of frog monsters and Ogdru Hem were ultimately thwarted by Liz when she torched the inner world of the planet, killing Mr Pope and his army, but also unleashing horrific disasters all over the planet, beginning the Hell on Earth era of B.P.R.D..

Mr Pope was responsible for all manner of horrors in his time, but for B.P.R.D. fans there is none worse than the murder of Roger. It shall never be forgotten.


Dr Marsten

After the loss of Mr Pope, Dr Marsten, formerly the head of the R&D department, became the new head of Zinco Industries. His approach to leadership was different from that of his predecessor, and his board members seemed to understand what he was working towards. There’s loyalty there. Under his leadership, Zinco transformed its image from that of a military contractor to a company dedicated to making the world better.

In the first wave of disasters at the beginning of Hell on Earth Zinco industries helped the decimated Indonesian and Malaysian islands by improving their communication networks, providing technology to supply potable water, and generally helping with their recovery (Around this time was when the “Zinco: A Better World” posters began to appear). But Marsten had his own reasons for being in Indonesia. He was searching for something, and in the lone standing building of a ruined village he found it.

This is the symbol of Project Ragna Rok which brought Hellboy into the world in 1944

Upon returning to Zinco headquarters, Marsten told his board members it was time for the project they had been planning for for so long to commence. There were two others present for this meeting…

They're ALIVE?!
How Kurtz and Kroenen came to be alive I couldn’t tell you. Kurtz offered an explanation about Rasputin saving them from the explosion in their Arctic Sanctuary, but he was a little light on the details (namely that there were none). And sure, being whisked away by a ghost monk might explain Kroenen being alive, but Kurtz was already dead by that point. I suppose Kroenen could have resurrected Kurtz. Making the dead live is somewhat of a speciality of his. Even still, how these guys came to Zinco Industries and how long they’ve been there is a complete mystery.

The body recovered from
the Oannes Society
As for Zinco’s secret project, their aim was to revive “the Master,” Grigori Rasputin. Kurtz and Kroenen worked at making him a body, but the task proved more difficult than either of them suspected. Without a body Marsten’s plan could not proceed. But then he learned about the body the Bureau recovered from the Oannes Society, a body built to epitomise human perfection. Of course, getting the Bureau to part with it was the real trick.

They baited the Bureau with talk of technology that could help organs develop faster, and waited for them to make the first contact. Zinco made it very clear the body was of no use to them, to the point that they quite literally had the Bureau begging them to help. They even agreed to letting Zinco take the body off-site.

Things progressed very quickly from there. Kroenen prepared the body, but Marsten wouldn’t let him help in locating Rasputin’s soul, insisting he remained focused on his work. Kroenen became suspicious, believing that locating Rasputin’s soul was the sort of work that should only be done by those chosen directly by Rasputin himself for the task. Kroenen’s distracted thoughts nearly led to drowning the Oannes body. Afterwards, when the body was stable again, Kroenen accepted that his was but one part to play in what would follow, and dismissed any further doubts to concentrate wholly on the work at hand.

Continued below

But he had good reason to doubt Dr Marsten, though he did not know it. Dr Marsten’s team soon located the soul in the crystal prison of the Ogdru Jahad. But that’s not where Rasputin’s soul was. Back in Hellboy: Darkness Calls, the last remnants of Rasputin’s soul fell through the roots of the World Tree and into the fire beyond (presumably Hell). Marsten was instead planning to bring back his own master, Mr Pope.

But it was not Mr Pope that he brought back.

The Black Flame is trouble, but don’t expect him to start the whole plague of frogs thing again. He’s not as fond of them as he once was.

He may have just killed the last of the frog monsters

And with the Black Flame’s arrival, an all new round of hell broke loose, with disasters all over the planet, and a surge of new Ogdru Hem.

New York, Moscow, Paris, and Chicago

That was the last we heard of Zinco. Since their head office is in New York, I don’t imagine things are going well for them though. As for what the future will hold, I can only guess. However, I don’t think Kroenen and Kurtz are going to be very happy that all their work to revive Rasputin was wasted on a lie. Dr Marsten has pissed off the wrong Nazi scientists.


…And the B.P.R.D. still doesn’t know Zinco Industries has got anything to do with the end of the world.


//TAGS | Hell Notes | Mignolaversity

Mark Tweedale

Mark writes Haunted Trails, The Harrow County Observer, The Damned Speakeasy, and a bunch of stuff for Mignolaversity. An animator and an eternal Tintin fan, he spends his free time reading comics, listening to film scores, watching far too many video essays, and consuming the finest dark chocolates. You can find him on BlueSky.

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