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| This is only sort of the first cover – the BPRD logo is covering Monkey Man & O’Brien by Art Adams |
In 2011, Hellboy died fighting a giant Nazi Dragon (er, so to say).
However, according to Mike Mignola, that was initially teased in 1994.
Let’s travel back to 1994 to see if he’s telling the truth.
If you just want to know the answer to that question, then yes, he was telling the truth.
Back in the early-to-mid 90’s, Dark Horse was looking to expand it’s creator-owned output, giving an avenue to some talented folk like Frank Miller, John Byrne and Mike Allred. While collecting creators for said imprint, Barbara Kesel came across a young man with promising talent who had done various for-hire work named Mike Mignola with a character freshly rejected from DC Comics looking for a home. Dark Horse, looking to find it’s place among the bourgeoning world of fresh and iconic new characters of the 90’s that was immensely prevalent over at the fresh young publisher Image Comics, hired Mike and started publishing Hellboy in 1993 in the second San Diego Comic-Con comic from Dark Horse.
With that one smart nab, Dark Horse gained itself a character that would spawn four additional titles, two feature films, two animated films and an immense line of merchandise opportunities. But we’re not here to talk about all that. We’re here to talk about the first major Hellboy comic — Seed of Destruction!
Seed of Destruction was and is a rather unassuming mini-series from co-written by Mignola and Byrne and illustrated by Mignola, with colors from Mark Chiarello and Matt Hollingsworth. Telling the incomplete (or “initial”, if you prefer) origin of the titular character, Hellboy is brought to Earth via an evil demonic spell to reign destruction on the planet. Instead, he ends up fighting Nazis, frogs and demons on behalf of the US Government as an agent of the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. That’s essentially the best possible scenario for a situation like that to end up going, if you ask me. What began with four simple issues and a very open-ended final page ended up being the introduction of over a decade’s worth of stories, only recently culminating a few months ago in Hellboy: The Fury #3, and looking back on it now after the fact, it’s quite easy to see why Hellboy endured.
With Seed of Destruction and help from John Byrne, Mignola’s turn at writing a comic of his own device was a hit both in ’94 and still reads as one of the sharpest comics of that age today. For no discernible reason, I’ve found myself looking back at a lot of comics from that general era (been re-reading old Madmen and Spawn with their hardcover releases, for example), and more often than not I’m finding some of it a tad dated. Comics tend to go through creative transitions quite frequently, and while there is definitely a rather apparent 90’s style, most of these books just generally suffer from an overdose of exposition and a chaotic injection of quantity (usually of muscles) over quality (in this case, of writing). What’s humorous about that is that, to an extent, Hellboy has both — the writing is full of exposition and Hellboy has more muscles than any human should be able to have outside of Ron Perlman. (Though, to be completely fair, Hellboy is still exposition heavy and he definitely still has a ton of muscles), yet where Hellboy succeeds that others fail over time is that his story doesn’t lose relevance or quality due to outdated references and overplayed tropes parading as fresh and/or edgy. Instead, while others tried to trip up the superhero world with heroes of a new era, Mignola kicked the superhero idea out from it’s heels and took it to a different genre for a different experience and universe.
To a point, Hellboy is still a “superhero”, albeit a non-conventional one. While most superheroes are known more for wearing capes, tights or some other form of identifiable costume, Hellboy at most wears a trenchcoat. Hellboy doesn’t fight some villain in a dark lair, but he does have his own evil arch nemesis in Rasputin, who controls legions of dastardly minions, some of which are “powered” themselves (in different fashions, though none appear in the first arc until the last panel), as well as villainous frogs. So no, Hellboy is not a run-of-the-mill superhero, but he is super, and he is a hero, and he goes on adventures worthy of other superheroes; they’re just more genre specific. This is why Hellboy fit in so well in the 90’s crowd and why it was so easy for him to stand out. People are still trying to trump and comment on the Superman ideal, yet Mignola and Hellboy looked farther back into mythology, picked apart some fun Nazi pseudo-science, mixed in some Russian folklore, and charged full speed ahead to explore the untapped modern horror market.
Heavily influenced from writers like HP Lovecraft with a heavy helping of Eastern European folklore and mysticism, Mignola – with the help of Byrne – crafted what feels like only a brief tease of things to come, yet a powerful enough one to obviously become the beginning of a legacy. It’s easy to see the journey Hellboy would eventually take after this story, but before being pronounced King of England, Hellboy was a noticeably different character. Hellboy grew into a more stoic character over time, but the earlier incarnation present here was a bit more bombastic and playful, similar to the wise-cracking Perlman-esque version that exists in the films (but with less cats). It’s actually fun to see; I can’t remember the last time Hellboy looked like he was having this much fun (but years of fighting monsters and demons will assuredly weigh heavily on the soul). Mignola also uses first person narrative in Seed, which is a device he later abandoned in place of prophetic ramblings from other character. It was a bit jarring at first to rediscover Hellboy’s inner monologue, but it adds to the overall tale here in introducing the eponymous character, and all things considered this is a great introduction. Not too much is revealed, but the groundwork is laid out and it’s rather impossible to not want to immediately (re-)read the follow-up arc and see what happens.
Mignola’s artwork is easily one of the things I miss most in the recent releases. While Mignola is great about working with talent who take after his visual style, even greats like Duncan Fegredo never quite embody that full Mignola spirit that, rightfully, only Mignola can. His his often straight and thick lines that seem to take after the work of Jack Kirby, and his handle of motion within the isolated panels is uncanny. Mignola uses shadows in his books in a way that no others do, and his shadow play helps to define the visuals with it’s thematic overtones and genre-stylizing. The book is incredibly dynamic visually, perfectly embodying the spirit of the title, and it’s of no great surprise that Mignola’s characters would eventually go on to be as iconic as any others as well as to create a visual style frequently imitated and embraced by modern audiences.
Amazingly enough, Hellboy’s entire future was rather apparent in Seed of Destruction. Sure, we’re looking back at it both with a fond nostalgia and the knowledge of all that comes next, but it’s impressive to see how well this material holds up to the sands of time and how much is seeded here. The war with frogs from BPRD (the first major story arc for the eventual the spin-off), teases at Abe Sapien and Hellboy’s true histories, issues with Liz Sherman’s abilities, the prediction of “Ragna Rok” and the eventual fight between Hellboy and the dragon in The Fury — it’s all here, not to mention Mignola’s rather outstanding revolution into the way ongoing stories can be told in segmented/non-linear installations. I can only imagine what was going through 1993 Mike Mignola’s mind, and if he could ever even imagine that in 2010-2011 these seeds (Eh? Eh?) would eventually pay-off. Granted, Hellboy took a rather notable shift in it’s execution when stories started to converge around 2007 with Darkness Calls, dealing more with Arthurian legend over Eastern-European folklore, it’s still impressive to look at the book’s humble beginnings and marvel at how far it went.
Suffice it to say, Seed of Darkness is still one of the best debuts I’ve ever read, and has instilled an urge in me to re-read all of Hellboy (which I will probably go through with). Any book that can re-excite a veteran reader a decade and a half after its initial release is a book worthy of diving into any available longbox.
As a note, just for clarification — no, I did not read Seed of Destruction in 1994, as I was 7.
