Via The Hollywood Reporter, Dark Horse Comics have announced “Giant Robot Hellboy,” a three-issue series written by Mike Mignola, with art by Duncan Fegredo, coloring by Dave Stewart, and lettering by Clem Robins. The comic will see Hellboy get “kidnapped and hooked up to a massive mecha-Hellboy for a mission on a mysterious, faraway island,” although “the island might just put up a fight of its own.”
The series originates from several drawings featured in Mignola’s Quarantine Sketchbook, the book he produced to raise funds for Jose Andrés’s World Central Kitchen during 2020. Mignola states the character “is my very obvious nod to all those Japanese giant monster movies… which I actually have no particular love for. What I do love is listening to Geof Darrow and Art Adams talks about those movies, so really, I guess this series was inspired by those guys.”
He elaborates, “I had the idea for this one a long time ago but figured it was too silly to actually do. Then the pandemic came along and I started to do all those sketches I would post online. I had never given a serious thought to what a giant robot Hellboy would look like but I knocked out a few sketches and I liked them. The thing started to seem like something that could actually be done.”
Adams and Darrow proved to be too busy to do the art, so Mignola pitched it to Fegredo, whose last project drawing comic book interiors was 2019’s “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Beast of Vargu.” He quips, “[In this], Hellboy awakes to an out-of-body experience and simultaneously has to deal with the usual fallout from mad scientists doing their thing whilst learning to walk again. Come to think of it, that pretty much describes my return to collaborating with Mike.”
Previously, Giant Robot Hellboy was turned into a large, limited edition miniature for Hellboy: The Board Game. Its official description states it was “discovered in a cave in Japan in 1972 — apparently built by a secret group of Japanese scientists (purpose unknown) and abandoned in the 1950s. Turned over to the American government as a worthless curiosity after examination showed no sign of how to operate it and apparently no power source.”
“Giant Robot Hellboy” #1 will be released on October 25, with a main cover by Fegredo, and a variant by Mignola. The second issue will have a variant by Darrow, while Adams will provide the variant for the third.
