Readers of Hellboy know all about Hellboy’s infamous five-month “drunken weekend” in Mexico, 1956 — there’s an entire trade paperback about it and it’s a part of the latest arc of “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.” Now it seems there’s going to be just a little more: this May we’re getting a new Hellboy one-shot comic, “Hellboy vs. Lobster Johnson: The Ring of Death.” Mike Mignola’s co-writer Chris Roberson explains the genesis of “Hellboy vs. Lobster Johnson” coming from the same meeting that resulted in 2017’s “The Visitor”:
“As longtime readers might remember, in the summer of 1956 Hellboy went through a rough patch, a months-long drunken ‘lost weekend’ in Mexico that he later claimed to remember very little about, during which he fought Aztec mummies, palled around with Mexican luchador wrestlers, and even spent some time in the ring himself. And it’s also been established that in Hellboy’s world there was a long-running series of low-budget Mexican horror films featuring ‘Lobster Johnson,’ a masked luchador hero inspired by the Depression-era hero the ‘Lobster’ who Hellboy had idolized as a kid.”
So this isn’t about the Lobster we know from the 1930s, this is actor and luchador Adolfo Flores, who played Lobster Johnson in a series low-budget horror movies. One of those movies was 1957’s Lobster Johnson and the Ring of Death. There’s almost certainly a connection there.
The one-shot comic will include two stories, the titular ‘Hellboy vs. Lobster Johnson: The Ring of Death,’ drawn by “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1956” artist Mike Norton, with colors by Dave Stewart, and ‘Down Mexico Way,’ drawn by “The Visitor: How & Why He Stayed” artist Paul Grist with colors by Bill Crabtree. And if you’re looking at the cover going, “Is that the Visitor?” … yes, it most certainly is.
Look for “Hellboy vs. Lobster Johnson: The Ring of Death” May 29. For full details, check out the announcement on Entertainment Weekly.
