From way out of left field, the most unexpected Hellboy Universe book of the year has stomped into stores. “Giant Robot Hellboy” #1 is a bombastic and giddy release aimed at pushing style first in a tribute to monster movies and the uniquely geometric, elemental style of Mike Mignola. While this first issue almost doesn’t go far enough into its pulp magazine premise, there’s a lot here to celebrate.
Written by Mike Mignola
Illustrated by Duncan Fegredo
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Clem RobinsHellboy is kidnapped and hooked up to a massive mecha-Hellboy for a mission on a mysterious, faraway island, but the island might just put up a fight of its own.
Inspired by Mignola’s viral-hit pencil drawings from “Mike Mignola: The Quarantine Sketchbook,” Giant Robot Hellboy gets his own story in this 3-part miniseries from Mignola and longtime “Hellboy” artist Duncan Fegredo!
“Giant Robot Hellboy” #1 never tries to scream its influences from the rooftops, but that doesn’t make its stylistic backing any less evident. By this point, picking even a few core influences for the “Hellboy” series is difficult, just because of how vast those inspirations are. It’s folklore, pulp, Lovecraft, and a million other things at once, but mostly it is just the passion of its main architect. “Giant Robot Hellboy” is refreshing because you can actually point to a panel and see the childhood delight of its original inspiration.
I don’t think an obvious ancestry is reductive of the comic either. This whole book started as a stylistic exercise for Mignola as he went stir crazy in lockdown (alongside all of us). It’s easy to forget that fever dream period, but it’s definitely in the lifeblood of this book. So many of us returned to simple pleasures, things that could easily evoke that childhood sense of wonder as the world itself got a lot less wonderful.
There’s something so exuberant about this concept, and the creators know it. The moment this giant sheet-metal Hellboy pops onto the page, you feel them grinning with you. They’re enjoying this just as much as the reader because when we get to see dashes of Jack Kirby, kaiju, or War of the Worlds, they’ve got to immerse themselves back in the first kernels of this whole universe’s emergence.
If it wasn’t apparent already, this comic does inspire a special kind of excitement that makes it hard for me to pretend this is a serious and sober review, and I wouldn’t even try and pretend that part of that doesn’t come from the return of Duncan Fegredo.
Fegredo has a special place in the retinue of Hellboy Universe artists, as one of the earlier guest artists who got to truly define the visual style of this universe outside of Mignola’s unparalleled penciling. Upon his return, he shies away from the deliriant fantasy style of ‘The Midnight Circus’ or ‘The Wild Hunt’ and instead focuses on endearing the audience to his environments through thoughtful clutter.
We open in a beautifully rendered ’60s London that has an urban density to it immediately indicative of a lived-in and practical city. By giving a starting point that asserts just how familiar it should be to the reader, Fegredo gets to show how the titular Giant Robot himself is a different kind of mechanical altogether.
Giant Robot Hellboy feels more like a puppet than a Transformer, which is not surprising at all given Mike Mignola’s penchant for Pinocchio. Fegredo runs with this, allowing his Tin Man-esque Gundam to be distinctly of the aesthetic’s time period while being obviously distinct to the reader because we’ve seen how cluttered the “real world” is compared to this.
That feeling of Hellboy’s rock-’em-sock-’em golem being askew from reality seems like it will give Fegredo a good bit of wiggle room in how he uses the character. The expressions are a little more Mignola-ized, animated, and expressive with that bit of carnival melodrama. It’s an immediately endearing choice, especially when compounded with the overall boxiness of the design. It has the charm of The Iron Giant or a kid’s Halloween Astronaut suit lovingly crafted with cardboard and tinfoil.
Continued belowThe Hellboy Universe has had a crack at rendering the “higher further faster” attitude of American Modernism in its books, even providing a rolling commentary on it through “B.P.R.D: 1948” to the adventures of “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.” in the 1950s. It acutely renders an attitude of technology and optimism that has little space for irony or anything less than the self-serious. By setting this book a little further down the line in the 1960s, Mignola and Fegredo get to inject a little bit of that missing facetiousness into this giant metal superman.
Alongside “Hellboy in Love,” “Giant Robot Hellboy” feels like a purposeful return to genre stories that build out a character by stretching the settings where their core can stay intact. If anything, it feels closest to the bronze age reinvention of Batman, where the sullen, gothic mystique of the character was poked and prodded with globe trotting adventures, or character dynamics that acknowledged their soap operatic roots. Hellboy can now be James Bond or Thor or Godzilla, without becoming any more superfluous of a character.
That said, it almost feels like keeping Hellboy “on model” is what is holding this book back from its greatest potential. There’s a very stubborn decision here to keep the book in continuity, when there is an arguably better version that steers out of the constraints of its realism and fully embraces its inspirations.
So many comics are chastised for being “inconsequential” when they are set outside of the main continuity, but the whole character of Giant Robot Hellboy came from an exercise in consequence-free artistic expression. When you try and shove this four-story tall tin man back into the rulebook of a twenty-five-year continuity, you just can’t go to the same lengths with it.
Verdict: 7- “Giant Robot Hellboy” #1 is an unabashed ride into 20th century genre fiction that suffers in parts from a hesitancy to ride head first into the promise of its premise.
