“Giant Robot Hellboy” is back and battling, but with little new to say past its premise, an identity crisis for the title feels more and more clear ahead of December’s finale. Spoilers ahead.
Written by Mike Mignola
Illustrated by Duncan Fegredo
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Clem RobinsWhile Hellboy’s robotic counterpart battles giant monsters on a faraway island, the scientists running the mission scramble when things at the lab get more than a little out of hand.
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!
With Monarch coming out I’ve been in a real kaiju-craze lately, and once again the best merit of this issue is the willingness to lean into bombastic action. Ever since the giant fight in ‘The Wild Hunt’ I’ve felt like Fegredo was one of the best artists in the Hellboy Universe when it came to illustrating clear and weighty action scenes. I don’t think the fight spread through the issue is any more impactful than what he had in the second half of last issue, but it does have more flair. I love how Giant Robot Hellboy tumbles like a slinky when thrown, really emphasizing that disassembled and reassembled toy aspect to him. I also think that nipple missiles should be a part of Hellboy’s permanent arsenal. There are moments here where I think, beyond the action being deflated among the cutaways to other plotlines, we lose some of its impact when scale becomes less than obvious. It feels essential in a story like this to see how giant the giant characters are, and while that’s clear in the beginning, as pages get more crowded the environment doesn’t necessarily carry enough detail to keep all these monsters in perspective.
Like I said in my previous review, there’s a bit of plot mismatch here that has lingered in the book. The desire to keep this three issue miniseries both within the continuity, and majorly building upon it, often just feels like too great a task for a book that also wants to revel in its pulpiness. It’s hard to point to a singular plotline that feels substantial alone. Reading issue #2, I feel like Mignola has tried to build a “B.P.R.D: 1948” or “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D” follow-up story, and has buried it in monster fights to get the reader through the intrigue. Or, he has done the opposite and hedged the bet that readers wouldn’t accept a monster fight without some rational plot explanation. I think both explanations do the reader a disservice, and never really respect the reader to have the attention span needed for a more substantial singular focus for the title.
This could have been “Hellboy: Skull Island”, but we never have the page space to really build out the setting for Hellboy’s battle with monsters. It does make me wish that we could have merged this with the stylistically similar “Young Hellboy: The Hidden Land”, which had similar plotting issues, and ended with a stronger Tarzan-ish adventure story that leaned purely into its genre roots.
The point that for me solidified the plotting issues that came to a head in this issue is that there is no clear antagonist. There are human characters with various levels of blame in the London plotline, but none of them are especially memorable or reflect Hellboy to any degree. Then when Giant Robot Hellboy enters combat, he has no major foe either, the monsters are interchangeable and largely without personality. We have Hellboy in this whole new setting and there’s been no cause for any reflection on him as more than just a genre symbol caught up in zany exploits.
Of all my complaints about the plot here, we are treated to an absolutely insane ending. Never would I have guessed that this issue would tell us about Hellboy’s cycle of reincarnation, especially so soon after “Miss Truesdale and the Fall of Hyperborea”. It’s one of the most exciting concepts to mine out in this modern era of Hellboy stories, and I think this is a great, unorthodox way to introduce it into his 20th century era. Again though, unless this is just a first peek at the ramifications of bearing the identities of all these past heroes, it really feels like one too many plotlines for a book that advertises itself as an art-centric title. We have one issue left for the miniseries and I still barely feel like I know what this story is about, or what it’s trying to say about Hellboy.
Verdict: 5.5-“Giant Robot Hellboy” #2 is a comic of immense weight and scale, but without a clear direction or objective it often finds itself shambling forward without consequence and propped purely on the talent of its byline.
