Like Hellboy: The First 20 Years before it, Hellboy: 25 Years of Covers commemorates another anniversary with beautiful art.
Illustrated by Mike Mignola and othersCover by Mike Mignola
Colored by Dave Stewart and othersTo commemorate the 25th anniversary of the first issue of Hellboy, this deluxe art collection includes more than 150 full-page cover pieces from Mike Mignola, Richard Corben, Duncan Fegredo, and more!
This oversized 8” x 12” hardcover is sure to appeal to Mignola fans and comics enthusiasts alike, featuring an introduction by colorist Dave Stewart and a foreword by Mignola himself.
• Featuring Hellboy covers from the original series, one-shots, collections, and more!
For those of you that have picked up the trade paperbacks, library editions, or omnibus editions of “Hellboy” you’ll no doubt have noticed the covers made their way to those volumes as chapter breaks. But, the thing with the chapter breaks is that they appear in uncolored black and gray.
Hellboy: 25 Years of Covers offers a unique look at something we’ve rarely seen before, “Hellboy” covers in full color, without trade dress, and gloriously oversized.
This is hardly the first “Hellboy” art book, so you’ve likely seen some of these covers before. 2003’s The Art of Hellboy and 2014’s Hellboy: The First 20 Years both feature several key covers in full color, together overlapping with the content in Hellboy: 25 Years of Covers by about 25%. The doubling up usually occurs with milestone covers. After all, you could hardly expect any of these volumes to be missing the cover for “Hellboy: Seed of Destruction” #1; it’s simply too significant to skip. So, yes, there’s doubling up, but it’s done it a way which is not only understandable, but unavoidable if these collections are done right.
If you haven’t seen the other art books, you may notice a few absences. You’ll see the covers for prose anthologies Hellboy: Odd Jobs and Hellboy: Oddest Jobs and wonder where Hellboy: Odder Jobs is. Not to worry, it’s in Hellboy: The First 20 Years. Where possible, doubling up has been avoided for less iconic stories such as these.
The other 75% presents covers in color that aren’t available anywhere else, and as a long-time fan, it was fantastic to see them here. I was particularly happy to see the wrap-around cover for “Hellboy: The Island” #1 presented as a double-page spread. (Mike Mignola, Dave Stewart, please release this one as a print someday. It’s so starkly somber, adrift in white.)
Unlike Hellboy: The First 20 Years, this isn’t a book focused on the Hellboy Universe in general, but more strictly on “Hellboy” specifically. Outside of “Hellboy” and “Hellboy in Hell,” there are a handful of “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.” covers by Mike Mignola, and a pair of covers from the last arc of “B.P.R.D.: The Devil You Know,” but that’s it. The book benefits from this specificity, being able to give a very thorough presentation of the covers. I can count on two hands the covers that I felt were missing. Considering the twenty-five-year period this book spans, it feels incredibly complete and Mignola’s covers have never looked better.
But, y’know, as much as this is a book about Mike Mignola’s work, it’s also about Dave Stewart’s. As I said before, in the collections we rarely get to see these covers in color, so it’s impossible to talk about how jaw-droppingly beautiful this book is without discussing Stewart. From roughly 1997 onward, virtually every cover in this collection is colored by Stewart, and my god, it’s a tour de force. As Dave Stewart points out in his introduction, Mignola draws in such a way that the colors must finish the art. The colors aren’t merely a plus on top of an already finished piece—there are aspects of them that only come to life when Stewart adds color. (Look at Mignola’s covers for “Hellboy: Darkness Calls” without color and compare them here. Stewart’s contribution there was huge.)
Continued belowThere’s something so exciting too about having a book that spans such a long period of time. In 180-ish pages we get to explore the collaboration and growth of these two artists. It’s often easy to forget that these covers are the work of two people; they work in such perfect unison it feels like they’ve been drawn from one singular vision, especially by the time you get to ‘The Wild Hunt’ trilogy covers and “Hellboy in Hell.”
I should point out, like Hellboy: The First 20 Years before it, this is strictly an art book. Don’t expect any commentary from the artists beyond the introduction and foreword. Aside from page numbers, this book is text free with only an index in the back to identify the pieces. This isn’t The Art of Hellboy – Volume 2 and it isn’t meant to be.
While this is an excellent book on its own, personally I think it works even better as a companion volume to Hellboy: The First 20 Years. The two share the same book design and sit nicely together. With luck, in five more years we’ll get another anniversary volume to join them. Honestly, there’s a wealth of material in the Hellboy Universe. Dark Horse could fill two volumes with “B.P.R.D.” covers alone… Hmm, I shouldn’t start down this road. I’ll find myself wishing for too many books that don’t actually exist.
But that’s a big part of the pleasure of Hellboy: 25 Years of Covers—it’s wish fulfillment, plain and simple. This is a book I’ll proudly display on my bookshelf and take down to read often.
