Feature: Hellboy: The Bones of Giants #4 Reviews 

Mignolaversity: “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #4

By and | February 16th, 2022
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“Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #4 takes this miniseries to its most otherworldly stage, as Hellboy and his band of dwarves take on Thrym and his cohorts in Utgard. Be warned, this is a spoiler-filled review.

Written by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden
Illustrated by Matt Smith
Colored by Chris O’Halloran
Lettered by Clem Robins

Hellboy and the others make their way to the ghost city of Utgard in search of Thrym. But there’s more than one giant standing between the B.P.R.D. and saving the world. Dwarves, Valkyries, and the Norse god of Thunder himself come together for the ultimate confrontation to close out this stunner of a series!

Mark Tweedale: By the end of the last issue, Hellboy, Abe, and Pernilla had truly moved from one world to another as they arrived at Utgard. Right off the bat, I have to praise Matt Smith’s work here. His art brings an eerie gravitas to the location, heightened by the contrast to all the ordinary locations of the rest of the miniseries. Up till now, all the major confrontations have taken place in locations that we recognize from our world, and Smith emphasizes that contrast as much as possible.

James Dowling: It does feel like a very resonant intro sequence, with Hellboy and the team wandering into a realm where even the colors around them purely reflect Thyrm and his giants, their bright reds and soft greens are completely alien there, it’s beautiful to look at. I totally agree that by going completely otherworldly in this scene, Matt Smith’s art gets to flourish, he’s not working around any artifice or obstacle, just a world of his imagination filled with characters completely in his style and range.

Mark: It shows one of the advantages of comics. The novel, with its slower pacing, needs to address certain plot elements, like planning out how to approach Utgard. In the comic, it’s easier to frame this sequence in such a way that we skip that stuff, so the walk to Utgard focuses on the emotion of the scene instead. Given that this is sandwiched between all the moody stuff from the end of issue #3 and the finale, this is the heaviest stuff.

That and Christopher Golden uses it to show character. Hellboy is so Hellboy in this opening. He’s annoyed by how boxed in he is in his choices, and that manifests in a somber discussion about cutting off his right hand if he needs to, but it’s also paired with this:

Hellboy is indomitable. Still cracking jokes, even as he’s gearing up to fight a god.

James: Yeah, it’s a great example of how to use Hellboy as a passive protagonist, which is the role he’s usually at his best as. There’s this divide between the intense but abstracted stakes of the whole conflict, and the very personal dilemma it brings Hellboy. On top of that, he’s consigned to the conflict, despite having a way out, since he’s so begrudgingly sure he’s going to help them anyway. It’s that classic working man charm that’s perfect when he’s as outside of his element as this. The fact that Golden hits the nail on the head so perfectly shows how good he is with the character.

Mark: That’s a good point. Hellboy does make a good passive protagonist. Whenever he has no choices, he becomes even more himself, as if to say, “Fine, I guess I have to do that thing, but you I won’t let you take who I am away from me.”

As an adaptation, issue #4 has the most difficult material to adapt to comics, since so much of the story occurs in Hellboy’s head. In the novel, Hellboy gets attacked very early on by Logi (who doesn’t show up in the comic), and it’s a particularly nasty fight. Hellboy is badly wounded, but by the time the fight is over, he’s practically healed thanks to his fast healing combined with Thor’s. It shows that Hellboy is in full god mode going into this final battle against Thrym. But in this encounter Hellboy also almost very nearly badly hurts Abe—Thor doesn’t recognize him as a friend and so sees him as a monster and attacks. So the tension going into the final battle isn’t “Will Hellboy beat Thrym?” but rather “How will Hellboy beat Thrym without being entirely consumed by the spirit of Thor?”

Continued below

The comic cannot do this to the same degree, not in the space that it has, so rather than pushing the conflict between Thor and Hellboy, Christopher Golden and Matt Smith have made it more about Hellboy and Thor working in concert as the issue progresses. Hellboy’s dialogue switches back and forth between his own and Thor’s, and we see images of Hellboy with the spirit of Thor, the two moving in unison.

Instead of going into the fight like a god, Hellboy ascends to a godlike state throughout the fight.

That’s not to say the conflict between Thor and Hellboy is entirely gone. There’s a conversation from the novel, where Hellboy talks about cutting off his right hand to free himself from Thor, that made it into the comic. With the condensed storytelling of the comic, this moment feels like it’s coming from Hellboy’s encounter with Garm, so it carries the emotional weight of that scene into this conversation—especially since there’s a punctuation panel of silence afterward, so the weight of this conversation sinks in.

James: I loved the comparison between Thor’s Hammer and the Right Hand of Doom, it really helped contextualise this story in the great overall arc Hellboy has grappling with his terrible destinies.

Mark:Plus, I liked this moment because it’s yet another scene with Abe checking in on him. I really like how this story brings out this side of Abe, the guy who keeps checking in on everyone.

James: I think this issue had the best social dynamic of the whole series, the cast gets thinned down and solidified and it leads to a very engaging and rhythmic style of dialogue. The first half of this issue is mostly a discussion of all the giant hunting to come, and the second half does exactly that. There’s nothing in this issue trying to surprise the reader, but it’s still charming as hell based on the characters bouncing off one another.

Mark: Something that I think really pushes the grade scale of this final conflict is the silent audience to it all. We’ve seen this sort of thing before in “Hellboy,” where Hellboy is fighting with Hecate and being watched by King Dagda and Sir Edward. Here, the hellboy and Thrym fight has an audience of Norse figures silently watching. It doesn’t change the plot, but it changes the atmosphere. And when paired with the whole Hellboy-and-Thor-working-in-concert thing, it takes what is essentially two guys beating the crap out of each other and makes it a clash of titans.

James: Yeah, I love how this book takes what’s essentially a romp through Norse mythology and places a greater emphasis on its place in the history of these conflicts, with them searching through the final remains of Ragnarök in view of the dead mythology, and in some ways preparing for their Ragna Rok to come. It’s why I loved the ending of this book; the aftermath is very contained and the intense emotion of it all is practically shrugged off. That’s the point of the conflict here, it’s contained in this whole other world and there isn’t really space for reflection once they escape it.

Mark: There is so much in the ending that’s unsaid, but still felt through the visuals. Like on the final page, every single panel has Hellboy walking away from Utgard. No looking over his shoulder, no stopping; the work is done and he does not want to think about it. Plus there’s that final line, which is such a ’80s and early ’90s Hellboy line, before he learnt too much about his destiny, back when he was able to shrug things off a lot easier. If this same story took place in the early 2000s, that final line wouldn’t work as well, or it would have to be delivered with a different cadence to work.

James: It’s such a charming moment, isn’t it? That’s probably my takeaway from this book as a part of Hellboy’s story; it’s him grappling with all the artifice and prophecy of an analogue hero, Thor in this case, and facing the weight of that before he goes through it all himself in the years to come. It feels especially interesting when putting next to “Hellboy: The Storm and the Fury” where he’s expected to take on the burden of Arthurian legend and then rejects it, once again taking on the mantle of another identity, while drawing himself closer again to Norse mythology with Mignola’s comparisons to Odin. Retroactively, it ends up feeling like it’s all informed by the burden he had here, as he changes the decisions he would have made now based on what he knows about his birth and destiny.

Continued below

Mark: Which makes “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” sound very heavy, but while it has this stuff running through it, it’s kept relatively light. There’s a moment in the novel with Hellboy ripping the tree out of Thrym’s abdomen, and seeing it as a comic, I can’t help but get flashbacks to “Hellboy: Almost Colossus.” It’s like a reverse version of that scene, and it brings the lightness of it to the page. ‘Almost Colossus’ also could’ve been very grim, but it has a playfulness to it. That’s at work here in ‘The Bones of Giants.’ And it feels like such a quintessential Hellboy moment.

From “Hellboy: Almost Colossus”
Story and art by Mike Mignola; colors by James Sinclair; letters by Pat Brosseau

James: Yeah, despite being surrounded by Thor’s world and speaking Thor’s words we’re still seeing some of the core Hellboy poking through. It’s like you said, he’s a hero who refuses to lose any of his identity when put under pressure.

Mark: In the novel, Hellboy goes into this conflict wearing a knitted jumper (or sweater if you’re in the US), which was made for him by his ex, Anastasia Bransfield. It gets ruined during the fight, but there’s a sense that he’s wearing it as a way to hold onto himself, to keep him anchored. It’s the sort of detail the comic couldn’t do, not without a lot of explaining, especially since we haven’t yet met Anastasia in the comics. But you still feel this struggle in the comic, and I think that’s because Golden very deliberately crafted these moments that are so Hellboy.

James: It obviously wasn’t feasible in this version of the story but I would have absolutely adored Hellboy fighting in a jumper, all of Smith’s alternate outfits for Hellboy and Abe have been so memorable.

Mark: They really have! It’s been such a joy to see how he’s used the costumes throughout this story.

I wanted to briefly talk about one of the casualties of the shorter comic: Pernilla’s purpose in the final conflict. Her expertise in Norse mythology acts as an invaluable tool in the novel, but as you can imagine, that’s gonna be a dialogue-heavy aspect of her character that this finale doesn’t have room for. Instead, the focus of her ending is on rescuing the remaining villagers. And this is where the comic makes a curious change—there are more surviving villagers. In the novel there were only three people left. It was fucking grim. Here, even though it means more people for Smith to draw, and wider panels to encompass them all, they went with a larger group of survivors.

It’s a way of keeping Abe and Pernilla’s ending relatively simple in terms of explaining what they’re doing and what their objectives are, but it also pushes the importance of what they’re doing too. The two of them get all those remaining survivors out alive.

James: It’s an interesting change but I think this sequence did the least for me overall, in terms of achievements for the story it feels like a fairly flat ‘doing the right thing’ moment that doesn’t cross over with everything else this ending is trying to communicate.

It sort of relegates Abe and Pernilla to a corner that isn’t saying much about them as characters and gives the book a way to pull them out of the giant fighting whenever the spotlight needs to shine solely on Hellboy. Still, in terms of frustrating sequences, it’s unobtrusive enough not to leave any real bad taste in my mouth.

Mark: It makes me hope we see Pernilla again someday. Like maybe a one-shot or something, where the Bureau calls her in as a consultant, just so we can see her shine in a way that shows if she hadn’t been there, everything would’ve gone south. The comic had so much already going on, there simply wasn’t room for that beat here. But, considering we spent so much time with her over the course of the story, I do feel that beat’s absence.

James: Yeah I really hope that this miniseries can open up a whole new section of stories in this great late ’80s lead up to the classic “Hellboy” stories. It’s got such a unique feeling to it, where all the pieces are there, and the future’s still echoing back, but the characters aren’t burdened with that yet. I’d love to see that same kind of treatment for Professor Bruttenholm and Liz Sherman in one of these great adventure series.

Continued below

Mark: Absolutely. And I think that’s the plan too. The ’80s especially, since it can have Hellboy, Abe, Liz, and Bruttenholm together, and build the family dynamic that in the comics we mainly get a sense of, but rarely see on the page.

Before we wrap up, I wanted to touch on Chris O’Halloran’s colors. During the final conflict, the power of Mjollnir is tied to yellow. Every surge of power changes the frosty blues to yellow. So when yellow is used when Mjollnir is not directly involved, we still make a connection there, associating it with the work Hellboy/Thor has done. So when the battle is done, the sky is yellow. When we look back at Utgard on the final page, the sky is blue, then it fades away, and when it’s gone, yet again the sky is yellow. It’s stuff like this that makes color feel like music to me. It’s not meant to be literal, but it creates associations that augment the mood.

Part of what makes this work is the way that this color language has been seeded since issue #1. I mean, just look at this panel from #1 when Hellboy first picks up Mjollnir.

James: That’s such a great undercurrent. It’s been easy to discount just how consistently great O’Halloran has been through this whole series, but he really is the consistent star of this issue. It’s especially impressive given how he’s expanded the visual language of each issue in the book, constantly working outwards from the Dave Stewart palette and building something incredibly memorable from off of that. “Hellboy: The Bones of Giants” #4 is exactly what I wanted from the end of this series, just a popcorn throwdown between heroes and giants, with some incredible thematic projections around the idea of Ragnarök, all rendered creatively by Smith and O’Halloran. I’d say this is a 9/10 for me.

Mark: Not gonna argue with that. A 9 it is.

Final Verdict: 9 – Like the novel before it, ‘The Bones of Giants’ is a “Hellboy” classic.


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James Dowling

James Dowling is probably the last person on Earth who enjoyed the film Real Steel. He has other weird opinions about Hellboy, CHVRCHES, Squirrel Girl and the disappearance of Harold Holt. Follow him @James_Dow1ing on Twitter if you want to argue about Hugh Jackman's best film to date.

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Mark Tweedale

Mark writes Haunted Trails, The Harrow County Observer, The Damned Speakeasy, and a bunch of stuff for Mignolaversity. An animator and an eternal Tintin fan, he spends his free time reading comics, listening to film scores, watching far too many video essays, and consuming the finest dark chocolates. You can find him on BlueSky.

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