Artist Alison Sampson joins the Hellboy Universe in “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1957—Fearful Symmetry.” It’s a tale that’s both different from what we’re used to seeing with this series, while also containing elements that are key to the series’ appeal. I wanted to do a proper deep dive into this issue, so it’s packed full of spoilers.
Written by Mike Mignola and Chris RobersonCover by Laurence Campbell
Illustrated by Alison Sampson
Colored by Lee Loughridge
Lettered by Clem RobinsWhen Hellboy is called to India to investigate a rash of mysterious animal attacks, he is reunited with a familiar face. Together they search for the strange beast terrorizing a small village, but the mystery—and the myth behind it—runs deeper than they thought.
I’ve missed this series. I don’t mean “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.,” as we still get issues of that pretty regularly, I mean the ‘19––’ titles. And I have a couple of reasons for that. Firstly, the long-running story involving the Occult Cold War. (This story cycle still doesn’t have an official title just yet, but this is what Chris Roberson calls it, so until there is an official title, this is what we’ll be calling it too.) While not exactly a cliffhanger, ‘1956’ ended on an ominous note that begs for more and, admittedly, I’m impatient for the next step.
Secondly, as impatient as I am, I’m not so impatient that I can’t appreciate what the ‘1957’ titles are doing. We get to slow down and spend time with the characters in standalone stories, and while the other “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.” issues do this too, they tend to focus on Hellboy to the point that they really are just regular “Hellboy” stories with a slightly longer title. Whereas the Occult Cold War–era stories dig into the surrounding cast more, with each issue of ‘1957’ showcasing a different B.P.R.D. agent in the field. And I love this aspect. I think the Occult Cold War material works best when it doesn’t center Hellboy as much but just makes him a member of the team. Each issue of ‘1957’ tells us something about the characters, not just the paranormal things they encounter.
So in that respect, ‘1957—Fearful Symmetry’ is a bit of a departure since Hellboy is the only Bureau agent in the story, but it’s also not at all a departure because he’s teamed with Virginia (Ginny) Payne, who might as well be a Bureau agent and frankly, I would not be surprised if she either becomes one or works with the Bureau again in the future. For those not familiar, Ginny is one of Hellboy’s childhood friends. The two met during the summer of 1950 in a short prose story, “The Other Side of Summer,” collected in Hellboy: An Assortment of Horrors. Hellboy is only seven in the tale, but growing up fast, so he already seems much older. That said, he feels the need to act more mature around Ginny, who is nearly ten years his senior. She introduced Hellboy to a series of books about Sarah Jewell—a genuinely great moment because both of them clearly have a passion for paranormal investigation. I mean, Hellboy casually mentions that he loves Jules de Grandin stories. This matters because it means that Hellboy didn’t just become a paranormal investigator because he was pushed into it or he felt there was nothing else he could do. He’s genuinely interested, and this shared interest is what sparks his friendship with Ginny.
This was what I was most looking forward to going into ‘Fearful Symmetry,’ seeing these two paired up again. It may seem a strange thing to say, but I liked when the story stopped and the two just spent time together. There’s a sequence where the two sit on the bonnet of their jeep and wait, and as they wait, they catch up. It’s not the kind of catch-up where they simply say what they’ve been doing the past seven years—it’s filled with lines that reveal motivation and show the spirit of the person speaking them. Ginny talks about her studies, but this reveals her restlessness, her drive to travel, to see more. She cannot be satisfied purely with the academic side of things. And this is where Alison Sampson’s art shines too. There’s a moment when Ginny lies back on the bonnet and above her head all is black except for the speech balloons. And as she speaks, the next panel conjures what she’d like to see as she explores the world, and then in the next panel we see Hellboy and he’s not just listening, he’s in the places she’s conjured. It is such a beautiful way to bring a conversation to life, to show shared interest, to demonstrate a connection visually. We can see what Ginny is passionate about because the panels light up. ‘Fearful Symmetry’ takes what’s unique about the Occult Cold War stories and showcases it beautifully here.
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As for the paranormal aspect, I like Roberson’s choices with what to show and not show. All the way back in 1994’s “Hellboy: The Wolves of Saint August,” there’s a moment when Hellboy arrives at the scene of a particularly nasty massacre and comments on other incidents like it. Keep in mind, this is him talking about over fifty years of paranormal investigating, these are the ones that stuck in his head as the really bad ones. One of those was India, 1957, and that’s what ‘Fearful Symmetry’ is about. To be clear, ‘The Wolves of Saint August’ wasn’t laying the groundwork for a future story that had to be told—it’s a throwaway mention, but it is a mention that is constructed to establish tone and stakes. So if Mike Mignola and his fellow creators ever decide to tell this story, that aspect needs to be preserved so as not to undermine the purpose of the reference in ‘The Wolves of Saint August.’
And I think Roberson was wise to side-step this aspect. ‘Fearful Symmetry’ tells us there have been massacres, but it doesn’t show them. The massacres that we conjured in our heads remain in our heads. The suggestion is all we need. The tone is preserved. I say this because this isn’t the first time the Hellboy Universe has done this (not by long shot) and in one particular case, the tone changed and it broke the original moment. In “Hellboy: Box Full of Evil,” Abe Sapien is badly injured; it’s a grim moment, and Hellboy looks back on the nearly twenty years he’s known Abe and picks a memory of him being thrown by the Ogopogo onto sharp rocks. That’s what jumps to mind for him when he sees Abe grievously injured. However, when the Ogopogo story was finally told, the moment was played lightly, and it broke the somber mood of ‘Box Full of Evil.’
The interplay between ‘The Wolves of Saint August’ and ‘Fearful Symmetry’ comes down to more than just seeing or not seeing the massacres. The tone of the paranormal threat throughout ‘Fearful Symmetry’ plays with this connection too, but in a more indirect manner. The tigers in this story are genuinely unsettling and that bleeds into how our mind’s eye envisions the massacres. Sampson draws the tigers with these wild eyes that aren’t catlike, but they aren’t exactly human either—maybe like a human in a frenzied state, with way too much of the sclera showing and the iris and pupils small but focused. The fur changes too, taking on a bristle-like quality—a contrast that becomes especially pronounced when the tigers return to normal and their fur looks soft and lays flat against their body again. It’s a design that suggests a particularly horrific form killing.
And finally, this is a story with tragedy at its heart. When Hellboy learns what’s behind the attacks, about a man that unintentionally killed his neighbors, it’s not hard to imagine why this investigation would still stick in Hellboy’s head fifty years later.
In terms of art, I should mention that Sampson’s Hellboy feels a bit awkward. He doesn’t have his familiar bullet-shaped silhouette, his stone hand sits too high, which makes it feel like it’s lacking weight, and some of his features are too human-like. This last point is something that’s often tricky for artists with a more realistic style—Adam Hughes has even said how difficult he finds it adapting Hellboy’s design to his style, and feels there are times he didn’t quite pull it off. That said, this wasn’t something that got in the way of my enjoyment of the story beyond the first few pages, and a big part of that is because I like the rhythms of Sampson’s storytelling. That and her drawing style feels uneasy, and that uneasiness works for the tone of ‘Fearful Symmetry.’ In one scene, during an encounter with a tiger, the background drops away and we get Hellboy and the tiger flailing against flat color. There’s little sense of the way the fight unfolds, instead it feels unmoored, dreamlike (or rather nightmare-like). If you want to follow every moment of the fight, this sort of action isn’t going to work for you, but if you want to appreciate the twisted, unnatural form of the tiger and how wrong it is, it really works. Yes, fighting happens, but the fighting isn’t what the scene is about.
Continued belowIn terms of colors, I have the same problems with Lee Loughridge’s colors that I have had before. He doesn’t engage with the color language of the Hellboy Universe. That doesn’t hurt this story though, and his approach to daylight scenes makes me conscious of the burning sun in India. It’s far more motivated here than it was in “The British Paranormal Society: Time Out of Mind,” where the daylight quality was nothing like Britain. For me, his colors augment what Sampson is doing very effectively. However, there was one moment when I felt like he wasn’t coloring with the story beat of the panel in mind.
The point of the panel is that we see lights in the windows, so we should see light upsetting the darkness. Without Hellboy’s dialogue, the purpose of this panel does not read. We only notice the few lit windows because the dialogue makes us look for it. I would have liked to have seen more windows lit and some of that light spilling out into the street to strongly indicate a sense of disturbance. This is overall a minor issue—the dialogue still drives the point home—but I’m used to color in the Hellboy Universe being extremely story focused.
The only other thing that hit the wrong note for me was after the first fight with a tiger. A man gets badly attacked, and we see Ginny attending to him in the background of a panel during the fight, but nothing more afterward. I wish we’d had an extra page or two, just to show Hellboy mentally putting the paranormal mystery on a shelf for a moment and focusing his attention on the injured man. I wanted to see how witnessing this attack affected Ginny, and I wanted to see Hellboy attend to her in the wake of this violence. It’s not plot important, but it does affect the tone, and not having these beats makes Hellboy and Ginny feel disaffected in the following pages. It’s one of those occasions where it jolted me out of the story for a moment. That said, this issue is not the usual twenty-pager we’ve been getting lately, but rather twenty-two, so it’s already working with more elbow room. Those two pages make a difference, especially in making the connection between Ginny and Hellboy feel authentic. That stuff takes time and time is space, and the story is stronger for prioritizing that aspect.
After a long absence, it’s good to have the Occult Cold War era stories back.
Final Verdict: 7.5 – ‘Fearful Symmetry’ is very different in terms of the art, but familiar in terms of the writing, and together this creates an atmosphere that’s very appropriate for the tale. It excels in its character work and in the unsettling. Sampson’s approach to the tigers, where they are just the right amount of wrong, was particularly effective, and continued to live in my head for a few days after I read the issue.
