We may not be getting a “Hellboy Winter Special” this year thanks to the chaos of the pandemic, but “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: Her Fatal Hour and The Sending” still feels like something special. Two stories in an extra-long issue seems like a good way to wrap up the year for the Hellboy Universe. Spoilers ahead!
Written by Mike MignolaCover by Tiernen Trevallion
Illustrated by Tiernen Trevallion
Colored by Dave Stewart
Lettered by Clem RobinsGone, but not forgotten!
Years after Hellboy’s ill-fated tangle with the Beast of Vargu, the Romani women who helped him need that debt repaid. Claimed by a demon in a romance gone wrong, the younger woman reaches out to Hellboy through the power of a familiar old puppet, and a supernatural confrontation full of magic and mayhem ensues! In a second short story, Hellboy goes head to head with a phantom who is looking for an object completely unknown to the living people the ghost is terrorizing.
Master of horror Mike Mignola is joined by artist extraordinaire Tiernen Trevallion and award-winning colorist Dave Stewart to bring you the follow-up to smash Hellboy hit “The Beast of Vargu”!
‘Her Fatal Hour’
The first story in the issue and the longer of the two, is touted as the follow-up to last year’s ‘The Beast of Vargu,’ but it ended up being an entirely different animal. I feel like Mike Mignola is deliberately playing with our expectations from the beginning, setting up the story as a follow-up to the strange and mysterious ‘Beast of Vargu,’ and giving it that ominous title, ‘Her Fatal Hour,’ sets our expectations up something tonally similar. And then Hellboy ends up naked in France.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of the ominous stuff in here—Nadya’s tale of how she became entangled with Ferko, for example—but this is all played off the brilliant bits of humor, like when Ferko shows up to claim Nadya and finds Hellboy wearing her kimono and immediately assumes she’s been unfaithful. Then there’s that fantastic fight juxtaposed with the puppet Hellboy back at Bureau headquarters, lying in Hellboy’s bed and shouting.
I have to hand it to Trevallion, he’s able to handle the wild swings in tone of this story fantastically. I can’t help but be reminded of ‘Dr. Carp’s Experiment,’ which set up for a very subtle haunted house sort of story, then launched into a sequence with time travel, a Victorian secret society, and a rampaging demon monkey—far from subtle, but the contrast gave it such energy. ‘Her Fatal Hour’ is delightfully silly, yet without undermining the seriousness of its stakes or breaking the mood.
There’s a panel on the last page, with Nadya sitting in her home, everything a mess, with a smoking corpse on the floor, and she’s simply enjoying a drink by the fireplace, finally free for the first time in ten years from that clock ticking down to her fatal hour. In all her details, she’s drawn with such subtlety and restraint, while everything around her is chaos. It captures that superb balancing act of the story in a single panel.
‘The Sending’
The second story hooked me pretty quickly, since it had Harry Middleton in it. This is a character we were first introduced to as a ghost in “Hellboy: Darkness Calls” and later we got to see him when he was alive and traveling with Hellboy and Professor Trevor Bruttenholm in “Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1953,” a time that Hellboy would look back on as some of the happiest of his life.
Harry immediately brings a different energy to the story. He’s not a Bureau agent, but he still brings with him all the experience of his years as a private paranormal investigator and as a member of the Eaton Ghost Club during his years at university with Trevor.
Harry in this story appears almost exactly the same as he does in ‘Darkness Calls,’ so it’s probably set a short while before his death, which sort of gives the whole thing a feeling of this being his last hurrah. Instead of this being a mission where everything goes wrong like so many other stories often are, Harry seems utterly in his element, enjoying every minute of it, especially when he finds some old books he likes. In fact, he immediately recognises the book the spirit is after as The Farnham Grimoire—a nice little nod to Harry and Trevor both being fanboys of Sir Edward Grey back in their university days.
Continued belowThe entire story has a laidback quality. Like when the spirit appears in the secret library and starts fighting with Hellboy, Harry doesn’t even raise an eyebrow. He trusts Hellboy to take care of things while he thumbs his way through the grimoire looking for answers. And at the end of the story, while our heroes share a pot of tea, it’s good to see Hellboy actually smiling. He had fun with this one, and you can tell this is one of those stories he’ll tell when people ask about Harry years later.
Trevallion’s take on Hellboy in this second story is especially good. When Hellboy’s fighting the spirit and its wriggling about, he gives us some great expressions from Hellboy, showing that this fight isn’t much of a struggle, more just a bit of nuisance. The spirit is so dramatic when it first appears and then kind of becomes a bit like a toddler chucking a tantrum.
In both these stories there’s a casual ease to everything. Mike Mignola approached both stories with a certain playfulness, and Tiernen Trevallion took that and ran with it. The two are such a natural fit, I expect we’ll be seeing more from Trevallion in the Hellboy Universe, and hopefully soon.
Final Verdict: 8 – The two tales are lighter than the usual “Hellboy” story, embracing the more humorous aspects of the series, and the extra pages make for an especially satisfying read.
