Feature: Young Hellboy: Assault on Castle Death #4 Reviews 

Mignolaversity: “Young Hellboy: Assault on Castle Death” #4

By | February 1st, 2023
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It’s the final issue of “Young Hellboy: Assault on Castle Death,” so we’re going to take a look at what works, what doesn’t, and what we hope for the future of the series, because we definitely want more.

Cover by Matt Smith
Written by Mike Mignola and Thomas Sniegoski
Illustrated by Craig Rousseau
Colored by Chris O’Halloran
Lettered by Clem Robins

Still in the grips of a fever-induced hallucination, Hellboy (aka the Scarlet Crab), his dog Mac, and a friend straight out of pulp legend find themselves in the strange laboratory of Castle Death. While Hellboy is lost in his fantasy, the Brotherhood’s assassin finally closes in!

The second Young Hellboy series reaches its exciting conclusion! From Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and cowriter Tom Sniegoski, with art by Craig Rousseau and colors by Chris O’Halloran.

Format has been foremost in my mind lately when reading Mike Mignola’s books. In part this is because Dark Horse seems to be capping many of its miniseries to four issues, which I think has hurt some of Mignola’s books, especially those with a grander scope. But it’s also because the Hellboy Universe has expanded so much to tell so many different kinds of stories, and yet everything still comes out as miniseries, and not every genre works best in this format. More than ever, the Hellboy Universe needs to stop using the same playbook for every series. Not everything should be serialized; not everything should be capped at 80-ish pages; not everything should have chapters of equal length.

“Young Hellboy: Assault on Castle Death” is a story weakened by serialization. The wait between issues over-inflates their importance in a story that’s meant to just be a lighthearted fun romp. That’s not to say it doesn’t work as a four-issue miniseries—I think it manages the scale of its story so that it’s much better suited to four issues than other Mignola stories lately which have felt crammed-in or truncated—but a story this light is not something that sits in the reader’s mind in the gaps between issues. There is a sense of lost momentum when beginning a new issue.

However, with the series now finished, I sat down and read it all from the start in one sitting. And y’know, ‘Assault on Castle Death’ is much more suited to its collected form. Five months from now there will be a collection and from then on practically every new reader will read this story in one go. The collection is the experience readers will have with this story for years to come. And as a reading experience in one sitting, ‘Assault on Castle Death’ reads much, much better. A big part of this is that Thomas Sniegoski didn’t try to force a five or six-issue story into a four-issue miniseries. The ambition of this tale is well-suited to its length. The story is low-stakes fun, and in one reading, the stakes aren’t over inflated and the fun remains the primary focus while maintaining an appropriately fever-ish pace. Everything with Hellboy, Mac, and the Lobster works so well. I think Sniegoski chose to write for the collection, and it was the right choice because this story is far better suited to that format.

Matt Smith’s cover for the hardcover collection coming in June

Craig Rousseau, Chris O’Halloran, and Clem Robins are doing a lot of things that telegraph the back and forth of reality and Hellboy’s fever dream (which I’ve discussed in prior reviews), and the obvious stuff reads fine in singles, but the nuances read better all together.

When I got to the last few pages and Hellboy’s lying in bed with a smile on his face, I was reading the book smiling right along with him. Not only did the real Lobster actually make an appearance, but we got the Sky Devil show up too. (That said, I’m still hoping for a proper Sky Devil and the Lobster crossover someday. This feels like a teaser for that.)

I’m glad Samuel didn’t go the way of Dick Halloran in Kubrick’s version of The Shining. If Sneigoski does ever get to do a proper Lobster story, I kinda hope Samuel gets to make a cameo. And I hope he sticks around in “Young Hellboy” too. Hellboy needs a friend and Archie’s still back at the old base in New Mexico at this point (he doesn’t join the B.P.R.D. till 1948). It’s good for him to have someone that isn’t largely an authority figure like Professor Bruttenholm or Margaret. He fits in well with the lighter adventure of this story and him chatting with Hellboy was a nice way to wrap up that plotline. It lets Hellboy close out the story with a smile, which couldn’t really happen if it had been Professor Bruttenholm dismissing Hellboy’s nonsense or Margaret being focused on his fever.

Continued below

Brother Robert’s story, however, fell short for me. We were given all this backstory into how he was robbed of a childhood and raised by a cult, and only given the chance for a normal life as a disguise for a mission. But the story doesn’t engage with those elements beyond being flashbacks to show motivation. They don’t spark conflict. I was hoping that as someone who had been stripped of his innocence as a child, there would be some engagement from the character where he began to see Hellboy was just an innocent child too and he was now the figure attempting to strip that innocence away. Instead, he remains unchanged through to the end. It’s not bad, it’s functional, but his ending could’ve been something more compelling given the set-up.

And given that the Brothers of Desolation are clearly going to show up again, my hope is that next time they get to be something more complex. If this organization is going to be a long-running aspect of the series, it needs to develop some meat on its bones.

Like the previous issues, the best aspects of ‘Assault on Castle Death’ tend to be the little things. It’s difficult to say much about these as they speak for themselves, but they have a cumulative effect that makes it impossible not to enjoy this story.

C’mon, how could you not love that?

Final Verdict: 7.5. “Young Hellboy: Assault on Castle Death” is at its best when it’s fast paced and the energy is high, and there’s plenty of that in this final issue.


Before I leave you, I’d like to discuss a change in Mignolaversity for 2023. As of this coming March, I will have been writing reviews for Mignolaversity for a decade, and while it’s been fun in some ways, in others, it has been a frustration. I’m a natural tradewaiter, so reading these stories first in singles feels like I’m artificially diminishing my own enjoyment. In one of our Staff Resolutions for 2023 pieces, I even said I wanted to cut down on reading singles, and foremost on my mind was reading Mike Mignola’s books as collections again.

So I’m going to finish all the series we’re in the middle of, like “Hellboy in Love” and “Koshchei in Hell.” By April, everything should be wrapped up, and going forward I plan to write reviews for each story arc as the last issue comes out. My hope is that this new approach will let me write more thoughtful, less reactionary reviews. Of course, there are other reviewers on Multiversity Comics that would like to review Mignola’s books, so I don’t think reviews of single issues will entirely vanish either. At the very least there will always be one review for every story arc.

—Mark Tweedale


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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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