This is most a collection of short stories, with little impact on the larger universe. The stories are still wonderful and creepy though.

A creepy beasty that comes from a woman with her head kicked off:



This weird floating baby:



One thing that I really love about comic books is the 'sound words' (is there a better term for that?).



DIE! DIE! THUD THUD THUD

Wonderful.

I'm backdating these reviews a bit, but I think we've seen this before. And we'll certainly see it again.



Over and over we have cases of Hellboy carrying on a conversation with people and then surprise they were dead the whole time. Is it really happening? Is it all in his head? Is it a power he has and doesn't know about? Does he know? He never seems to react to it.

I DON'T KNOW!

It's still a bit of a surprise each time though... ( )

Not sure Corben and Russell stack up 100% to Mignola (Corben's a slightly better match in my opinion) but as always Hellboy is a weird, dark delight. ( )

A fun little collection of one-off stories. Not as good as the previous volume, but still enjoyable. ( )

Honestly, I was so-so about the first stories in this volume. The tale of the trolls and the sisters was fairly decent but didn't grab me nearly as much as the tale of Makoma.

That one was all kinds of awesome.

Mignola is doing some rather fantastic things with his research and retellings of old legends and myths. It's subtle and not subtle at all. It's giving credit even in the pages even as it co-opts the legends and turns Hellboy into something rather larger than life.

It's not something I could even see during the read, even. It only hit me after the fact.

Rather than getting long story arcs like I'm used to and how I seem to prefer them, I'm getting some truly excellent episodics here that remind me wonderfully of Gaiman, but not. Mignola is truly doing his own thing and I appreciate it by leaps and bounds. :) ( )

I had forgotten how much I loved the Hellboy books; the myths and the folklore, the dark atmosphere, the silent pages that tell the story better than any number of speech-balloons ever could, the joy of roaming through lost worlds. ( )