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September 2004
Last month I said that I'd give you the scoop on Dark Horse's new monthly Conan series, and I will. But first I got me a confession to make. Y'see, I'm a real big fan of Frank Miller's serialized series Sin City, the brutal film noir comic book á la Mickey Spillane that Dark Horse Comics has been publishing for well over a decade now.
Nah, that's a lie. The word 'fan' is an abbreviation of the word 'fanatic' and that doesn't even begin to come close to the unhealthy obsessive attachment that I have to this ongoing series. How obsessive? Well, suffice to say that when each individual monthly installment of a new Sin City yarn comes out, I don't read them from month to month like any rational human being would do. Instead, I hoard them all in a pile, waiting six to nine months until the entire limited series is published and I have all of them. Then I make a large pot of strong black coffee and consecutively read each issue, one after the other, in one long continuous sitting.
Yeah, I know. But just think of the Kurtzian-Liddy willpower.
So you can just imagine my reaction back in 1994 when Miller made the following editorial comment in Part 2 of Sin City: The Big Fat Kill:
"And then there's Mike Mignola, author of Hellboy and the only guy who uses more black on his pages than I do. Mike's Hellboy is revealing itself as the best horror comic of our decade. It's creepy, it's fun, it's good and scary. It's beautifully illustrated. Go buy it. It'll make your life happier. It'll make the world a better place to live in."
And because I'm such a slavish Frank Miller fan, I did what any devout devotee would do: I promptly ignored his obvious in-house buddy-buddy hype job and immediately turned my attention to Part Three.
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My mistake. No, scratch that. My big mistake. Because here we are now, a full decade later, and with the hit Hellboy movie now out on DVD and available in every video store on the planet, it's my turn to 'fess up and publicly admit that I was grievously dead wrong: Mike Mignola's Hellboy comic is everything Miller said it was, and more.
Sure, I was used to seeing Mignola's drawings of Hellboy from time to time in a Dark Horse house ad: after all, it's kinda hard not to notice a seven foot, bright red, cloven-hoofed, trench coated, cigar smoking, Bronx speaking, Nazi-conjured Hellspawn turned All-American Nazi-pounding paranormal investigating demon-buster. But when I saw the Hellboy movie trailer and realized that they'd somehow managed to successfully translate that grim granite visage from comic book panel to widescreen panorama, I immediately sat up, took notice, and wondered: what have I been missing for the past ten years?
In a word, a whole heckuva lot.
Now as we all know, Nazis are the archetypal villain that everyone loves to hate. But I guarantee you that in the annals of pop culture there ain't nobody who hates Nazis more than Hellboy, and with good reason. Y'see, as alluded to in the above-noted paragraph, the Nazis hired no less a scourge than Rasputin himself to conjure up the child demon soon to be named as Hellboy from the nether regions for use as the Reich's ultimate weapon again the Allies.
Unfortunately for those grenade-garglin' hob-nailers, the Mad Monk miscalculated his distances to Hell and back, with the end result being that the young Hellboy was made manifest on Earth not in Ratzi Central as planned, but miles away smack dab in the middle of the Yanks themselves.
If you've seen the film, then you already know how Hellboy grows up to become an ace paranormal investigator for BPRD, the American government's Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. And while the film does an admirable job of transferring Mignola's vision, it can't hope to compete or convey the creepy feel of the original source material. To experience that dank delight, you have to dip into the deep end of the pool and read the comprehensive Hellboy collections that Dark Horse has assembled into five distinct chronological volumes.
Reading the first one, Hellboy: Seed Of Destruction, it's easy to see why Frank Miller took such a hankering to Mignola's creation: because for the most part, Hellboy dresses, acts, and speaks just like Miller's first and most loved principle Sin City character, the irascible and irrepressible Marv (who, parenthetically, will be played by Mickey Rourke in Robert Rodriguez's upcoming film adaptation). Even Hellboy's face and expressions echo Marv's somewhat, as does his use of a huge hand cannon that inevitably gets discharged with a deafening BLAM whenever things get out of control.
But whereas Marv's adversaries are the usual Basin City gaggle of gangs and congenital thugs, for the last 60 years Hellboy's BPRD duties have taken him around the world from haunted Irish castles to British drawing rooms to Himalayan peaks. The cool subtext to all this is that as he does battle with all manner of supernatural beings or pesky Nazis who just won't stay dead, and the myriad threads of each mystery unravel, Hellboy learns more and more about his cloudy past and shrouded destiny. This includes, perhaps most perplexingly of all, why he has a huge stone left hand instead of a normal one. Well, normal for Hellboy, anyway.
Of all the adventures of Hellboy that Dark Horse has published, my own particular favorite is Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm, which somehow manages to interweave the works of Lovecraft and Poe while also paying tribute to vintage to Saturday afternoon movie serials via the bloody pulps. In this case, our special guest hero is one other than that legendary two-fisted arch-enemy of evil, Lobster Johnson. Face it, with a name like Lobster Johnson, how can you not be just the slightest bit intrigued? Especially since his calling card is to burn the sign of a glowing lobster claw into the foreheads of those foes of freedom he has duly dispatched.
To fully appreciate every nuance of the Hellboy mythos, you really should read all five volumes in sequence, including the collection of short stories, if only because each story is an integral part of the larger story arc. Of course, you can always see the movie first and then go straight to the last volume and read Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm if you'd prefer. But just be forewarned that if you do take the easy way out and bypass volumes one through four, you'll be missing out on a ton of fun—not to mention more barmy FemiNazis than you can shake a stone fist at!
As for Dark Horse's new monthly Conan series, it'd be easy to compare it to the Roy Thomas – Barry Smith version that I talked about in this space last month. But there's really no comparison between the two, as even a cursory glance at the old and new versions of "The Frost Giant's Daughter" will ably attest.
In fact, it's not until you read the new Conan that you realize how different Marvel's old Conan series was to the spirit of Robert E. Howard's original stories. Personally, I consider Howard to be one of the great plain-speaking authors of our age, ranking right up there with Ian Fleming and Mickey Spillane. But there's no denying that Thomas' scripts transcended Howard by elevating the original stories to a heightened artistic level that the original pulp texts just didn't have. In this way, Thomas' educated words were a perfect compliment to Smith's ornate artwork. And while their version of Conan was as spiritually valid as Howard's, there's no denying that it had the aesthetics of a foreign film made by Merchant Ivory.
The new Conan, on the other hand, as created by writer Kurt Busiek and artists Cary Nord & Thomas Yeates is no high-falutin' art film. On the contrary, this Conan has a basic grittiness that's akin to a Roger Corman B-movie. By not being afraid to get their hands wet, Busiek and Nord have returned Conan to his brutally bloody pulp roots.
What gives the book its unique look is the fact that it's reproduced directly from Nord's pencils, and then computer colored. This gives every page a painted patina that's enough to strike a solid chord of realism but without compromising the rough realism.
To his everlasting credit, Smith's Conan was a totally unique vision that didn't owe anything to anyone else. But Busiek isn't afraid to cast his Conan in the shared visualization of Howard and Frank Frazetta, right down to the Moe Howard bowl haircut that Smith so tellingly eschewed. By adhering to the classic Frazetta physiognomy, Nord avoids going overbroad and portraying Conan as a Styled By Steroids mutated muscle mass, like Simon Bisley did when he hyper-illustrated Frazetta's Death Dealer comic for Verotik.
As for the text, Busiek's narrative has a widescreen sweeping grandeur to it that's evocative of David Lean at his best. Best of all, by putting all of the captions in old Remington typewritten form, you get the feeling that it's Robert E. Howard himself who's telling you each and every story—a small but effective trick that adds a real Thirties flavor to the proceedings.
You can pick it up now, or you can wait until the first group of issues are collected into trade paperback format. The choice is yours but, either way, you'll find that Dark Horse's new Conan series is the real deal. Not only is it faithful to the honest no-nonsense spirit and style of Robert E. Howard, it's the most authentic Howard experience you can have short of sitting down and reading one of REH's own trailblazing maverick works. In fact, Dark Horse's new Conan series will make you want to go back and read Howard's original short stories. And there's no higher compliment than that.
MEANWHILE: I only have enough room left to mention that Ann Nocenti, my all time favorite female comic book writer, is back with a new two-part series for DC called Trail Of The Gun. Illustrated by Bolland/Gulacy clone Ethan Van Sciver, this Batman tale is a very even-handed take on today's gun violence issue. If Nocenti's name doesn't ring a bell, go out of your way to read her sublime work on Marvel's Daredevil back in the late Eighties, where she was ably aided and abetted by John Romita Jr. on pencils and the great Al Williamson on inks. If ever a comic book series deserved to be collected into a deluxe prestige hardcover format by Marvel, it's Ann Nocenti's Daredevil.
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