Hellboy: Conqueror Worm

Part two of my Halloween read, and as good as part one was, this was even better.

This volume contains the one story and there's a lot to it. The Nazis are back, and one of their experiments from the war is coming to fruition sixty years later. Hellboy and the homunculus—they named it Roger—are sent to a spooky castle somewhere high up in the Austrian Alps where said experiment was conducted and thought to be destroyed by a military expedition led by some vigilante named Lobster Johnson. Much smashing occurs.

This collection has everything: poetry samples from Poe, Lovecraftian nightmares, restless spirits of the damned, hordes of ghoulish creations, undead minions, transmogrified soldiers, subterranean lairs with steampunk machinery, show more and a Nazi mad scientist. What else could you want?

Ok, there's more. Hellboy has his usual witty responses to the situations he stumbles into. It's his coping mechanism. Loyalty and trust are two of his strongest traits. He's expects underhanded behavior from strangers and outright villains, but the BPRD does something to royally piss him off, and he's forced to reconsider his relationship with them.

Roger the homunculus gets plenty of screen time. There's some self-reflection on what he is and how he fits into this modern world, centuries after his creation.

This is probably my favorite of the Hellboy volumes that I've read so far. 4.5 stars rounded up to 5. show less

Oddly enough, or perhaps not oddly at all, I'm really enjoying Hellboy. At first it was just an intellectual enjoyment, getting all into the conspiracy stuff and the metaphysics and the magic as well as the history, but now I'm just rocking to the stories being told.

It's filled with gentle reveals, perhaps no more than hints, and we've got a grand sweep of untold history, but all these snippets are pure gold.

I like Lobster Johnson and Roger a lot. Alien intelligences and cthuhlu entities? Even more. :)

I'm almost sad that I'm reading this as a buddy-read of one volume per month. I kinda want to rip through these now. I'm hooked.

God damn Nazi-Frankenstein monkey! You don't know when to quit!

I love these books.



They're the perfect blend of hilarious and creepy.



And they do a good job of hinting at just what is it that makes someone a person?



Plus, you have one of the craziest core ideas for a plotline yet. There are spectral entities out in that want to come down, but they need a body to do so. How, may you ask?



Yup.

Also: Hellboy spends a lot of time falling and crashing through things. What in the world would it take to actually kill him?

Roger's back! I love Roger.

After two volumes of (mostly) unrelated shorts, this got us back into the ongoing plot, that being the (eventual?) freeing of the Ogdru Jahad, aka the dragons that are going to bring about the end of the world.

There's a lot of mystery here, with enough loose ends tied up to make it satisfying, but not so many questions answered that it becomes too tidy. Who was the helpful alien? What the hell was going on with ghost Lobster Johnson? Is this really the end of Rasputin?

An enjoyable read, start to finish.

This trade paperback collects the four-issue Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm series, rather than a collection of shorter adventures as some of the past trade paperbacks have done.

Note: This review features mild plot spoilers -- read at your own risk.

There are really three protagonists here, all of whom play pivotal roles: Hellboy, Roger the Homunculus, and ‘30s pulp action hero Lobster Johnson, who’s seen here – even in his spectral form – as a ruthless badass. Hellboy and Roger are sent out to a ruined castle to deal with a returning Nazi space capsule that is returning to Earth after a sixty-year hiatus. The two eventually encounter Lobster Johnson, who, as it turns out, was killed at the castle in 1939 when he tried to stop the show more Nazi rocket from being launched.

The rocket was sent into space with the dead body of a Nazi scientist on board so that it could be inhabited by one of the evil spirits of the void with whom the Nazis had made contact.

One of the last of the old-school Nazi occultists, Herman von Klempt, now just a head in a jar, is on hand with his granddaughter, some neo-Nazi minions, and his next-generation cyborg gorilla to usher in the apocalypse that this void spirit is sure to bring. Sure enough, it takes the form of a gigantic worm/caterpillar/thing that grows as it consumes life. Our heroes only just manage to stop this beast from destroying all life on Earth.

This is another excellent installment in the Hellboy series and I highly recommend it. 5 stars out of 5.

Review copyright 2010 J. Andrew Byers show less

The introduction to Lobster Johnson, which occurs here as part of his final adventure, is one of the many things that makes this story great. I think this was actually the first Hellboy story I read. Dark Horse had yet to release numbered collections of trades at the time, and this one just piqued my curiosity. It's got everything that makes Hellboy great; Nazis, Lovecraftian terrors from deep space, pulp action, and Roger the Homunculus.

Also, I've always been a fan of Herman Von Klempt as a villain. Who doesn't love a floating head in a jar? Nice to see him take the reins as the lead villain in this piece.

There are themes and concepts that will return in later works featuring the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense, and those are show more some spin-off works that are worth checking out.

But here we have Hellboy in all his grandeur. This is why he's one of my favorite characters at the moment.

Boom! show less

Continuing to catch up on old Hellboy collections I read and never reviewed, this is a great continuation of the "main arc" with Hellboy starting to question why he's doing what he's doing (a nice build on the events of Right Hand of Doom), Lobster Johnson turning up, and a creepy plot by everyone's favorite floating head. Great work by Mignola as always.