Hellboy: Wake the Devil

A lot goes on between the lines in these comics, giving us a history largely unseen and mostly just implied.

Fortunately, it also relies on so many occult sources and mysteries and legends and mythologies and old gods that it's pretty cool just to sit back and see where Hecate or the Sumerian head honcho An or where Rasputin takes us.

Murder mysteries aside, of course, it's great to see the bird women and the dead rise and getting to see a whole damn castle blow up. It's fun for all the kiddies!

But for me, a special place will always lay in my heart for Baba Yaga. Bless her bullet-ridden face.

This comic is "special".

Volume 2 picks up where volume 1 left off. Defrosted WW2 Nazis are striving to build their "vampir sturm" army, but they need resources to build it and Vladimir Giurescu to finish the job. While the resource problem is quickly solved, ol' Vlad's been dead since the war and his body is hard to find. A year later, Hellboy and his fellow field agents from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (I didn't realize it was located so close to home. I should see if they're hiring.) are sent to Romania to investigate.

The artwork is much like the first volume with lots of black ink: shadows and brooding darkness. Mignola is quite capable of evoking emotion and story out of the gloomier colors in his palette without seeming drab or dull.

Here show more in volume 2, Mignola takes over the writing duties and improves the storyline. There's a lot more dialogue and multiple POVs. There is quite a bit of infodumping up front, but it's done in the form of a BPRD briefing. The one thing I would've liked to have seen is more interaction between Hellboy and his co-workers. While on assignment, he's told that he has to go solo in order to cover more ground (not enough agents to go around) so most of the volume is him alone. There are a couple of conversations that teased at deeper connections which will hopefully be explored more in detail later.

As for our intrepid hero, Mignola brings out some of his charm during and between fights with his foes. He refuses to be anyone's pawn and will gladly clobber anyone who would have him be otherwise. Not only do we get more details on Hellboy's origin and purpose, but we get more insight into the villains in this tale. Sure they still like to monologue a lot, but this time they also carry on conversations with each other over friendship, faith in the Master, trust, and love. Still, one of my favorite lines comes from a resurrected Nazi general's disembodied head in a jar:

"Think. Why burn down the world when we can be its masters?"

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"Lady, I was gonna cut you some slack, 'cause you're a major mythological figure but now you've just gone nuts!" -Hellboy to Hecate

Here we have the second series of Hellboy stories, and it's just as fantastic as the first. Mignola mixes classic vampire lore, greek, norse, and russian mythologies, a bit of fairy, demonic power struggles, and of course more Nazis into a tale that gives more of Hellboy's origins while still allowing for more to be revealed in future volumes. This story finishes the major confrontation between Hellboy and the man who brought him to Earth, Rasputin (who isn't named in Seed of Destruction, but his identity is hinted at when he talks about being shot, stabbed, poisoned, and left in a river to die), and his show more Ragna Rok team of Nazi occultists. This time the whole thing kicks off with a death in New York which leads to a vampire clearly inspired by Dracula. Hellboy's going to find out much more than he ever wanted to know about himself while fighting off vampires, harpies, Rasputin, treacherous technology, and the goddess Hecate. All in a day's work.

What I love about Hellboy as a character is how unimpressed he is by all the crazy supernatural things that happen in his life (of course, being a demon, that sort of make sense). He's got a job to do and often, gods and monsters get in his way, but he's not going to let that stop him from getting the job done.

We also get to meet some new characters such as Kate Corrigan (I love Kate), and a homunculus to be named later.

I think this is my favorite full-length Hellboy story. show less

This may contain spoilers, but I'm not really sure, which is why I'm not hiding my review.

Like I suspected Hellboy Vol. 2 is better then Vol. 1. Mignola expanded is fascinating world, and has even brought in some important character development.
I liked the whole fighting Vampire part of the story that was introduced, but it felt like midway through they decided Vampires were too cliche and they should find a different monster for Hellboy to fight. That is probably the only thing that really bothered me about the story. Yet, I think the monsters in this story were more of a background element, and this Vol. was all about furthering the plot and bring in the much needed characterization.

This trade paperback collects the five issues of Hellboy: Wake the Dead, along with a new epilogue written specifically for this collection.

Note: This review features plot spoilers -- read at your own risk. I will provide a brief overview of each of the collection’s sections.

Part One: Sets up the five-part mystery collected in this edition. The cabal of Nazis serving Rasputin who summoned Hellboy to Earth in 1944 are back and BPRD has eceived word that they may have just gotten their hands on the body of a vampire with whom they were formerly allied with plans to mystically resuscitate him in his ancestral castle in Romania (don’t you wish you had one of those?). Needless to say, an alliance between a bunch of show more cryogenically-preserved Nazis bent on world domination and a vampire who can quickly spawn an army of other vampires would be a Very Bad Thing and BPRD decides to do something about it.

Part Two: Hellboy goes to Romania, along with two other teams of BPRD agents, and promptly gets into a fight with some of the Nazis, including one of their cyborg thugs. He also encounters a really old vampire (not the one he’s seeking, unfortunately) as well as some mythological creatures, the “Women of Thessaly” (what I would call harpies). Some great mood-setting and characterization of the various villains.

Part Three: Lots of good fighting Hellboy vs. monsters and one of the other BPRD teams discovers a human-sized homunculus. Liz Sherman foolishly(?) brings him to life and he promptly kills one of the team. We don’t see much more of this sub-plot in this volume, but this discovery will have profound implications for BPRD.

Part Four: Lots of major, major happenings. Hellboy battles the snake goddess Hecate. The castle blows up. Ilsa Hauptstein, hot leather-clad Nazi bitch from Hell, is transformed into…something…by Elizabeth Bahory’s old iron maiden delivered to Rasputin by Baba Yaga’s queer little servant. (Yes, read that last sentence again – only in a Hellboy book!) Hellboy is captured by Rasputin and left to die at a crossroads.

Part Five: Hellboy defeats the vampire and the iron maiden critter. Abe Sapien gets some mystical hints about his past/origins. Nazi infighting back in Norway effectively ends their threat (for now…you and I both know we’re going to see these guys again). I’d actually have liked a clearer resolution of what happened here. This was the weakest of the five parts because many of the various struggles ended kind of mystically and it was unclear exactly what happened in the real world.

Epilogue: All-new for this collection. It shows some interaction between Rasputin and Baba Yaga after he has been at least temporarily defeated by Hellboy. Poignant. Moody, sophisticated storytelling.

If there’s a flaw in this collection, it’s that there is simply too much going on here. This was really a six- or eight-part story that was crammed into five parts, and it shows. Because there are three BPRD teams sent to Romania, the action has to switch back and forth between them , with not enough attention focused on any of them. We’ll have to wait for more on the Liz/homunculus sub-plot for a later book, unfortunately. We also don’t see what becomes of the transformed Hauptstein/iron maiden and so forth. Just too much going on for a book this size, so some characters just kind of disappear and aren’t dealt with any more.

I highly recommend this collection, as it advances the Hellboy storyline and is full of occult Nazi-bashing. If you enjoyed the first Hellboy collection, you should certainly pick this one up as well. I give it 5 stars out of 5.

Review copyright 2010 J. Andrew Byers show less

A demon raised by humans thwarts another apocalypse (maybe?).

2/4 (Indifferent).

This is 20% exposition, and 50% villains monologuing vaguely about their Terrible Destiny. It would be nice if Hellboy were more than a supporting character in his own book.

(Jan. 2022)

Great story. About 1/5 of the artwork is fantastic, the rest is mediocre to terrible. The rest was exactly what I like about Hellboy, action, humour, good A plot story arc and more information about Hellboys back story woven organically into the tale.