Hellboy: Masks and Monsters

Just when you think they’ve run out of “Hellboy” comics to collect, a new volume shows up featuring stuff you either forgot about or didn’t know existed.  This isn’t a proper volume of the series, but a collection of the two crossover mini-series featuring Batman and Jack “Starman” Knight in one and Ghost in the other.  The “Batman/Starman/Hellboy” is an interesting beast in the way that it’s probably the only time since the initial Hellboy mini-series that creator Mike Mignola has turned the writing duties over to another creator — “Starman’s” James Robinson in this case.  It also handles the team-up in an interesting fashion as the first issue has Hellboy teaming up with Batman to foil some Nazi terrorists who capture Ted Knight.  Business in Gotham prevents Bats from pursuing them to the Amazon, and that’s when Jack shows up to accompany Hellboy, save his dad and stop a resurrected elder god.  This isn’t essential reading for fans of the characters, but Robinson captures their voices quite well and fashions a plot that all three characters feel right for.  Nice art, as always, from Mignola as well.

For “Hellboy/Ghost,” Mignola wrote the script and turned art duties over to Scott Benefiel (pencils) and Jasen Rodriguez (inks), who turn out to be pretty capable artists in their own right.  Now I didn’t know a thing about Ghost before I read this, but everything you need to know about the character for this story is contained within.  After Hellboy comes to Arcadia City to recruit her for the B.P.R.D., he finds himself caught up in the schemes of a masked man who manipulates Ghost into attacking the paranormal investigator.  It’s your standard “heroes fight, then team up” story, but things are enlivened by all the occultish weirdness that Mignola throws in.

If I have one complaint about this volume, it’s that there’s no commentary from Mignola on either of these stories.  In every volume of “Hellboy” he’ll usually talk about the genesis of a particular story and what changes it went through before publication.  I’d like to think that Hellboy’s team-ups with these company-owned characters had a more interesting genesis than “They’d probably sell really well,” but I guess we’ll never know.