Mike Mignola has said goodbye to his most famous instauration ( at leastfor now ) . Today , the concluding issue of Hellboy in Hell was released , and there ’s no last victory among its pages , no final gruelling battle . It just terminate . In an age of gamy - spectacle comic books , disgraceful events , and massive scale leaf , there ’s something incredibly knock-down about that .
If you ’ve not been following along with Hellboy in Hell , Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart ’s intermittently expel 10 part miniseries has seen everyone ’s favourite comic Word unholy paranormal agent , unsurprisingly , in Hell . Hellboy die at the oddment of Hellboy : The Fury in 2011 , permanently .
Since then , he ’s been meander the afterlife , having risky venture and campaign demons . But above all , Hellboy in Hell has been about the banker’s acceptance of endings , that at some point it ’s time to pillow and for a narrative to come to its close . No matter what Hellboy does , no matter how he tries to see the afterlife as a new beginning , it ’s just an filename extension of his end . His lifespan as he know it , for all its hardships , is done . He ’s wasting away . There ’s no going back .
But for the most part , Hellboy spend much of Hellboy in Hell still doing what he always did — fighting demons andprotecting humanity from their dark plans . Mignola had , originally , designate to keep the series going , with one - off adventures of Hellboy roaming around the barren barren of Hell — alien and empty and flaky , and unlike any sort of expected Hell , as Mignola load his immense artist endowment — but when plans changed , there was a bit of a gear shift in Hellboy in Hell ’s ethos . What if this was n’t a fresh start ? What happen when the job is done , and the lords of Hell are drained ? affair finish . When there is no more for Hellboy to do , he has to bear that it ’s prison term to take a breather .
In many path the “ veridical ” conclusion of Hellboy in Hell came in its penult matter , in which Hellboy has a conversation with his demonic ex-husband - wife ( they got get hitched with , she adjudicate to kill him on the honeymoon , it ’s a long history ) while pinned to a tree . It ’s where the fibre speaks his last words , and it ’s where he manages to accept some form of resolution to his job .
Hellboy tells the ogre he never wanted to accept the legacy given to him as the Logos of Azazel — it ’s what he spend his whole life sentence on Earth refuting , fighting back against his own kind and his position in their rank . But his former married woman differentiate him that the only way he can really traverse that destiny is to have go of his previous sprightliness . That the only rest he can get will be at the ending of it all , instead of always rail in against it , bewilder doing the same thing he ’s always done . “ You need to start over ? You want a fresh life ? ” she asks him . “ First you have to stop the old one . ”
And that ’s what we see in Hellboy in Hell # 10 . It ’s mere , and stark , and despite some epic mo — empty panorama of the barren Hell , in full maximize Mignola ’s trademark use of phantom to overwhelm the reader with a sense of vanity , or a lavish chronological succession of pages of silent action as Hellboy destroys Beezelbub ’s stronghold — it ’s the topic ’s uneventfulness that makes it melancholy and beautiful .
There ’s no flash , and the reader experiences these moment ( the last boss fight of Hellboy ’s pursuit if you will ) alien and distanced from the character . The events are recount to us not by Hellboy , but a lonely demon who witnessed the carnage from a length , which emphasize the vanity of it all . This is n’t some grand fight , it ’s just … the remainder . There is no real meaning to it other than its finality .
But this is not the oddment of the comic ; or else Mignola takes both us and Hellboy on one last , silent trip throughout Hell , discharge of the damned soulfulness there and the demons Hellboy has vanquished . There ’s no word , just the artwork , and yet there ’s something crushingly heartbreaking about Hellboy cutting a lonely figure in the huge barrenness of it all . But it ’s that excited resonance truly comes into the for in the final pages , in which Hellboy finds a strange little street corner of Hell to settle down in , a recess that suspiciously seem like an English countryhouse . We see him wander inside , no sound or words ( keep for recital calling back to his first appearance on Earth as a young devil ) , as Hellboy is engulfed in the brightness given by three geometric shapes , reach his net rest period .
The form themselves have hugely emblematic meaning for Hellboy fans — and they absolutely summarise the beauty of this ending . The shapes come from a scant storey Mignola wrote with his then - seven - year - old - daughter Katie call “ The Magician and the Snake . ” you’re able to read the whole thinghere on io9 , by the way , and it ’s definitely worth doing so .
https://gizmodo.com/this-comic-by-mike-mignola-and-his-daughter-is-the-most-5604593
“ The Magician and the Snake ” was , like Hellboy in Hell , a mediation on accepting the end — the titular Magician is dying but accept that his time is over ( unlike his slithering companion ) , and passes jubilantly knowing he was loved . The same can be said of Hellboy , except that his ending is not dying . He ’s already been through that . Instead , it ’s something not many superheroes really get in comics these days : long , only rest .
There could always be more Hellboy — in fact , there will be , as Dark Horse carries on with the Hellboy and the BRPD prequel series exploring the character ’s former Clarence Shepard Day Jr. . But in the here and now , a comic book image has laid his grinder to rest . Despite the equivocalness of it , all the interpretations that you could wring out of these last pages , there ’s a gumption of permanency here in a way that is rarely tangibly feel in comics , where there is always another news report to tell , another serial to quetch off , another death to loosen .
Sometimes , things just cease . No explosions , no heroic words , no final huzzah . For a story that has focused on accepting the inevitableness of the Washington - E - goal , it ’s perfect that Mike Mignola says goodbye to Hellboy with the strait of silence .
ComicsHellboyMike Mignola
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