Hellboy: Weird Tales, Vol. 1

Mike Mignola's award-winning series Hellboy has been lauded as much by other artists as it has by award ceremonies and fans. Over the years, many of the best artists in the industry have asked if they could do a backup story, just to get a chance to play with the characters and worlds Mignola has created. As Dark Horse gears up for the release of the 2004 Hellboy motion picture, we present this lavish colection of these stories. One of the most popular features in recent Hellboy books has been the sketchbook section, so we've asked these stellar artists to let us present some of their behind the scenes work in this collection. Some of the best writers and artists in comics team up to present stories of giant bats, demon children, jet packs, haunted circuses, and rusted-out spaceships. Old-fashioned pulp fun featuring one of the greatest heroes of modern comics.

From Publishers Weekly

Mike Mignola's popular character Hellboy is headed toward the big screen, and Mignola's turned him over to an array of creators to produce short stories, collected in this volume. Hellboy is a devilish looking paranormal investigator with a sense of humor, and his adventures are infused with a spooky gothic horror, sarcastic wit and a sense of movie serial fun held over from the 1940s. Hellboy's basic concept is broad, allowing creators room to play with ghosts, demons, foreign landscapes and a well-designed character who lends himself to a multitude of interpretations from dead serious to wacky. The collection of 13 stories has no duds, and quite a few excellent pieces. Of the more successful ones, a few stand out. Bob Fingerman's hilarious slapstick version of Hellboy has him investigating a soda machine that ate his dollar. John Cassaday contributes a solemn and cinematic story about a ghostly circus that pays off with a dramatic ending. And Andi Watson tells a seemingly serious birthday story with a touching finale. Roger Langridge and Eric Powell keep things light, both contributing funny, lovingly rendered stories that treat Hellboy and the paranormal as fertile ground for jokes. This entertaining collection is accessible to even the Hellboy neophyte, and highly recommended for adventure comics lovers. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Hellboy is a big, red, basically humanoid demon with a lantern jaw, a Schwarzenegger build, a brick (maybe brimstone) right fist, two sawed-off horns on his forehead, a reptilian tail, and cloven-hoofed feet. The brainchild of artist-writer Mike Mignola, Hellboy is an agent of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense entrusted with tracking down and squelching ghosts, poltergeists, and other bumpers-in-the-night. Thanks to Mignola's visual flair, Hellboy has been so appealing that lots of other comics creators want to horn in on the act. Hence, the new comic Weird Tales, consisting of Hellboy capers writ and drawn by anyone but Mignola, the first four numbers of which make up this book. The word entertaining is an understatement for this stuff, which varies visually from UPI-cartoonish (i.e., like Mr. Magoo, Casper the Friendly Ghost, etc.) to delicately textured and toned black-and-white realism to alt-comics-looking minimalism to cursive, manga -ish abstraction. Humor and whimsy are constants in the writing, even, darkly, in the one story in which Hellboy is replaced by a human demon--Stalin. Ray OlsonCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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