“The setup of this is hilarious. We’ve got Koshchei and Hellboy in a bar in hell, and K. keeps telling Hellboy how he ended up in hell, and each step Hellboy is like, “Damn, K-Man, you crazy!”
Sometimes I like Hellboy because there’s just wacky shit out of fucking nowhere, and we never get any backstory or anything. Just some dude with green eyes who turns into a giant walks out of the mist, fights Hellboy, and then it’s over.
Part of the fun of Hellboy is that there’s all these characters who feel like they have a backstory, and they walk into the narrative to get dispatched right away.
BUT THEN, some OTHER times, I like these character backstories in Hellboy.
They work better than some others (*cough cough STAR WARS*) because they’re not overly cute and referential. You could read this having read NO Hellboy books, and you’d have very close to the same experience as someone who’s never Hell-ed a Boy.
I almost feel like…okay, this is a wacky theory. I’m sorry. But now it’s in my brain and it needs to come out somewhere. It’s like I have this huge fart of an idea, and I can’t hold it in, so I run into the other room, which happens to be Goodreads, and blast it all over. I’m so, so sorry, for this and also for that analogy.
I almost feel like Mike Mignola exists in a parallel universe, and he’s writing Hellboy in the 80’s/90’s, and he’s hosting frequent contests where you enter and then, if you win, you get put into a comic as a side character. This was a thing back then. And Mike was on a supercocainephetamine bender (ALTERNATE UNIVERSE MIKE, not our Mike) and just started like 50 of these contests at the same time. So now he’s got to make 50 semi-characters to make good on his promise of putting real kids into these comics, which get published in an alternate universe.
That’s really the most logical explanation for all the side characters in Hellboy. “