RRP £37.99 Lowest New Price £21.99

Dark Horse Number of pages: 278 Language: English (Original Language) Language: English (Unknown) Language: English (Published)

RRP: £37.99
The tiniest niggle on an otherwise flawless book...
Review date: 2008-10-19 Rating: 10 out of 10

Ahhh. Hellboy.
This book contains many of the Hellboy short stories (previously collected in the TPBS "The Chained Coffin" and "The Right Hand of Doom"), collected for the first time in chronolgical order.
If you've never read any Hellboy, you're in for a treat. Forget what you think you know from the movie. This isn't dumb hollywood action. This is beautiful, subtle storytelling, dripping with folklore and fairy tale, with the unique pacing that only Mike Mignola's sublime illustration can provide. Oh, and there's plenty of dumb action too...
Some of my favourite Hellboy stories are in here, from the dark gothic werewolf tale "The wolves of St August", to the absurd fan favourite "Heads" to mention just two.
My only critism of this beautiful book... why, oh why did they not include all of the front covers?!?! The first library edition had the covers for all the issues (admittedly in frustrating black and grey), and I've got to say, this is one of my big pet peeves with TPBs. I want to see the whole cover for each individual issue, as it was released, with the logo, the date, the price, everything, and in colour. Mike Mignola rarely draws these days, so it'd be great to have all the differnet covers, trade covers and variants collected. Oh well, maybe they'll release them all as a separate book or something.
But anyway, I love Hellboy. You should too.