This Horrific Life: Terrible Beauty
Art, Horror and Collaboration in the Hellboy Universe
If you need proof that there can be beauty in horror, you need look no further than the Hellboy comics universe. In the twenty years since his first appearance, Hellboy and his friends have fought everything from vampires to talking Nazi gorillas to giant tentacle monsters from beyond space and time, in one gorgeously illustrated panel after another. With the self-contained graphic novel The Midnight Circus, that beauty has reached a new height.
The initial appeal of Hellboy lay in the art of its creator, Mike Mignola. By typical comic book standards, Mignola’s style is eccentric, characterized by swaths of heavy black, minimalist composition and a peculiar sculptural quality. For Mignola, every panel is like a tableau from from a medieval altar piece, static but full of kinetic energy - and rich in storytelling.
He got his start with Marvel’s Rocket Raccoon (1985) and made a name for himself with DC’s Gotham by Gaslight (1989), which re-imagined Batman as a hero for a Victorian world. From there, his work increasingly embraced pulp and horror. In 1991, he collaborated with Howard Chaykin to bring to life Fritz Lieber’s sword and sorcery heroes Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser and, in 1992, he illustrated the sumptuous comic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
With Hellboy, though, he was freed of constraints. Things quickly got weird, as Mignola pulled from folklore, the pulps and anything else that struck his fancy to weave his stories. The result could have been a mess, but somehow it coalesced into something grand and expansive. Hellboy is not just a long love letter to the history of horror, but also a synthesis that was greater than its constituent parts.
There’s the werewolf who transforms by unzipping his human flesh with the slash of his fingernail. There’s the Nazi switchboard to the spirit world powered by mummified heads. There’s the endless variety of sea life inspired creatures - space jellyfish, mollusc gods, ectoplasmic octopi - that are not only fearfully alien, but also fearfully alluring. There’s the extraterrestrials, Lemurians, demons, dragons and faeries, all coexisting on the page.
As Hellboy became more popular, more series, some limited, some ongoing, began to see the light of day. Fish man Abe Sapien, pulp hero Lobster Johnson, the entire Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense and more got their moments in the spotlight. Mignola (along with Scott Allie, John Arcudi, Josh Dysart, Christopher Golden and more) took on the writing duties for these book and served as an art director, of sorts, for the collaborating artists. The result is visually varied, yet consistent on a design level.
Thus, we get Guy Davis’ nightmarish monsters in B.P.R.D. - fleshy, swollen, corrupt things. In Abe Sapien: The Drowning, Jason Shawn Alexander’s scratchy, inky line work is perfect for the unsettling imagery of a Catholic church given over to something from the ocean, it’s icons and statues wrapped in starfish and cockles. In “The Abyss of Time,” James Harren’s clean and sinewy lines bring prehistoric mankind to life. The cartoonish exaggerations Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon channel a dreamlike atmosphere and the trappings of a decadent Europe in B.P.R.D: Vampire. All these things, disparate though they may seem, form one cohesive world. And it continues to expand.
Over the last decade, as he focused more on writing, Mignola’s own illustrative work has appeared more infrequently (aside of covers, he has only worked on two Hellboy titles since 2005: In the Chapel of Moloch in 2008 and this year’s Hellboy in Hell). In his absence, it fell to Duncan Fegredo to draw the culmination of the first two decades of Hellboy’s story.
In those arcs, Fegredo proved himself the best kind of chameleon, taking cues from Mignola’s own style while retaining his own. In The Midnight Circus, though, something changed.
The Midnight Circus is a tale from Hellboy’s youth. In an homage to Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes, Hellboy sneaks off from the B.P.R.D. building to visit a mysterious carnival that appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the night. The whole thing, from the clowns quoting Lord Byron’s “Manfred” to the talking animals, is a diabolical charade meant to snare the young hero into denying his human life in favor of his mystical role as herald of the apocalypse.
The real world is bright, sharply drawn and retains those hints of Mignola’s style, but, as Hellboy is drawn deeper into the devil’s trap, the palette becomes muted, more wholly Fregredo. Bold comic coloring, so long a staple of Hellboy comics thanks to colorist Dave Stewart, recedes into subtle watercolor washes. Stylized minimalism gives way to the ornate trappings of the circus. The two styles play off each other, each feeling both real and unreal at the same time. It becomes impossible to find the borders of the dream.
Like Hellboy himself, The Midnight Circus is the sum of two worlds. Those worlds, in turn, are the product of the best kind of collaborations - between writers and artists, and between horror and beauty. It takes more than one man’s philosophies to populate this heaven and earth - and hell.
Hellboy: The Midnight Circus is now available wherever fine comic books are sold.
This Horrific Life is a daily exploration of horror, covering movies new and old (and half-watched), games, comics, music and anything else even vaguely spooky. Follow the collection to make sure you don’t miss a single installment.
