Dark Horse Releases Trade Paperback of Fantastic First Issues

Dark Horse is making it easy for you to find your next favorite series! Dark Horse is excited to announce the Dark Horse Number Ones trade paperback, which will allow readers to familiarize themselves with some of our most talented creators in a value-priced collection. Dark Horse Number Ones opens the door to new storytelling worlds with eight first issues from a diverse selection of genres:

• Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s The Umbrella Academy is the story of a group of superpowered children, born on the same day and subsequently adopted and raised by a scientist as secretive as he is wealthy.
• Mike Mignola’s Hellboy in Hell finds Hellboy dead and in Hell, where a throne awaits him—along with familiar faces.
• Joëlle Jones and Jamie S. Rich’s Lady Killer showcases a 1960s homemaker who is also a ruthless assassin for hire!
• Jeff Lemire and Dean Ormston’s Black Hammer finds a group of superheroes banished and trapped in a small town as they struggle to return home.
• Matt Kindt and Sharlene Kindt’s Dept. H follows a special investigator assigned to uncover possible sabotage taking place at a deep-sea research station.
• Brian Wood and Mack Chater’s Briggs Land introduces the Briggs family, the leaders of an antigovernment secessionist movement in the United States, as the matriarch, Grace Briggs, attempts to take control from her incarcerated husband.
• Kurtis Wiebe and Mindy Lee’s Bounty features galactic bandits turned bounty hunters as they fight their way across the galaxy.
• Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crook’s Harrow County features a young girl who learns about her origins and discovers her supernatural powers.

At over 200 pages, the Dark Horse Number Ones trade goes on sale March 29, 2017, for an unheard-of price of just $5.99! Comics fans, prepare to find your next obsession!

Review: Hellboy and the BPRD 1954 #1

At what point does the Hellboy franchise reach the point where you can describe a story as 'a good Hellboy story'. After all, I know what to expect from 'a good Batman story' (crime, shadows, and fisticuffs), I know what to expect from 'a good Superman story' (truth, justice, the American way, and fisticuffs), and so on. And suddenly, Hellboy is a brand with 23 years of comics, two films, two cartoons, and a whole lot of spinoffs. Which is to say, a Hellboy story is a known quantity with familiar rhythms, story beats, and twists. Mike Mignola's grumpy, large-hearted half-demon always ends up in pulpy fistfights with occult monsters. Hellboy's adventures will always split the difference between tragic folktales and dime-store fantasy novels finding a tone all of their own. This isn't a bad thing and doesn't mean every Hellboy is the same, but it means you can't open up a new story without having the frame of reference of adventures past. As such, Hellboy and the BPRD 1954 won't blow any fans minds, but it will serve as a pleasant reminder of why this character and these stories are still fun, 20 some years later. The conceit of the Hellboy and the BPRD minis (of which this is the third) has been that they tell the stories of Hellboy's first few years as an agent of the Bureau. It's an excuse to tell the short one and done stories that made up the early half of the Hellboy core title before the scope became so apocalyptically large. 1954 see Hellboy and enthusiastic agent Farrier journey to an island in the Arctic Ocean where a group of researchers are being attacked by a yeti-like monster. I would have expected the story to mine some claustrophobia from the deadly terrain and lack of sunlight as seen in Whiteout or 30 Days of Night, but at least in the first issue, Mignola and Roberson seem to be taking a lighter approach, using the setting as a means of slightly altering the usual Hellboy monster formula.

A lot of humor is mined from the relationship between Hellboy and agent Farrier (who, as it quickly becomes apparent, is more Bill Nye than he is Jason Bourne). Farrier thinks the monster is likely a new and possibly mythic species of animal (his specialty) while Hellboy casually and correctly posits it's a mutant polar bear. It's a spin on the buddy cop relationship, with Farrier as the young, naive recruit and Hellboy as the world-weary Pro which is made much more amusing by the implicit knowledge that Hellboy is a fairly young agent himself.

As things progress there are a few fun twists in the store which is especially welcome as a typical downside to Mignola comics is a slow building first issue. But what really makes this issue a rock-solid entry into the Hellboy mythos is the art by Stephen Green. His work is clean, stylish, with a good use of negative space making the issue flow smoothly throughout. He also manages, what is to me the mark of any great artist on a Mignola book: he manages to draw Hellboy right. In the hands of many artists, including some great ones, Hellboy looks too realistic (making his horns and underbite look grotesque and silly) or too stylized, making him look like a cartoon parody of Mignola's original designs. In the hands of Green, he is once again a brawny monster fighter with a weathered face and oddly soulful eyes.

All in all, I enjoyed Hellboy and the BPRD 1954 #1 more than any of the Hellboy spinoffs of late. It takes the traditional Hellboy formula and simply executes it well which, as seen here, is enough to make for a pretty darn great read.

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Hellboy and the BPRD 1954 #1 Writers: Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson Artist:  Stephen Green Publisher: Dark Horse Comics Price: $3.99 Format: Mini-Series; Print/Digital

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Unboxing: Loot Crate - August 2016

Welcome back to another Comic Bastards Loot Crate unboxing video of pleasure and joy. Made up that last part. Going to get a bit nerdy on this one since the theme for August is "Anti-Hero" and apparently, Loot Crate's definition is pretty damn loose. Sit back and enjoy two minutes of looking at stuff coming out of a box... that sounds wrong, and yet more interesting. Oh and the box turned into a hammer... these sexual metaphors will end one day I swear!

Original "Hellboy" Graphic Novel To Be Published in 2017

Next spring, Dark Horse Comics will publish an original graphic novel,Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea, co-written by legendary Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, co-written and illustrated by Eisner Award-winning artist Gary Gianni and colored by award-winning colorist Dave Stewart. Following the events of the classic story “The Island,” Hellboy sets sail from the wreckage of a deserted island only to cross paths with a ghost ship. Taken captive by the phantom crew that plans to sell him to the circus, Hellboy is dragged along by a captain who will stop at nothing in pursuit of a powerful sea creature. Gary Gianni has previously collaborated with iconic writers including George R. R. Martin, Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Michael Chabon and teamed up with Michael Kaluta to work on the classic pulp hero, The Shadow. Gianni is best known the creator of the Monstermen series, which appeared as a back-up feature inHellboy. He also illustrated Prince Valiant, the syndicated newspaper comic strip, for 8 years. Gianni will illustrate Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea, with colors by Dave Stewart; Mignola will provide a cover, with colors by Stewart.

"I imagine if Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea were a movie, the Hollywood hyperbole would describe it as Hellboy's greatest adventure,” said Gary Gianni. “Yes... it's Hellboy as you've never seen him before, laughing , loving and battling his way across the stormy seas! You'll be thrilled as he faces cosmic forces terrorizing a haunted ship manned by a desperate crew! Be sure not to miss Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea, the biggest comic book event of the year!"

Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea is the third Hellboy original graphic novel, following the classics, Hellboy: House of the Living Dead by Mignola, Richard Corben and Stewart (2011) and Hellboy: The Midnight Circus by Mignola, Duncan Fegredo and Stewart.

Review: Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1953

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction was the comic book that got me into comic books. Sure, I grew up on the Batman, Spider-man and Justice League cartoons, but like most kids, they never made me pick up a single issue.  I saw comic book movies, even the Hellboy one, and remained ambivalent. No one around me read comics and without any comic book stores to visit, there was just never a reason to jump in.

But then I was in high school and it was one in the morning. I was flipping through TV channels trying to find anything to watch when I found the Hellboy animated movie Sword of Storms.  This straight-to-video, cheap-looking cartoon is where Hellboy gets stuck with a magic sword and is sent into a strange alternate dimension filled with Japanese folkloric creatures. I can’t tell you if that movie was good but it set a fire in my brain—this juxtaposition of the weirdness of folklore with a sarcastic and hard-hitting demon protagonist showed me a type of storytelling I never knew existed. I immediately got on Amazon, bought the first three trades, and read them in a single night. I was all in.

Hellboy was the comic that introduced me to Alan Moore, whose books introduced me to Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison, and Warren Ellis. My love for comic books traces back to this series and, to be honest, this is the first Hellboy book I’ve read in six years.

Hellboy and BPRD: 1953 is another short story collection that takes place during Hellboy’s earliest days working for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense. The stories told here range from investigating a severed hand haunting an old British estate to a story from Hellboy’s father figure, Trevor Bruttenholm, about how he lost a friend to a Scottish water spirit when he was young.

If you’ve ever read a Hellboy short story collection before, you should know whether you’ll like this book.  If you’ve never read a Hellboy book at all, please go buy Seed of Destruction right now and start there.

I stopped being able to keep up with the series when I left for college and now that I’ve come back, it’s a lot like coming home. The stories feel shorter and smaller paced than they used. The art looks a little different. Hellboy’s always been a series that starts with an eerie ghost story and builds to a fist fight but now those fights seem like they’re coming on a little too quickly.

The last third of the collection covers a story about Hellboy investigating and stopping a giant, mutated dog from harassing a quiet Californian suburb. The series has always played with its pulp science fiction elements, but here, more than ever, felt like a genuine formula shake-up. The mystery builds slower and leaned harder into the science fiction stories of the 1950's like Them! than I expected. My first reaction was to be put-off. This wasn’t the type of story I remembered or wanted. What was I supposed to do with this?

The rhythm of this book as a whole felt different, never quite matching up to the Mike Mignola stories that I grew up on and loved.  Yet it still worked. I still found myself grinning when Professor Bruttenholm talked down an army of skeleton centurions or tilting my head at the strange and water-bloated horse face of a Scottish kelpie ready to drown Trevor’s friend in the lake. What worked in the previous Hellboy story collections works here even if it’s working slightly differently.

It was Mike Mignola’s stories that made me fall in love with folklore and that’s still here with great effect. The folklore of our ancestors, all those stories of ghosts and fairies and kelpie, were to make sense of the unknown, to give that darkness in the forest definition and meaning. But when we encounter them in this series, it’s not just a reminder that those unknowns are still present but that we live in places with history—that they have pasts, with people and with nightmares. Yet Hellboy has never been a series content with letting that history lie but rather about the ways we can break their cycles. In most folkloric stories, the beasts and ghosts can only ever be sated—to disappear and reappear, haunting a region in perpetuity. But in these stories, Hellboy will be sure to change that and beat the crap out of those monsters until they never show their faces around here again.

At first I was put-off by the final story in the collection, “Beyond the Fences,” because the subject matter was too much science fiction when I wanted folklore. Yet the more I thought about it, the more I realized that Mignola was leaning into a type of distinctly American folklore. Not Bigfoot or the chupacabra but the dropping of the Atom Bomb.  After all, folklore has never been about whether a subject had a basis in history as much it is about a reaction to history and to the world, few things in America’s history have generated more fantasy than the nuclear bomb. Whether it was the fantasies of an apocalyptic wasteland or the horrific creatures conjured up by radiation, people across the world took the reality of the nuke and crafted fantasy in order to process this new horror. Now it's just Hellboy’s turn to punch it out.

So even if the line work looks  slightly different or the faces look to have a little too much detail, when you see the crumbling stone fences and the thick, foggy forest trees on the page, you know you’re still reading a Hellboy story and you know that all sorts of spirits and folklore beasts are hiding just out of view.

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Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1953 Writers: Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson Artists: Paolo Rivera, Joe Rivera, Ben Stenbeck, Michael Walsh Publisher: Dark Horse Comics Price: $19.99 Format: TPB; Print/Digital

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