The Battle for a Fateful Body

Hellboy: Darkness Calls – Chapter 2

The frontispiece image:  Hellboy in a Cathedral Door

Hellboy just wants to be left alone.  Unfortunately, eldritch forces battle relentlessly for control of him – seeking his aid, or his destruction.  Now some witches pray to dark and night, and pull the demon-man into the sky, where he joins the flight of pigs and potent cats, witch-bodies and creaking broomsticks.  They drop him like a human meteor into a ruined church.

Here Duncan Fegredo paints a majestic scene of shadows and cobwebs, of cloaks and huddled bodies – a conclave of witches, waiting for a king.  They tell of Bromhead’s fate – a fool seduced by arcane secrets, overwhelmed by forces beyond his dreams.

“Call down the moon!” a bird commands.  And the man is doomed.

At this point, as is often the case, Hellboy seems the ultimate individualist.  The witches fret and fear and conspire, whispering and pleading and threatening.  They are a collective of shadows, threads on a larger tapestry of fates and histories that are profoundly interconnected but which mean little or nothing to Hellboy.  He shrugs them off… but the individual cannot fully escape the social and natural forms in which she or he is so thoroughly enmeshed.

Then the Baba Yaga – old witch-queen of Russia – sends a gnomish messenger to the cathedral.  And so Hellboy walks away, but through a hidden gate or portal… and into a world of white winter.  Vengeance is old – as old as hungry Grendel and boastful Beowulf, as old as the brutal but strangely infantile Greeks at Troy.  Old grudges are the gnarled roots of the world – and Hellboy trips upon the schemes of his indefatigable enemy, falling into a tide of snow.

Image: British Museum (text from Hellboy)