Hellboy: Darkness
Calls – Chapter 3
Frontispiece Image:
Flight Through the Woods
Chapter 3 is when this book really begins to show its
brilliance.
The witches mumble in England. “All the queens of old… are dust.” Gruagach, in pig monster form, walks into
their midst. Gruagach is a strange and perhaps
unlikely spokesperson for “the children of the earth” – the fey, the monstrous,
the mythic. Yet he is an eloquent
speaker. “Time to decide,” he
insists. “Fade away… or... make the
daytime world weep for fear.”
Meanwhile. In a series of epic panels, Hellboy battles
the Baba Yaga’s army of skeletons. An
avalanche of moldy bones against one red monster that thinks he is a man. Hellboy is a superhero trapped in a world of
impotence and futility. He can beat any
immediate group of foes – but not an endless supply of revenants. Not in the Yaga’s realm, at least. He runs.
He is rescued by giant wolves. “Uh… okay,” he stammers. Look at that panel. After the chaos of battle, there is quiet and
calm – trees become almost abstract lines.
Then the white world turns dark, and the Leshii waits by a fire. He’ll aid Hellboy, and when the white shroud returns,
it obliterates the army of corpses.
Artistically, these might be the best two pages in the book
– and that’s saying something. I want to
work through them in detail. 1. The quiet wood, by moonlight, contrasted with
the Leshii’s bitter gripes about the “half-blind” Yaga. Even the crescent moon echoes the
“half-blind” image. 2. The army: tattered, weary… soldiers without
will or purpose of their own. 3 and
4. A close up on the corpse faces – with
thick globs of snow like winter’s blood.
5 and 6. Whiteness – more menacing
and consuming now than those deep gorgeous shadows that are so prevalent and so
beautiful in the Hellboy books. 7 and
8. Whiteness, fading into wolf. “Hellboy, wake up.” Dream wolf.
Spirit wolf. 9. “Huh?”
Hellboy’s big arm and little legs remind me of President Franklin
Roosevelt, crippled by polio, yet still strong and defiant. Hellboy looks vulnerable here. 10.
Wolves everywhere, in the darkness behind HB. They just bloom in the shadows. 11. RUN.
12. Shock portrayed wonderfully
on that stern face, even though it’s so blocky that it might be made of
wood. A puff of breath in the cold. Study those pages! That’s how to tell a story!
Has there ever been a stranger villain than the Baba Yaga,
flying around in her mortar and pestle?
As much as I’d like to do more research, I’ll resort to the crutch of
Wikipedia, which quotes Andreas Johns in The Slavic and East European Journal. According to Johns, the Baba Yaga is “a
many-faceted figure, capable of inspiring researchers to see her as a Cloud,
Moon, Death, Winter, Snake, Bird, Pelican or Earth Goddess, totemic matriarchal
ancestress, female initiator, phallic mother, or archetypal image.” I think I’ll have more to say about her
later.
A quick mention of one of my favorite characters in all of Hellboy. There’s a tiny little domovoi, a house spirit,
which lives in the oven of an abandoned dwelling. He sits smoking with Hellboy, warning him
about the Baba Yaga. Hellboy talks
frankly with him: “I was so G-- d--- mad, I thought, what the hell, why not fight a whole army of skeletons?”
Meanwhile. Perun, God of Storms, “Lord over the whole
world,” sits in the woods drawing lightning in the mud… filthy, tangle-bearded,
melancholy masculinity, waiting for the next storm or battle that might
interest him. Is this a figure of fading
patriarchy, too lazy too defend his fragile empire? There’s something quiet and contemplative
about the god here, though we know he rages in nights of thunder. The Baba Yaga sneaks up on him with some
skeletal archers. “I will tolerate no
gods in my Russia…” He falls into the
river, bleeding. That’s some pretty
awesome deicide. It’s like something out
of a Dashiell Hammett noir crime novel, but, you know, with skeletons and
arrows.
Image: Boston Museum of Fine Arts
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