Monday, September 28, 2015

The Death of Innocence

Hellboy: Darkness Calls – Chapter 4

Frontispiece Image: Vasilisa the Beautiful

Bodies, of course, will be prominent in most comics – yet Hellboy explores the presence, absence, and trauma of bodies in fascinating ways.  This chapter begins with a trail of the dead.  There is Perun floating in the river (see Chapter 3), a graveyard around a church, blood pooling on stones, an image of the body of the post-Crucifixion Jesus, murdered priests.  Then, at last, we find the fey folk – Gruagach and his companions, wandering into dark catacombs.  Their monstrous bodies are dwarfed by the dark, sprawling architecture of the place.  Then – emerging suddenly from the shadows – we see the face of a giant, the curiously gentle guardian of an apocalyptic queen in her prison-tomb.  Broken bodies pave a trail that only leads to monsters… and to the promise of more carnage.

Meanwhile, Hellboy and the little domovoi are still chatting together – until Koshchei the Deathless smashes his way into the house.  Koshchei seems a body of pure violence – a human form that has surrendered completely to the archetype of the warrior.  Indeed, he is not in possession of his soul, which is guarded by the Baba Yaga.  Such, perhaps, is an eternal predicament for a soldier, as Mary Wollstonecraft suggests in her Vindication of the Rights of Women: “subordination and rigour are the very sinews of military discipline; and despotism is necessary to give vigour to enterprizes that one will directs.”

The relentless warrior is stopped only by the arrival of an incongruously innocent body – a young girl, equipped with a skull on a staff.  Brilliantly (in story, and out), Vasilisa first appears as a faceless figure shrouded in white light.  In most of the scenes that follow she seems to float above the snow, an angelic and ethereal presence in a world of blood and destruction.  “Koshchei the terrible, beaten by a little girl!” the domovoi mocks him.


It’s quite brutal when Koschei finally skewers the girl with an arrow.  She turns into a doll – she may have been one all along, animated by some ancient magic.  Even her dying words are mechanical and doll-like.  “It’s all right,” she keeps repeating, trying to reassure the traumatized Hellboy.  Curiously, while the original folktale does involve a magic doll, it doesn’t seem to feature such a transformation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasilisa_the_Beautiful).  It’s just another example of Mike Mignola’s impressive ability to absorb and transform myths in the service of his storytelling.

All of these body forms are variations on the human condition – mortality and spirituality in the priests and Christ, anger and disillusionment in the pig-man Gruagach, savage brutality in Koshchei, childhood innocence in Vasilisa.  Those last arrows from “the Deathless” Koshchei are just wounds for Hellboy – a torture that he can transcend – but they seem to pierce through everything and everyone with their unerring malice.

As Jane Yolen says in the introduction, “It is a deeply human story for all its monsters.”

As always, the art is incredible.  Duncan Fegredo provides some spectacular battles in this book, but his work also shines in subtle details: the texture of the wood panel behind the altar, the smoke and dust from the dark pit that looks jagged and bat-like, the weird geometry of the magical door opened by Vasilisa, the hewn sadness on the face of Hellboy.  The nuanced textures of the drawings capture a world erupting – seething, straining, shattering – and lurching like a wounded dragon through vast labyrinths of mythology.


Image: Ivan Biliban

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