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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