by G.E. Uke, Reporter

Let me preface this article by admitting upfront that I am a gigantic Hellboy nerd. I never intend to stop, and when I die they’re going to have to take my brain out and beat it with a stick to make it stop fanboying out over the Mignolaverse. 

With that established, I accepted an invite to a special interview at Comic-Con this year to cover the upcoming release of the movie Hellboy: The Crooked Man. There have been several Hellboy movies in the past two decades, some live action and some animated, but none had Mike Mignola directly advising their creation. Hellboy occupies a prominent place on my bookshelf, and I know this series well.

Hollywood had never captured the essence of the Hellboy comics before The Crooked Man. Mike told me as much to my face, and we both spent a good twenty seconds clucking and shaking our heads over it. 

So before I dive into The Crooked Man, I need to elaborate a bit on why Hellboy has been so difficult to reproduce on screen. The real Hellboy series is powerful, emotional, metaphysical, and deals with complicated subjects like karma, apocrypha, traditional folklore, destiny, and love. Often, these subjects are communicated through silence. Hellboy SHOWS readers, it doesn’t come out and discuss with dialogue. Overexposition would cheapen the book’s core themes. Those who have taken the time to sit down and read the series will know what I’m talking about. Hollywood Hellboy is a macho, angsty action hero with a chip on his shoulder. Comic Hellboy is quiet, competent, intelligent, and bitter. His fights aren’t long and satisfying brawls: they are over very quickly. And they are brutal. 

So when Brian Taylor and Millennium Media asked Mike Mignola to come onboard and advise on an indie Hellboy movie, he stated he would only do so if the story in question was The Crooked Man. It’s his favorite of all the Hellboy stories, and very firmly a horror story. It’s not an action flick, a bombastic saga, or anything like that.

The premise is simple: Hellboy and a rookie agent head into the backwoods of Appalachia to help a young man who dabbled in dark magic as a young boy get his soul back from a mysterious Devil-like figure known as The Crooked Man. At this point, it would be improper of me to offer too many spoilers, but having met the producer and cast I can promise that Hellboy: The Crooked Man will be one hell of a film. I dearly hope it becomes the first of a series of self contained “horror themed” Hellboy movies in the future, since there are plenty of case files like Crooked Man to draw upon. 

The Crooked Man isn’t a big budget movie, and it doesn’t need to be. The tale takes place in a forest, with lots of old cabins and darkness, and those things are basically cheap. Delving deep into the old horror “case files” of the 1950’s, we get a look at Hellboy in his younger years as a BPRD (Bureau of Paranormal Research & Defense) field agent with none of the super guns or polished government agent gear endemic to the modern age. The Crooked Man is firmly in Rated R territory, and not for the faint of heart. It has The Shining and Evil Dead written all over it, and watching Jack Kesy’s much thinner and less beefy version of Hellboy go head to head with creeptastic forces in their own element is a large part of the appeal.  

In summary, I cannot wait for Hellboy: The Crooked Man to come out. Having had the chance to discuss it directly with Mike Mignola, the author of Hellboy, I can report with confidence to our readership at ComicsOnline that they have something terrific to look forward to.

Special thanks to 42West for arranging this special feature.

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