Superhero Media: Hellboy (2004)

For a reasonably obscure comic that typically has little in the way of plot, Hellboy made one hell of a film. A collaboration between Mike Mignola and Guillermo del Toro, Hellboy may well be simultaneously the most faithful adaptation of an existing comic book series and one of the most revisionist. For those who haven't ready much Hellboy or B.P.R.D., the comics tend to be very narrative-light, more focused on ideas and the visuals Mignola wanted to realise; and there's nothing wrong with them or that approach, but it wouldn't translate well to film. What del Toro and Mignola do is take the bones of what works in the comics and fill in the connecting tissue to get a whole world on-screen. Of course, I fucking love Hellboy. From the opening with leather-clad Nazi Science Wizards fighting US Soldiers through to Hellboy getting swallowed by a mythos monster, the film almost doesn't miss a beat. I remember when Hellboy came out, I was in the last year of High School and was the only one of my friends interested in seeing the film before it came out, but this was 2004 and we didn't have the luxury of streaming, so we all saw it on the school holidays and soon I was inundated with questions about who Hellboy was and where to find Dark Horse comics. 

For me, Hellboy demonstrates the "Golden Ratio" of superhero (but also Kaiju and other nice genres) film adaptations, in that the, utterly absurd, premise is played completely straight, but the characters within the world of the film react naturally. Agent John Myers is flabbergasted by real-life monsters, as many would be, but for those working with Hellboy and Abe-Sapien long enough, it is as bland as any workplace, with Special Agent Tom Manning sounding for all the world like a frustrated HR Director. Ron Perlman is brilliant as Hellboy, swaggering in the larger-than-life role, complete with winking one-liners and embodying the "heroic man-child" archetype. Perlman perfectly delivers lines like "I'm not a very good shot... but the Samaritan here uses really big bullets" like he just stepped out of a comic panel. Despite the fact that Mignola often dismisses his own work as "...just want[ed] to draw monsters", there is a subtle genius to the embrace of pulp tropes along with classic monster movies, fairy tales and Lovecraftian Cosmic Horror; that this translated to a film as good as Hellboy is a testament to del Toro's skill and the crew he brought together. 

Keep in mind, the popular superhero film series of the era in which Hellboy was made were Blade, X-Men and Spider-Man, all from the pages of Marvel Comics, and two of which were stripped-down versions without much of the inherent silliness of their series. Bringing to the big screen an adaptation of a cult Indy comic with barely any plot, featuring a team of Monsters fighting Nazi Wizards led by Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin, who is trying to summon an Elder God right out of Call of Cthulhu, was pure madness, but it worked. Not only did this mad premise come together, but the film was made with practical effects wherever possible, so it still looks great more than a decade later, the cast is brilliant and the only misstep on the soundtrack was not using the original, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, version of "Red Right Hand". Hellboy is a film to treasure, and not just because the remake is so poor, but because a director and writer getting to put together such a personal project, on their own terms, and to have it come together so well, is pretty rare. This film made me want to start "Weird World War II" gaming, Pulp games and even Cosmic Horror. Hellboy was one of the first Indy Comics characters I painted in miniature and was in my first big Ultimate Alliance game. I will never stop loving this film.