The Hellboy Scholarship of Scott Bukatman

In his 2016 manuscript, “Hellboy’s World: Comics and Monsters on the Margins,” noted comics scholar Scott Bukatman articulates his perspective on the unique formal properties that make Hellboy a truly remarkable text within the comics canon. #Hellboy 1/5

Bukatman playfully says Hellboy is “a Howard Hawks movie set in an HP Lovecraft universe with art direction by Jack Kirby, but, while there’s something to that, it doesn’t begin to get at the complexity of the hybrid, genre–juggling textual system that Mignola has developed.” 2/5

Bukatman sees Hellboy as a work of pastiche, a complex intersection of innumerable inspirations occupying the same page: “What is most striking about Hellboy is the balance that Mignola achieves, the breadth of influences and the amalgam of elements that he keeps in play.” 3/5

Additionally, Bukatman speaks to Hellboy as a dualistic triumph of narrative and imagery: “Mignola directs the reader’s attention simultaneously in two directions: he provides effective storytelling, rich in atmosphere and inventive character design,…” 4/5