Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Now that I bought this, I'm sure I'll see it next show.


As I write this, I haven't seen the new Hellboy movie; unless I decided to go see it for Easter. The reviews were...not kind. But, I was able to take advantage of Dark Horse's digital Hellboy sale to get one I had never seen: from 2007, Hellboy: They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships, written by Mike Mignola and Joshua Dysart, art by Jason Shawn Alexander, collected in Hellboy, volume 10: the Crooked Man and others.

In his intro to this story, along with crediting co-writer Dysart for "research I would never have gotten around to doing," Mignola mentions this comic was a giveaway with the Konami game, although he wasn't sure how that was done. Wait, those dates don't seem to line up. I thought it may have been for the PS1 game, but "Dogs of the Night" was 2004. The next one, "The Science of Evil for PS3/Xbox 360, was released June 2008; and early purchases included a ticket to see Hellboy II: the Golden Army. (You can "movie cash" on the cover here, and I gotta say that gets me to buy stuff all the time...) It looks like a regular sized comic, so I'm guessing copies were sent to retailers to give away with purchase. Or not. (When I worked at Sam Goody, there were always promotional items that weren't given away because no one bought whatever was being promoted...)

Still, it's a pretty good issue: a hacky psychic ducks out of the rain, into a curio/antique shop, where a skull almost jumps out at him. He has a vision of the skull's owner, Blackbeard himself, and kills the shopkeeper to get the skull. He then tries to reunite Blackbeard's skull with his body; as Abe and Hellboy investigate. But they might not be the only ones who don't want to see Blackbeard return...

1 comment:

Mr. Morbid's House Of Fun said...

Huh. Looks good, art and all. I'm probably just going to go ahead and avoid that Hellboy movie altogether. Doesn't really look like I'm missing out on anything.