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...