One more Chronological Mignolaverse storytime for today!!!

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Goddamn Martin Gilfryd.

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I love/hate that they'll never explain the cannibals beyond this one page. "Big cities all have them."

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>Memnan Saa
Oh Shit. This will *not* end well.

I just assumed that they're those poor schmucks who get mind-raped by dark powers, but don't get the luck of getting killed by any of the various occult agencies and just end up clustering together in the Dark spaces under the cities.

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Ah Vril, the "Fire Of Heaven". Always nice to see the stuff at work.

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Make sure you've all read your 19th century prerequisits to the Chronological Mignolaverse storytime

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I do find it interesting that he's vaguely mundane in this appearance, when later on he'd be such a potent psychic.

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>Memnan Saa thinks he can manipulate the direct mortal manifestation of pure JUSTICE
I pity the fool.

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Memnam Saa can't be blamed for trying. He's a pretty industrious guy.

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>Wanting to try and spread the Power Of Heaven in a world where Ereshkgal rules
Yes, this is a good plan. Nothing could go wrong with this plan.

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Yeaaaaaaaaaah, humans weren't at all made to host the might of raw Vril. Especially not in a world as tainted as Mignolaverse Earth.

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I fucking love him

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Thinks he's so damn smart, doesn't even realize he's working for the wrong side.

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Might be my favorite panel.

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>Three Hundred And Sixty-Nine
Apeing your dark masters and their spawn I see, Saa.

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So they’re essentially tapping Into the power of god right with the Vril suit and everything?

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Yup yup yup

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Seems like a lot of “plans” go to absolute shot in the Hellboy universe especially with all the Hyperborea stuff

I don't know if I really want it, but if Hellboy was more popular, we'd probably have someone decode the Hypoborean language by now.

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I don't think I've ever hated anyone in the Mignolaverse as much as that dude. He is so fucking full of himself it's unbearable.

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I loved in the newest Devil You Know where Maggie and Howards talk in Hyperborean to each other.
Devon.

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Isn't that sword a lot like the one the Witchfinder had for like half an issue when fighting some gribbly?

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They should've listened.

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It's a Hyperborean sword. Gall Dennar had one which was found by the Heliopathic Brotherhood of Ra and found by Edward Grey then when he disappears they take it back until Ted Howards finds it. I'm fairly certain that that sword is the reference used for the BPRD logo

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The Chutt and Saa are Hypoborean fanboys. They either have a stockpile of similar swords (apparently without the excess powers) or they make their swords in imitation of the shape. Think of them like those kids in Highschool that bought "real katanas."

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It's the Professor!

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I wonder just how much the Ogdru Jahad truly care about Rasputin. I mean, they have gone out of their way to revive him once or twice, so they surely see some use in him.

Also; it's the Professor! Hurray!

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Well part of Rasputin's survival has to do with Baba Yaga holding a piece of his soul... he was also required, maybe, to summon Hellboy, who was needed for a variety of schemes.

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You know I’m suprised that this was basically the only issue Geoff Johns wrote for hellboy

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It's also one of the biggest continuity errors.

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So Grey's obsession with bringing down those bastards and avenging his friends ended up doing him in. Damn.

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I’m not really suprised but what are the errors anyways I thought the story fits well within the timeline

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So how present was the brotherhood by the time we get to hell on earth?

Later on in The Black Goddess the BPRD are told that The Lobsters crew met terrible fates, Bob is shown to have hung himself.
They're numbers are fewer but they still have some around because Howards finds Gall Dennar's sword in one of their hideouts.

Ssssorta? His story is far from over though. At the least, we see his final moments on Earth.

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Is Bill's story the one with the... water-horse thing? Did we miss that, or is it part of a later narrative?

Heh

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The Kelpie? That's not until the 50s

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So, more talk about "harnessing" the Power Of Ereshkgal, and an eldritch guardian trying to eat the Professor's face. Great, not like the day can get any worse at this rate.

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When was the last time we saw them, was it the Wild Hunt?

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That was the Osiris Club, technically an off shoot of the Homeopathic Brotherhood

Oh shit, this guy!

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Oh hwy, it's Sandhu! And he seems to have been greatly hardened by his own brush with the Dark Powers of the aether.

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The text, is that sanskrit? Any chance we have a scholar here?

God and his host are working in mysterious ways, it seems.

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Sandhu would have been great in the BPRD.

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Ahh, gotta love Von Klempt and his apes.

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That's it for today! That is the end of the Rasputin series for now the final issue comes out in March See ya'll next weekend!
I actually disliked this story, I think it messes with the Professor's character too much.

He's a little too action-y, isn't he?

Definitely. In previous stories like the 1940s stories and And What Shall I Find There he did do some heroic things but it was more like "OH GOD, THERE'S A VAMPIRE, CRAP!" and he kinda bumbles a bit with it.

Yeah... I can easily see him with a pistol or a saber, fighting off zombies in a tweed jacket. But parachuting into enemy territory, wearing a cat suit and spraying a submachine gun seem a bit out of character.

Maybe it's his uncle's blessing helping him out.

So the error isn't even Johns fault.

Possibly, that could make sense.
Not really, it's just there. There's some other ones too. The Visitor messed up when it comes to Hellboys dog.

What did the Visitor goof up with Mac?

Those dragon heads look like lobster claws...

Part of it shows little baby Hellboy complaining about the move from the New Mexico Base in 1947 while holding Mac as a puppy but then Pancake and takes place in the same year and Mac is almost bigger than Hellboy in that. And then the entirety of BPRD 1947 they are still in the New Mexico Base and he looks fully grown in that too

Hmm. The Lobster's powers, assuming he has them, are pretty difficult to pin down. He seems nigh impossible to kill (similarly seen with Bogavante, Kaler's sidekick Isaac and that one Russian operative in BPRD with the heavy gun. Of course, if you want to expand the field slightly, there's Iosif and Hellboy too), and even after dying the Lobster seems to be a pretty potent ghost as well. That said, since he's seen armoring for and dodging/blocking attacks he's not strictly immortal or invulnerable to harm. Bullets tend not to hit him unless you're within spitting distance, maybe some sort of passive effect or blessing, we see a number of supernaturally potent individuals perform similar feats, Crimson Lotus is the first that springs to mind but obviously we saw Bruttenholm experience something similar as well. He's descended, possibly, from skinwalkers, though we never see him perform the feat we do know that that particular power is passed down in bloodlines. It implies, at the least, that he possesses some ability for supernatural power.

Just spitballing here but I think that the Lobster's durability is tied to the burning mark he leaves on his victims. The burning claw could just be mechanical/electrical but it never seems to break for him regardless of the circumstances he goes through, we never see him working with someone who might have built it for him and he always marks his kills with it which, to me, speaks to a possible ritualistic element. I think that the Lobster is tied in a pact with some sort of spirit or fae, maybe a pact made, like Daimio's in desperation to stave off death. As long as the Lobster enacts cold, brutal justice and leaves his mark on villains, he's shielded, at least partially, from death. There's a necromancer that Bruttenholm faces who employs a similar tactic.

I think The Lobster's need for justice is also behind his apparent near-immortality. He may be somewhat like a revenant, unable to rest until his duty is complete. It just happens his duty is to eradicate all "wrong-doers" which would obviously take awhile. There has to be some supernatural boogeyness to him, he doesn't really act like a normal human and we've seen him come out of blimp wreckages saying nothing except that he knows he will be fine, as if all he did was trip down some stairs.

You know considering how sprawling this series is, it's not bad that the continuity errors are things like "Bob died different from half remembered stories told 70 years later." and "the dog should be a dog but was a puppy."

Yeah, they are solid when it comes to the continuity and I'm pretty sure the only reason I notice them is cause I read the whole thing multiple times a year.

There's a theory that someone said in previous threads that he is a literally spirit of vengeance possessing bodies throughout time.

Wait, hold up.
So his name is Hellboy Hughes?

I'm pretty sure he'd prefer to take Bruttenholm

Well. Maybe. Or Hellboy Azzael depending on how demon names work.

Or, click at your own risk, Hellboy Pendragon if he wants to go for his royal name. Hey. Dragon. I wonder if that'll be a thing.

All this shit I spitball for fun, and I forget the goddamn obvious:

I wonder if his wife took his name?

It still hurts. ;_;

Appreciated both replies. Gave me an image of a group trying to pin the proper family name to formally address him. Anung etc, Son of Azzael, Hughes, that other thing, only for him to interject with Bruttenholm.

Hmm, wonder when the Great Dakrness itself will take center-stage. Especially given that one of its spawn, Nergal, just got ganked during the events of Hell On Earth.

>He disclosed to me the child's true name. Would you like to know it?
>I already know what to call him. I call him "son".
John Hurt was so good in that role.

I'd put it taking direct action in the primary reality as likely as God showing up to wrestle it. We might see more of its agents going into action, but that's it.

For once in fiction where True Names mean something, I want the twist to be the great evil goes through the effort to learn the dark secret name, and learns it's powerless, because the character has so rejected all that it is, it just doesn't have a hold on them.

I mean... you've read Hellboy, right?

That's kind of what Hellboys all about. He rejected every prophecy that was his birth rights. They witches, being king of hell, being the rightful king of England. And each rejection led him closer to Hell.

You guys miss how far I want this to go. When things try to summon up Anung un Rama, he still horns out, and early on needed a moment to get back to himself. I want total fizzle. Total nothing. Just "Why did you say that name? The hell is going on?" Almost like a comedy beat, but played more to express how who we are, what makes us in life, is more important than what created us. So yes, much like Hellboy stuff, but turned up a bit.

I suspect that it might direct a tiny amount of its attention to the little blue sphere that managed to (somehow) best one of its many, many spawn, but otherwise, yeah. Can't see it acting overtly or anything like that against the heroes, besides it's pawns and agents rallying to avenge Nergal's death. But really, Nergal signed it's own death-warrant when it decided to directly siege Earth without waiting for the rest of its brethren to show signs of stirring, instead wanting to immediately go forth and burn everything to the ground, thereby leaving it weak enough were a single human spirit was enough to annihilate it.

Didn't the other Watcher angels destroy Anum for fucking up the whole deal? Isn't that where the right hand came from?

It's so weird how Hellboy has a whole creation myth, fallen angels, race of man, etc, that predate the also existing Lucifer and his allies falling. God just made another bunch of assholes after the first group about fucked up everything.

Lucifer and the other angels were the other Watchers. The term "Watchers" and a lot of the other biblical stuff comes from the non-canonical Book of Enoch.

What? Things have been calling the first angels Watchers forever now. Things Hyperborean.

Yeah, after the war against the Dragon, when Anum once again reached up to use the heavenly flame to seal away Ogdru Jahad, the rest of the watchers turned on Anum and tore him apart. Only the hand survived. Then God, in one of his(its?) two major appearances looks at how primordial earth was all fucked up and covered in monster corpses, and tosses most of the watchers down into the pit(hell) to form the first society of demons, and the rest onto the earth to become monsters, and presumably, fae and various pagan gods. Lesser spirits were turned into the Hypoboreans to populate and directly guard the already half-ruined Earth until life properly evolved. We only relatively recently learned that Lucifer's crew was from a SECOND fall of angels who, I guess, were pissed over something, the idea of letting hairless apes take over the planet after all this other shit happened, I guess.

I mean that there isn't two groups of Angelic things that God created like that other post suggested, Lucifer was a Watcher as was Pluto. Mignola got the term from a non cannon biblical book called The Book of Enoch.

One thing I'm rusty on. Is Hellboy Satan called Lucifer? Of all stories, I can see Hellboy riffing on Lucifer being Satan being a translation error.

Anyway, It makes me laugh how Mignola grafted Paradise Lost the Lost Prequel in as his origin story, then later made Paradise Lost also sort of a part of things.

Oh. Well what I mean is that there were two falls to Hell in Hellboy. Anum, and later Satan. Anum fucked up by trying to create life and creating the Ogrdu-Jahad. Satan presumably pulled the classic rebellion against god thing.

(Anum waas not sent to hell, he was killed. The other Watchers/angels who helped him were cast down. Sorry for any confusion.)

Also I tend to refer to as the first..... more Hyperborean aged host of angels as Watchers, and the later ones as more traditional angels.

In the final issues of Hellboy they talk about Lucifer being the ruler of hell after Pluto
God punished the other Watchers immediately for killing Anum.

They showed up in an earlier thread. Crime Boss and his creepy oriental assistant had a basement full of them.

I meant more in the sense of "why' or "where the fuck did they come from?" Or even "what happened to them since we stopped hearing about them?"

The Watchers destroyed Anum for basically giving Ereshkgal a free vessel to spread it's Evil across the Earth, which was made especially worse given that God stationed the first batch of Watchers to ensure that such a thing *wouldn't* happen. The other Watchers then immediately proceeded to tear Anum apart following the sealing of the Ogdru Jahad, at which point God went "NO" and cast the whole lot of them down onto the Earth, where the vast majority of them ended up breeding the various horrors we see throughout the comics, and others ended up getting kicked into Hell to form the first groupings of "demons".

And all that was left of Anum following it's siblings ripping it apart was it's Right Hand, which is one of the few things capable of freeing the totality of the Dragon (but not the only), and thus usher in complete victory for Ereshkgal.

Ereshkigal? Another name given to the Ogdru-Jahad? You imply they existed before Anum created them.

Ereshkigal is the "name" of the primordial darkness that entered the dragon when it was just a statue and gave it life.

fuuuuuck

I forgot that part.

Mignola loves hiding a bigger, broader evil behind things. Same thin in Baltimore.

The "name" Ereshkigal is just the closest thing that mortals can give as a designation for the primordial Great Darkness that God and His Host fight against, and is the force that gave life to the Ogdru Jahad, who became it's spawn from that point onward. It's been mentioned several times by characters like Hecate (also one of its elder spawn), certain cults and perhaps most notably, Grigorri Rasputin.

Yeah, but I don't think it's come up in a few years of story. I got in around publication of the Island. I haven't reread anything since. I keep on telling myself too, but I keep on saying after this certain arc or whatever and never getting there.

Ereshkigal was syncretized with Hecate in the real world so I assume that they are just different aspects of the same entity in the Mignolaverse. Hecate was already shown to be multiple gods in mythology.
Speaking of which, one of the most most fun things I found while researching for the storytime and timeline is the Lovecraft story The Moon-bog. In it a man's friend is building an estate on a bog and he and the construction workers are cursed and transformed into hideous frog beasts by the Moon Goddess that watches over it. Hecate was a moon goddess

>Ereshkigal was syncretized with Hecate in the real world so I assume that they are just different aspects of the same entity in the Mignolaverse.
Nah, it's pretty obvious that whatever Hecate may be, she isnt Ereshkigal. At best, she's it's closest representative within the material plane, but not the prime entity. Just like how God exists as a whole force, but acts primarily through agents and lesser servitors, so too must the Great Darkness.

It could very well be, I'm just expanding on the information in the book that Hecate is multiple Black Goddesses throughout various societies.

why does he remind me of this in the bottom panel?

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Ahh After 10000 years I'm free! Time to conquer Earth!