Mike Mignola’s influences are vast, from Henry James to Jack Kirby. In the one-shot comic “Hellboy: The Midnight Circus”, one of Hellboy’s guardians takes the young demon to a library so that he can learn to read something other than comic books; this seems inspired by Mignola’s love of reading.
“Dracula” is horror novel who inspired Mignola the most, and in “Hellboy: Wake the Devil” he thanks “Dracula and all those other vampires I’ve loved.” “Hellboy: Conquering Worm” is titled after a poem by Edgar Allan Poe (with lines from this poem included), and presents a similar thank you to old pulp heroes like Doc Savage and the Shadow.
“The Bride of Frankenstein” is Mignola’s favorite monster movie, but there is another Boris Karloff horror film that he likes even more: “The Body Snatcher” from 1945, where Karloff plays an articulate, sinister grave robber instead of the lumbering creature.
Hellboy, as a character and a comic, is the ultimate distillation of everything Mignola loves. Sometimes described as a “paranormal investigator”, he has the attitude of Philip Marlowe but deals with matters outside the occult. He is also (in only the literal sense) a monster himself. Although mostly accepted by humans, Hellboy will never be able to totally cross the bridge to become one of them – it looks a lot like Frankenstein’s monster and his quest for companionship.
“The Bride of Frankenstein” deviates from Shelley’s book but better adapts the tragic side of the Monster. On the one hand, it includes the sections of the book where the monster tries to befriend a blind man only to be chased away again by people who can see his appearance. The Creature desires a Bride because of his loneliness, of course, and when she too recoils at the sight of him, his despair is complete.
Guillermo del Toro’s “Hellboy” films particularly emphasize Hellboy’s foreignness. The filmmaker, a big fan of “Frankenstein” and who is directing his own adaptation of Shelley’s book, clearly responded to and amplified the glimmers of isolation in Mignola’s Hellboy.
Played by Ron Perlman and drawn by Mignola, Hellboy has a thick jaw that rivals Karloff’s square-headed creature. The difference is that Hellboy speaks clearly and is not a murderer; he gives smiles and lollipops to children instead of drowning them. The Creature decided to attack a world that rejected him. In many “Hellboy” stories, Hellboy is told by monsters to start the apocalypse already, and he always tells them to go fuck themselves, twice ripping off his own horns to show them that he is disproving his destiny . (Hellboy never wears his horns fully developed to give himself a more human appearance.)
It helps that, unlike the creature, Hellboy had a father who loved him: Professor Trevor “Broom” Bruttenholm. In the climatic mini-series, “Hellboy: The Storm and the Fury”, Hellboy sees a sign reading “the end is near” and feels solemn, knowing that he was brought to Earth to bring about this end. Thus, Hellboy remembers a moment from his childhood when Broom reassured him that he was not Frankenstein’s monster:
Black horse
