Hellboy comics offer a unique bounty of styles and atmospheres – the character has a massive, decades-spanning history and has gone up against everything from supernatural Nazis to Greek myths. Each new Hellboy series announced offers the opportunity for something new and zany, creepy or humorous. It’s a broad canvas.
Dark Horse
Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Ghost Ships of Labrador offers up a very specific type of atmosphere. A foggy night, a seaside village deserted but for ghoulish specters whose rotted ships have run aground from the sea. A story scenario not far removed from John Carpenter’s 1980 film The Fog, but made even more bizarre by the nature of ghosts in Hellboy comic books; these spirits are no blank, mindless beings but enriched by their own personalities and peculiarities.
Dark Horse
On its surface, The Ghost Ships of Labrador might not feel as vibrant and instantly compelling as some of the more off-the-wall Hellboy entries; Hellboy doesn’t make his entrance into the story until the halfway point of the first issue, and everything preceding is a bit long-winded in its stage-setting. Those peculiar ghouls don’t get as much play time as one might hope, either; by the end of the book we realize that it’s not even the ghosts that Hellboy and B.P.R.D. compatriots Abe Sapien and Agatha Blunt need to worry about. The suggestion is that the second (and final) issue will be even more intense.
Even if the book doesn’t drop us immediately into mystical action, it does present another aspect of Hellboy that sometimes gets overlooked: it’s cozy, a sort of warm blanket on a chill night. A ghost story less about spooks and more about the campfire you warm your hands around while listening to it. A lot of this feeling comes from those peculiarities of the Hellboy universe: ghosts are chatty and goofy (a pair of ancient mariners are enchanted by the magic of electric streetlights, here), the action of the narrative moves at an easy, ‘this is just another workday’ pace, and our primary characters are familiar chums.
That all makes The Ghosts of Labrador #1 feel like a great in-betweener, a story to cleanse the palette between Hellboy’s more grueling, epic adventures. It builds out the atmosphere of the world, which continues to be enriched even as the franchise passes its 30th anniversary. There’s no shame in a slow, cozy story; if anything, it makes the wider bounty of the series that much richer.
You must be logged in to post a comment.