The Fractal Hall Journal

I was a little disappointed with the first Hellboy film. It’s not that it wasn’t good, it’s just that I don’t think it lived up to its potential. Part of the problem is the quality of the original comic, one of (if not the) best created during the 90s. Partly it’s Guillermo del Toro’s signature style.

Don’t get me wrong, I think del Toro’s great. But in the same way Tim Burton’s Batman was Tim Burton’s Batman, I thought a lot of the tone and character of Mike Mignola’s work was lost in favour of del Toro’s interpretation. And that’s only going to become more obvious with the second film, based as it is on an original storyline rather than adapted from the series. Of course, differing artistic interpretation isn’t always a problem with filmed adaptations because everyone brings something new to the table, but in this case I thought it exacerbated some of the movie’s other missteps.

Take the audience POV character, the young Agent who I don’t remember the name of and don’t really care enough about to go looking for. He was utterly superfluous to the plot, practically disappearing halfway through. He’s not in the comic, and is only there for the other characters to spout exposition to. I understand why he’s utilised. In the original Hellboy comic, you can drop freaky characters in without much explanation because that’s just how genre comics work. The creators didn’t trust that a wider audience would buy that. Maybe they’re right, but even so it’s bad form, straight off the bat, to show that you mistrust the people who just shovelled out the cash to see your picture.

Because he’s so unimportant, and because he’s so much less interesting than any other character (so much so he’s not in the sequel), it’s obvious he’s not really there to draw the audience in, as he’s too bland. He starts to look like a sop thrown (actually, is a sop something you can throw?) to the studio so the creators can pretend they tried to make it appeal to more than the nerd crowd. After that, his purpose is to look all wide-eyed and ask questions so the producers don’t have to find a more elegant (but more difficult to pull off) way of infodumping. I’m not sure if it’s even required. Surely we can figure out what’s happening mostly from the 1940s sequence? And that stuff about World War 2 carrying on after 1945 always struck me as a bit of a false note that jars with the intricate worldbuilding of the comic.

I don’t know, maybe I’m being spiteful because Dark Horse and the Hellboy titles annoyed me this morning. I got round to finishing off BPRD: 1946 (very good, by the way), and I noticed a comment in the letters page about the collected edition of Darkness Calls having a specially written epilogue touching on Roger’s demise. And this really ticked me off.

I understand the marketing drive surrounding collected editions, but I can’t help but think sometimes that when the industry finally stops releasing monthly comics there’ll be a whole load of pissing and moaning from the people who make it so easy for me to not bother with individual issues anymore. Because there’s no fucking way I’m buying the story twice; comics are a crazy fucking habit as it is, and doing that strikes me as utterly insane.

It’s one thing to put extra bits and pieces as an incentive for people to get the trade, but the extra scene above seems to me like an important plot point that I’d have liked to have read. So I’m not sitting here thinking ooh, I am so excited I shall hand over my cash once again. I feel like I’ve been ripped off by one of the few ongoing series I consider to be consistantly brilliant. Is that really a great marketing technique? I don’t know if I’ve really got a conclusion here (other than maybe I need to get a bit more fresh air because I’m staggering dangerously close to entitlement), other than I think this shows how little these companies rate the monthly pamphlet sales in comparison to trade sales.

Contrast this with the obvious importance of individual issue sales to series like Casanova or Phonogram, where extra material in the issues isn’t available in collected form. I don’t know whether this is due to economic issues or just personal preference on the creators’ behalf, although it’s worth remembering the currently accepted view that, for new properties, you need to build a monthly fanbase to make it worth collecting the issues together for a trade. Although I suspect as time goes on (paperback novel style) people will start releasing more things like Casavova in an original graphic novel form, we’re not quite there yet. But the day is coming.

Ultimately, if that’s the market where they make most of their money, then that’s that and no amount of bellyaching is going to change it. I’ve certainly learned my lesson on this one.