Review — ‘Giant Robot Hellboy’ #2 Showcases The Timeless Nature Of Mignola’s Mythology

Welcome to the table,

Mignola has done it again.

I can say Mignola because like Cher or Prince or Batman, when I invoke his name you know exactly who I’m talking about. B.P.R.D. brought me back into comics, because I needed to sink into something that felt intentional and balanced and full of things that I enjoyed.

As I’m rereading all the issues of Hellboy, The B.P.R.D., and the associated Mignola-verse comics, these old bridges of light and imagination fire up within my brain. The webwork of the hidden lore of this tapestry of modern mythos have inspired me for almost my whole life. It flairs to life like torches playing across cave painted walls.

Giant Robot Hellboy#2 picks up right after the events of issue #1 where Hellboy is kidnapped and forced to pilot a giant mech version of himself and gets knocked down hard by a giant sea iguana. Hellboy in mech form continues to get battered about until the team of mech techs starts to activate various weapons that have been built into the mech.

The strange pseudoscience tech is in full effect in this issue and, coupled with some really strong history of Hellboy notes, serves to do some really amazing world-building in a way that only Mignola can do. There are nods to secret experimentation, hidden government experiences, and a door between our world and the “other place,” all masterfully captured by Duncan Fegredo‘s art and Dave Stweart‘s color work.

Soon, it’s not just a one-on-one fight for Hellboy, but a real War of Monsters-type situation with a bunch of different Kaiju joining the melee. In true Mike Mignola fashion, when Hellboy is fumbling around with a big dumb helmet blindly knocking out attacks in the lab, Giant Robot Hellboy clashes with giant monsters on this hidden island base.

Then the page turn comes, and everything you thought you knew about the Mignola-verse is now even more strange and ten times as wonderful. Bits of mythos and lore get added into the mix and a handful of puzzle pieces drop into place leaving long time readers like me looking like that meme of Leonardo DiCaprio where he’s pointing at the TV screen in recognition.

Giant Robot Hellboy is not only an amazing pulp romp where giant monsters clash in spectacularly cinematic fashion. It also serves as a must-read for anyone who’s been keeping up with the ever-expanding lore of the Hellboy universe. This is another standout entry into Mignola’s modern mythology and is destined to stand alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Erwin Howard‘s for generations to come.

Until next time, the screen display in this issue… the ramifications of this stuff, it’s all so very very good! I would give it 20/10 if I did not think it would break the site.