Review — ‘Hellboy In Love: Obsidian’ #1 Balances Romance And Horror In The Best Way
by Anton Kromoff
Review
Hellboy In Love does a brilliant job of balancing the romantic storytelling with the pulse-bounding occult horror we have come to love from the well-storied world of Mignola’s B.P.R.D.
Overall
10/10Welcome to the table,
Merriam-Webster defines love as “strong affection for another arising out of kinship or personal ties.”
That’s eleven words that do an okay job of giving some kind of conversational meaning to a concept that is vast and multilayered, but it hardly captures the fullness of the sentiment. Love, in my experience, makes you strong and weak at the same time. It gives you strength, and it also shows you the things in this life that, if harmed, threatened, or put into danger, can break you beyond repair.
It was not until this issue of Hellboy In Love that I think I fully understood an aspect of the title I had been missing this whole time.
Let’s get into it.
Hellboy In Love: Obsidian #1 is written by Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden with art and colors from Alex Nieto and letters from the main man, Clem Robins.
The issue starts off on a beach in Crete, Greece, in 1980. Anastasia and Hellboy are on a nude beach where Anastasia has embraced the local tradition while Hellboy is keeping himself a bit more covered to keep an air of mystery about himself to the onlookers.
It’s a brilliant visual representation of the two of them at this stage in their relationship. Anastasia is very open and has dived headlong into both it and life, taking whatever comes for the two of them. Meanwhile Hellboy is mostly dialed-in, but is clearly still guarded on some level.
I’m not a normal reader of romance comics, but in this format and with these characters, the genre is growing on me with each passing issue.
After their time on the beach, Anastasia and Hellboy are back in the hotel room discussing how Hellboy left his life at the B.P.R.D. to be with her and how Hellboy wants to be with her as long as she will have him. Anastasia shares that she wants to go spend some time with Hellboy around “his people,” referring to Professor Broom, Liz Sherman, and Abe Sapien.
If we are the stories that make us, it makes sense she would want to be around others who have stories from Hellboy’s life and have experienced him at different points in his existence since he was summoned to Earth as a baby all those years ago.
The two head to bed, but as is the case in most stories involving Anung Un Rama, something sinister lurks close at hand. A spectral-wearing man with a humanoid spider creature sends said spider creature to attack the couple in their sleep. Hellboy wakes in just in time, splatting the thing in a brilliant green splork of goo )that honestly really works with the color palette that Nieto is using for this issue).
The adventure continues the next day at a dig site where Anastasia meets with the team and discusses her various connecting cases and a mystical skull that was stolen from her by a mysterious woman.
She believes the skull is connected to the site. Just as there seem to be some breakthroughs in research, the spectral-wearing man from the evening before arrives as a friend named Mr. Sheffield who is stealing things from the dig without anyone knowing.
Mr. Sheffield introduces himself to Anastasia and Hellboy. Everything seems friendly as Anastasia explains that every time she makes headway on her missions, she seems to encounter actual forces of darkness that disrupt her research.
It’s not long before Mr. Sheffield gets Anastasia and Hellboy alone and unleashes a swarm of large spider-humanoid creatures on them. As someone who is not a huge fan of spiders, this issue does a great job of creeping me out a bit.
The spiders overwhelm them after Anastasia makes the connection that the benefactor to Mr. Sheffield is none other than Delilah, a woman they saw at an occult auction during another Hellboy in Love adventure.
When Hellboy awakens, he finds himself surrounded by a crowd on the beach, and the floating specter of Delilah approaches him. They exchange words, and then Hellboy realizes that Anastasia and Mr. Sheffield are not with them.
That’s when Delilah drops the incredibly chilling line, “What a dreadful feeling it must be, to be so hard to kill… and to be in love with someone so soft…so vulnerable,” as she floats away, leaving Hellboy in a panicked state.
Hellboy In Love does a brilliant job of balancing the romantic storytelling with the pulse-bounding occult horror we have come to love from the well-storied world of Mignola’s B.P.R.D.
I have been a fan up to this point. I find myself really worried about what is about to come next, knowing that at some point, Anastasia is no longer part of Hellboy’s story.
Until next time, be kind to each other. You never know how long any of us have left.
