Review — ‘Young Hellboy: Thrilling Sky Adventures’ #1 Brings Pulp Adventure To A Story Within A Story
by Anton Kromoff
Review
If this whole four-issue arc ends up being Young Hellboy reading this comic adventure, I will be content based purely on how much I enjoyed this first issue. It’s an odd way to tell a story for sure, but I love odd stuff, and this feels so much like something from the well-storied world of Hellboy that I was happy to be along for the ride from cover to cover.
Overall
10/10Welcome to the table,
The thrilling action and adventure of the fictional 1930s and 1940s have captured the imaginations of radio listeners, moviegoers, novel readers, and comic book enthusiasts for generations. Barrel-rolling biplanes, daring shootouts, and dashing heroes in the World War 2 era — free of modern technological conventions — were out and about smashing Nazis with good old-fashioned superpowers and signet rings while teaching us about right and wrong between witty quips and dazzling explosions.
Just as we can enjoy a pulp comic now and again, young Hellboy also liked sinking into these atomic tales, like the new miniseries Young Hellboy: Thrilling Sky Adventures #1. Let’s get into it!
This ‘comic adventure within a comic adventure’ is written by Mike Mignola and Thomas Sniegoski, with art by Craig Rousseau, colors by Chris O’Halloran, and letters by the iconic Clem Robins, who I think letters 90% of the comics I read these days.
The story kicks off in 1947 with young Hellboy hanging out at the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense with his dog Mac on a Saturday morning. Like most kids of that time, Hellboy is settling in for a bowl of cereal and grabs an issue of “Thrilling Air Stories: Featuring the Real-Life Adventures of Scarlett Santiago: The Sky Devil!”
As someone who has been really trying to unplug from my phone, a Saturday morning reading comics with my pets while eating cereal honestly sounds like a dream come true these days.
The story within a story has a delightful pulp intro with a mysterious figure. They may or may not be part plant, or bug, or alien, or plant-bug-alien stealing a strange-looking artifact in a museum.
I don’t need anything more than that. I’m already signed on and excited to see where the heck this story is going. Sometimes we overcomplicate things, and “Bad guy steals magic thing. Good guy goes and gets it back” is the kind of story I can really sink into. It’s not a lot of mental gymnastics trying to figure out shades of grey and who is a double agent and why the guy who is faster than a speeding bullet and can leap tall buildings in a single bound needs a space motorcycle or anything … but I digress. Back to the adventure!
The Sky Devil, a female pilot with a devil mask, shows up to thwart some bootlegging criminals, which she does with ease before returning to the hangar where she touches base with her mechanic.
Meanwhile across the globe in France, a bunch of wealthy socialites prepare to dine on the Bubal Hartbeest, a creature reported to be the last of its kind.
-Spoilers Follow-
It’s at this point we get introduced to another pulp age hero, The Ghost Leopard. The Ghost Leopard is one Clark Henry Parrish, friend to animals and ecological do-gooder who wears a spiffy pulp-era costume and communes with beasts great and small.
The character is very Phantom-coded but has that air of occult gloom and existential dread that comes with most of the “heroes” in the well-storied world of Hellboy.
It’s wild how quickly I forgot this was a story within a Hellboy story. That made me wonder why this format was how they were telling this tale.
I assume that this will somehow cross over into the “real world” that Hellboy inhabits. The Thrilling Air Stories comic called out “real life” on the cover, but up to this point that has not been made clear.
The Sky Devil and her mechanic are running low on funds and are offered a job by a mysterious benefactor who may be the plant-bug-alien who stole the strange-looking artifact from the museum earlier in the issue. They take the job and are almost immediately attacked by the gang they disrupted at the kickoff of the issue.
This leaves the issue closing on a firefight with a “To Be Continued” cliffhanger leading us into issue #2.
If this whole four-issue arc ends up being Young Hellboy reading this comic adventure, I will be content based purely on how much I enjoyed this first issue. It’s an odd way to tell a story for sure, but I love odd stuff, and this feels so much like something from the well-storied world of Hellboy that I was happy to be along for the ride from cover to cover.
Until next time, I hope The Sky Devil and The Ghost Leopard get many more adventures because they are a ton of fun!
