Here to mark National Pancake Day is one of my favorite comic-book panels ever.
I really have nothing to add except that if I’d been able to bring myself to bastardize Mike Mignola’s work (beyond what I did to straighten and flatten the photo I took from my Hellboy Library Edition printing of the story) I would’ve probably included the Campbell’s soup can for emphasis because it looks much to my frustration like posting will continue to be all too infrequent.
Heidi MacDonald, a longtime journalist and editor who runs comics site The Beat, coined a great phrase several years ago: “satisfying chunk”. More than ever that’s what I’m after when reading new material, with issues costing 3 to 4 bucks
a pop — not just a steep price on the face of it but one that suffers in comparison to copious collections of recent material that easily best the per-chapter price of single issues and usually throw in extras to boot. There’s also a wealth of archival material now available nearly impossible to even imagine a couple of decades ago.
I greatly appreciate series that compel me to reread often, too, and reward my doing
so in different ways:
I’ve pared down my pull list at the comics shop yet again, both to help offset some
new monthly expenses and because most single issues simply cost too much for too little reward anymore.
I’m looking to get rid of most of my thousands of comic books, but Hellboy ranks among the keepers. The series is pretty much my all-time favorite, certainly when you discount nostalgia; Mike Mignola long ago proved that he’s as accomplished and unique a writer as he is an illustrator. While I think the absolute best Hellboy stories are short, self-contained tales, the mythology woven by Mignola and his collaborators in the family of Dark Horse’s Hellboy, BPRD, Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson, and Witchfinder one-shots and miniseries rivals any other from graphic novels, television, film, or prose in recent decades.
Yet I come here not to praise Hellboy, but to barter him.
