Hellboy: Weird Tales Volume 1 [Paperback]

Midnight Cowboy - A young Hellboy gets into trouble at Area 51.
Haunted - Hellboy investigates a supposedly haunted house but finds no trace of ghosts but they find him.
Family Story - Hellboy is doing research and discovers some strange goings on in the family that owns the library.
Hot - Hellboy investigates something that is scaring people out of some Chinese hot springs. The Water Sprite he finds awakens the horn in him.
The Children of the Black Mound - Cold hard reason squares off against ghosts, legends and religion. A tale of a young historical figure.
Big-Top-hell-Boy - Hellboy investigates a cunning array of circus ghosts and find a curious property of his right hand.
Flight Risk - Aces of the jetpack vie for altitude records but some rather large bats may have other ideas.
Hellboy & Co in Downtime - Hellboy has tackled some evil entities in his time. Now he must face his ultimate challenges as he goes up against the office copier and the soda machine
Abe Sapien Star of the BPRD - Hellboy is just a musclebound bulk while Abe Sapien is the one who really brings home the sushi (I mean bacon).
Hey, Hey, Suckers! - Hellboy returns from a gala and can't help boasting and rubbing it in.
Curse of the Haunted Doily - Kate faces her mom's ghost
The Dread Within - Liz vs Possession
Still Born - Hellboy attends a dangerous birth in reality and in his dreams.
Party Pooper - Hellboy's birthday party

This is a fun collection. The stories vary between the silly to the dark and eerie. Art styles also cover most of the spectrum from the beautiful pencils of Hot to the cartoonish Hellboy and Co in Downtime. A must read for any Hellboy fan.

In order to fill in the gaps and to make us all feel better, Hellboy and the gang have been taken under the wings of mixed group of artists and storytellers, some questionable and some rather talented, allowing other people to work with what Mike started and try to give us that fix we want. And while they aren't Mignola and you can tell it a few times way too much, some do an outstanding job of filling in and dosing up all the Hellboy junkies out there in need of a quick fix.

Now before I continue and rain praise on this parade that could be taken in many different lights, I have to let you in on a little secret. I'm actually a Hellboy junkie, fan of just about anything Mike Mignola touches, and I like following the stream that flows from that magically-tasty trough. I've gone to lengths to follow the BPRD sagas that have been coming out, tracking down one-shots of Abe Sapien before the TPB and finding the little hints Mignola has dropped here and there, so I'm not what you would call "unbiased party." I've followed quite a few forgettable drops in the artistic bucket just to catch three-four pages of a character I can't seem to get enough of, and I'm assuming that most people that would go out and purchase this have to be at least a lower grade of obsessive like myself. For anyone that isn't and is not familiar with the concept of the BPRD, they research the paranormal and they try to remedy those problems. More often than not that results in a little fist-to-face action, and more often than not it also involves some really strange recounts. For anyone unaware of who Hellboy is, there are a few books out there to answer a question that I'm not even going to begin tackling here.

In the Weird Tales installations, there were some rather high notes and quite a few stories. I personally enjoyed seeing a lot of them dedicated to the off-the-beaten-path characters, too, like Liz Sherman and Baba Yaga. While I wouldn't go as far as to say that anything truly meaningful to Hellboy or the BPRD takes place in them, I'd say that they contain a lot of what you'd expect. Sometimes that unfortunately translates into something that I, as a reader knowledgeable in Hellboy, abhor because the writers feel they I have to be reminded of some of the essentials. Other times it also means that we get art that isn't the greatest in the world (and, once or twice, that I wouldn't have let my pet use for diaper duty), and the short stories we find are just that and they aren't really allowed to shuffle things around. A few times, however, everything hits just right, a demon kid breathes a little fire and sets everything ablaze, and I sit thinking that everything therein is just plain creepy. A little Baba Yaga comes to count the fingers of the dead, Hellboy does something interesting or recounts a tale of his youth, and Roger even finds his way into the fray. This happened enough times in the mix, at least once per comic edition to the Graphic Novel, so it made it pay off pretty well and made the other portions and complaints vanish. In fact, it was kind of surprising because I expected a disaster with Mignola off working on the Hellboy movie.

If you really don't know anything about Hellboy and you've picked up on this as something of a primer, I'd advise you to go back and try on Mike Mignola's work so you can get thoroughly acquainted with the idea. In the four main graphic novels, you'll see what's what and how the idea has influenced so many people, understanding what these stories are all about. These are more like tasty little tidbits to tie a person over, given to us by people that enjoy the concept but aren't the Patient Zero of the Hellboy contagion. Its would actually be something akin to a cover in music, only its done with frames instead of melody. Also take note that this isn't the whole collection because there are eight comics in the Weird Tales collection. That means there'll be another graphic novel to come, and some of the stories that'll be in it are really, really superb.