Hellboy Omnibus Volume 2: Strange Places stories by Mike Mignola; “Into the Silent Sea” story by Mike Mignola and Gary Gianni; “The Right Hand of Doom”, “Box Full of Evil”, “Conqueror Worm”; “The Third Wish”, and “The Island” art by Mike Mignola; “Being Human” art by Richard Corben

Dark Horse, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-50670-688-7

Available: Paperback, Kindle edition, comiXology

Hellboy Omnibus Volume 2: Strange Places includes Hellboy’s adventures from 1998 to 2005, in chronological order. In these tales, Hellboy searches for answers about himself and his destiny.

In Hellboy: The Right Hand of Doom, the titular character meets Adrian Frost, the son of Professor Malcolm Frost who spent the last years of his life trying to kill Hellboy. The priest tries to convince Hellboy of his father’s fear of him, and that he wasn’t an evil man. He offers to sell Hellboy the only surviving clue that he found in his father’s notes about himself. The price is a story, the story of Hellboy. He tells a story of the Mad Monk who came back, his death at Hellboy’s hand, and the search for who Hellboy really is, who he is meant to be.

“Box Full of Evil” finds Hellboy and Abe Sapien investigating the case of a mysterious man who can paralyze a household while he digs through the walls of a gentleman’s sitting room only to pull out a small locked box and a pair of commonplace fireplace tongs. What could the box hold, and who is the man who had the power to subdue everyone in a large house merely with a hand shaped candle?

In B.P.R.D.: Being Human, Hellboy convinces the B.P.R.D. to let him take Roger the Homunculus out in the field to investigate the dead bodies of the Quillen family, who walk out of their graves to return to their run-down estate. They discover a Black woman with a vendetta to settle. She was born out of the rape of her mother at the hands of the head of the household, and she wants them to pay in their afterlives.

Roger and Hellboy are sent out again in Conqueror Worm, with a guide to Hunte Castle, to stop the Nazi spacecraft that is estimated to crash land there. Hellboy discovers the terrible truth about something the BPRD decided to add to Roger’s internal workings when they brought him back to life. When they arrive at the castle, they find they were led into a trap, and Lobster Johnson is real.

Trapped by the nail of the Bog Roosh, Hellboy must fight his way to freedom in “The Third Wish”. The youngest mermaid of three proves an unlikely ally in his journey, and reconciles with her father in the process. Hellboy meets the cursed being that set his existence into motion in “The Island”. This creature underestimates Hellboy’s strength and humanity in the end. In the final story in the omnibus, Into the Silent Sea, the true commander of a crew of men on the ship named Rebecca is called by something in the sea, just as she calls to it. Will anyone survive her visit?

Also included in this volume is a Hellboy sketchbook with notes by Mignola. The sketchbook is a bonus to see how Mignola crafts his stories and artwork as well. It has been fantastic to read these stories in chronological order to see how Hellboy’s story unfolds. This also provides a new reader the opportunity to become familiar with the short stories in the Hellboy/B.P.R.D universe. There are, of course, mythological and Lovecraftian overtones galore. Something that seems to be prevalent in the Hellboy stories is the subject of humanity’s inability or unwillingness to recognize the fact that Hellboy is not human, based on his actions and decisions to aid humans when at all possible, even risking his own life at times. They don’t have any qualms about calling other creatures, whether they be demons or homunculi, inhuman. This, of course, gets under Hellboy’s skin and he is not shy about addressing it. We even see the big red guy quit the B.P.R.D. as a result of something he can’t sit by and watch. Highly recommended.

Contains: some blood, violence

Reviewed by Lizzy Walker