Hellboy Volume 1: Seed of Destruction
by Mike Mignola, John Byrne
My first hellboy comic. I liked the two movies with Ron Perlman a lot.
Chapter One
Kraut here. Hello! Not summoning any monsters…
The Torch of Liberty… is that Captain America’s alter ego outside of Marvel?
Very old-fashioned looking artwork. Very straight-forward page layouts.
Frogs. Flashbacks. Nazis. Wut?
Chapter Two
Oh well. I really do not like the artwork with those blocky shadows and lack of details.
Story… very wordy. Not very suspenseful. It gets a bit more interesting towards the end, when the bad guy shows up. It saved this volume from being dropped after this chapter.
Chapter Three
Still wordy. Long conversations and a fight scene with an equally longish and boring voice-over by Hellboy. It doesn‘t add anything interesting. And to make it worse, this whole drawn out affair is topped off with the bad guy narrating his life story. And how Hellboy came to be. Again. Argh.
Too much telling, too little showing! In a graphic novel! Come on!
Chapter Four
The climax. Action, fighting, monsters and again a ridiculous amount of narration, that took out all the fun for me. The grand finale was just so drawn out and not in a suspenseful way. Whatever. Thank goodness, I am almost done!
Two stories…
These two origin stories were not bad.
And the final Hellboy gallery had some good panels.
But overall this was really disappointing and just not for me. I did not like the artwork, the single chapter plots were really thin and there was just too much narration. It was just not well balance and lacked suspense.
Cathy's Reading Bonanza 