Platypus of Truth

Hellboy: Into the Silent Sea S.T. Coleridge: U bless Snek Mike Mignola: Bless Snek? U crazy? S.T. Coleridge: Y U noe bless Snek? U bless Snek Mike Mignola: U bless Snek, Snek et U: CHOMP! That's about the shape of it, and well taken it is. Of course, there's also the nods to the styles of Prince Valiant, Gustave Dore, and Arthur Rackham, not to mention the allusions to Moby Dick , Diogenes, Robert E. Howard, and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner . If you're a Lit Geek and a Pop Culture Geek, then it's still pretty hard to get cooler than Mike Mignola. Oh, did I mention that he critiqued the entire 19th century scientific project in the same terms as The Abolition of Man ? Yeah, cool stuff.

The academic year is always exhausting and with a new position this year there hasn't been much time for reading anything that's not school related. However, I have managed to slip in a few treasures nonetheless. *Warning: Hellboy in Hell  spoilers* The first of those is the final installment of Mike Mignola's Hellboy saga: Hellboy in Hell: The Death Card . How do you end a series that has been going for twenty years? Hellboy's violent career as Anung un Rama, the World Destroyer, would argue a Big Bang. Unlike the movies, however, Mignola's Hellboy has always been more about the brooding silences and carefully worded dialog than the fights. We had our epic battle with the Dragon in The Storm and the Fury. In The Death Card , tough Hellboy harrows hell, defeats Behemoth and Leviathan, and slays the princes of Pandemonium, it is all done with a somber finality that rises above the the frenetic furor of an Avengers  or Batman Versus Superman: Dawn of Justice . In ...

This is a pen-and-ink version of a whiteboard doodle from my class on Frankenstein. Here we have The Monster fulfilling his promise to be with Frankenstein on his wedding night. Poor fool, Frankenstein believes that The Monster is coming for him! The silhouette style is meant to be a nod to German Impressionism, and influence on Mike Mignola's popular Hellboy  series. I used several of Mignola's Frankenstein illustrations from The House of the Living Dead  in class with great success. The students enjoyed seeing how Mignola's interpretation of The Monster matched with the images in their head. They're working on their own art project for the book and will be presenting their own creations on Monday. There are many ways to read a book. Mortimer Adler suggested that we do it pen-in-hand. I find it equally productive to do it sketch-book-in-hand.

Here are two pictures drawn during a recent trip to visit family. Both are concept art for the forth volume in a series of unpublished novels which chronicle the strange life of occult detective Ronald Fairfax. The style is inspired by a read through Hellboy's World , an academic study of the comic (and comics in general) by Stanford professor Scott Bukatman. If you like Hellboy, or comics in general, I can't recommend this book to you highly enough. Incidentally, it was also helpful in understanding an illuminated manuscript collection we happened upon during our trip. In other news, teacher's meeting have started, so posting may become erratic over the month of August. It's already be an a-typical summer with far more pictures than book reviews and reading live-blogs. Oh well. It's always Strange Places for us here at Platypus of Truth, and we'll see what the Fall brings.

I was looking for a reference to go with the last picture and came across this statue of Saint Bartholomew draped in his own skin from Milan. It looked like a perfect opportunity to play with my grey-scale markers, so I jumped right in. The finished piece reminds me a bit of those gorgeous renaissance grey-scales that Mike Mignola used to use as frontispieces for Hellboy chapters (a colored icon of St. Bartholomew actually appears in the first edition of Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder ). Anyhow, this would do just as well heading up one of the chapters of a BadNun  graphic novel...

After twelve issues spanning the better part of a decade, Hellboy's life on earth came to a apocalyptic end in The Storm and the Fury .  While his existence on this plain ended as was foretold, Hellboy's story is far from over.  That story continues with the launch of the brand new series Hellboy in Hell.  The collected first volume came out this summer and I was happy to stumble upon it at Barnes and Noble while I was looking for a map of Southern New England. The original Hellboy series ended with such a resounding "bang" that I had a little trepidation upon first opening the volume.  The new series has to start at the start and build up the action from scratch.  That sort of relaunch can kill all interest in a story.  I was glad to find (and I've just finished my third reading) that this is not the case with Hellboy in Hell: The Descent .  By now, Mignola's imagined world is so thick that it can sustain our interest even when the action slows almo...

I needed a break from A Treasury of Modern Fantasy (too many authors and too many styles coming in too fast) so I decided to turn back to an author whose work I've enjoyed exploring: Robert E. Howard.  This time, however, I decided to skip over Howard's famous Conan yarns and instead take a look at one of his earlier creations, Solomon Kane.  The idea of a puritan occult detective was too intriguing to pass up.  I have the whole collection of Kane's tales and I do intend to blog them all.  Right now, my little literary detour has only encompassed the first two short stories so I'm going to record my thoughts on them right away and get back to the rest as I have time. Skulls in the Stars Solomon Kane makes his debut with this classic bit of English Gothic including a haunted moor, a vengeful ghost, and a solitary miser.   Howard's Kane fits the portrait of the archetypal puritan: grim, principled, metaphysical, with an iron sense of right and wrong.  I h...

This story gave me nightmares.  That's rare.  I don't usually even dream; at least that I remember.  Now here's what I learned staring at the ceiling at four-in-the-morning. The Sleeping and the Dead is a two part story collected in Hellboy Volume 11: The Bride of Hell and others.   It features Hellboy doing a little free lance work for the B.P.R.D. in England back in the 60s.  It's also one of the few vampire pieces Mignola has done.  Over the course of the story we find out why there are so few vampires in Hellboy's world, but the main plot line is how an ancient European vampire takes over a Victorian English family and uses them to pray on the village of Hoxne.  At least that's what it appears at first...  In reality, it's really about what evil does and how, in the end, evil is undone by its own hubris.  The real terror in the story is not the vampire, nor his English mistress, nor his subverted manservant, but Mary, the youngest da...

So, when I was in college I spent a semester studying abroad at Oxford.  When I wasn't studying like mad or taking in the English culture, I turned to writing light fiction to pass the time.  On rainy evenings, I would sit down at the keyboard and tap out a few pages to send back to the folks at home.  Now in the midst of the writing, and the studying, and the rain, an idea came to me: what ever did happen to Vivian after she stole Merlin's spell and bound him in tree for all eternity.  Neither Mallory nor Tennyson have anything to say.  What if she was biding her time all those years until Arthur's kingdom fell and she could emerge as a power.  With her magic, the Saxons would worship her as a goddess and she would bring ruin on the isle of Britain.  Of course, she'd have to get her comeuppance in the end and be undone by the very powers she'd summoned.  That was my idea and it went exactly nowhere.  I couldn't write something like that an...

The Sacred Heart of Jesus always catches my eye.  There's a story in this.  Back during the Great Depression, my great-grandfather owned a restaurant.  One day, a man came in and told my great-grandfather that he was hungry but couldn't afford a meal.  My great-grandfather, a devout Catholic, sat him down and gave him one for free.  The man thanked him and left.  The next day he came back and told my great-grandfather that he had a job interview but needed a watch so he could be on time.  Again, my great-grandfather gave him his pocket watch.  Now the man did come back, and with the watch, but when he returned it to its owner there was a slight change: the man had painted inside in minute detail the Sacred Heart of Jesus.  It was his "thank you" for a man who was unafraid to live the gospel. Now, I told you that story to tell you a less important one.  Namely, what I see in Mike Mignola's Hellboy in Mexico , part of the collectio...

This post will be a review of Witchfinder: Lost and Gone Forever , the second volume in Mike Mignola's Sir Edward Grey series.  If you wish to remain spoiler free, don't read on. As the name suggests, Lost and Gone Forever brings Sir Edward Grey to the American Wild West on the trail of occult evil.  To briefly summarize the plot, Grey travels to Reidlynne Utah on the trail of Lord Adam Glaren, a British nobleman who has committed an unspecified crime. Grey's first attempts to locate Glaren are a disaster with the Englishman's failure to understand frontier culture landing him in the stereo-typical bar fight.  The locals then attempt to run him out of town and Grey is only saved by the intervention of the mysterious Morgan Kaler.  What exactly Mr. Kaler does, we never find out, but he seems to be a sort of occult detective himself.  Throughout Lost and Gone Forever , the older Kaler adopts a mentoring role, with Grey slowly learning that he doesn't kn...

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once claimed that he was on the side of the angels to which G.K. Chesterton quipped: "on the side of the fallen angels , and all the imperialisms of the princes of the abyss."  Beyond simply disagreeing with Disraeli's policies, Chesterton was reacting to a common sort of gnosticism popular in the Victorian era that equated anything "spiritual" with the Good.  The problem with such an attitude is that it ignores the possibility of spiritual evil.  It wants angels but ignores demons. Mike Mignola's occult-saturated world makes no bones about the existence of spiritual evil, but it often raises the very real problem of how to fight it.  Jesus' challenge to the pharisees with the principle that "Satan cannot cast our Satan" isn't a given for many of Mignola's protagonists.  This poses a very real problem in that if means don't matter, is it only the ends that separate Good from Evil?  What i...

September is just around the corner and that means that Summer is nearly at an end.  On that note, it's time to announce this year's winners for "The Seven Heavens of Summer Reading." Moon: Lilith by George MacDonald   Constancy and inconstancy form a central motif in this weird tale turned Universalist allegory.  As a symbol of this stand the various moons that govern the nightly changes of MacDonald's imaginary world. Venus: She by H. Rider Haggard  The colonial administrator turned author brings us a vivid picture of Venus Infernal in this seminal work of adventure pulp. Mars: Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein  One of the great soldier's novelists since Kipling, Heinlein easily captures the slot devoted to the god of war.  On the bounce! Mercury: From Alpha to Omega by Anne H. Groten  I tried to teach myself Greek this summer.  Not the best thing to try during a major move.  Still, what better book could there be for this summe...

As promised, I'm continuing my review of Hellboy Vol. 10 with a discussion of "In The Chapel of Moloch." "In The Chapel of Moloch" is the first Hellboy comic that Mignola has both written and illustrated in some time. As such, it seems to represent Mignola's personal musings in a less guarded fashion. *Spoilers Ahead* "In The Chapel of Moloch" presents us with three characters: Hellboy, the Jerry's agent, and Jerry the Artist. Given the cast of characters, Mignola's general theme is quite obvious: this is a meditation on art. The story begins with Jerry's agent calling Hellboy out to Portugal to investigate his client's increasingly weird behavior. Jerry's career has apparently hit a dead end, with the artist only capable of producing copies of Goya. In an effort to save his reputation, Jerry rents a villa in an isolated part of Portugal and holes up in the adjoining chapel to reconnect with his muse. Jerry stops t...

 It's not often that we get to enjoy two Hellboy volumes released within six months of each other.  After the groundbreaking "Wild Hunt," however, it's hard not to imagine a short stories volume being something of a let down.  I was very much pleased, then, to find that "The Crooked Man and Others" holds its own.  There are only four stories in this volume, but each one is a masterpiece of the "wierd tales" genre while also deepening our apreciation of Hellboy and his journey as a character. *Caution: Spoilers Ahead* The most important short-story in the volume is the one from which the collection takes its name: "The Crooked Man."  In "The Crooked Man" Mignola again reminds us just how much folklore there is to explore in the world by setting the tale in the back-woods of Appalachia.  After a long string of stories featuring Hellboy in Europe, Africa, and England, the return to America and American Folklore is welcome cha...

So, for anyone who's read " Hellboy: Conqueror Worm " out there: do you think there are any references/similarities to Lewis' " That Hideous Strength? " I know the main inspiration is Edgar Allen Poe's poem of the same name , but just think: macro-beings who want to destroy mankind, neo-fascists, floating head-in-a-jar , attempts to breed a new race of men, evil scientists trying to contact said macro-beings in space via a collection of severed heads in a cabinet hooked up to machines, the veneration of a space-worm with weird chanting ... At least we get spared "Fairy Hardcastle," and we do get a homunculus ! (P.S. -hope the links are helpful and not a superfluous annoyance!)