Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Others
Encyclopedia
Hellboy: The Crooked Man and Others is the tenth collected edition of Mike Mignola
's comic book
series Hellboy
, collecting "Hellboy: The Crooked Man #1-3", "Hellboy: In the Chapel of Moloch," "Hellboy: They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships" and the story "The Mole" from "Free Comic Book Day 2008: Hellboy." The collected edition features an introduction by Gahan Wilson
. As with Hellboy stories generally, it was published by Dark Horse Comics
.
, was first published from July 2008 through September 2008 as issues 1-3 of an eponymous Hellboy Limited Series
. The issues were numbered 33 through 35 of the overarching Hellboy series.
to be the region's own version of the Devil
. Tom invites along Hellboy and also Cora whose soul he hopes to save from the Crooked Man - "It's too late for me. He's gonna have me -- but if I can do right by her and my pa -- I guess I will a done somethin."
Tom and Hellboy discuss the burden Hellboy is carrying that must be many times worse than Tom's but which he hasn't started to feel yet. They try to take Cora through a region of coal mines but since a 1902 collapse the mines had been infested with deformed cannibal witches descended from the Roanoke
colony. Cora can hear the witches calling her. Tom tells Cora they're safe while it's daylight but in the Hurricane they're "on the devil's time" and night falls immediately. Cora explodes into a shower of small demonic animals from whom Tom and Hellboy are only saved by Tom's first use of his witch-bone. They arrive at the church to find Cora's ghost waiting for them, and the church's pastor, blind Reverend Watts, who tries to persuade Tom that whatever he's done he can still be saved. Effie and the region's witches surround the church grounds which they cannot enter, calling to Ferrell to join them. The Crooked Man arrives.
There is a brief interlude how-to page where a witch named Grammy Oakum and her cat familiar instruct the reader on how to create witchball projectiles for cursing enemies and in the process damning oneself to Hell.
Back at the church Witkins calls in demanding Tom pay him his debt. Reverend Watts confronts Witkins and is tempted with piles of gold for rebuilding his church, and with the return of his youth and his sight. Witkins sends the coffins of the graveyard's more evil residents hurtling into the church, some of them young women restored to beauty to torment Watts further. Watts prays, successfully, to be made old and blind again. The Crooked Man reminds Hellboy of his demonic origins: "Be a sport, reach over there and snap Tom's neck for me. Fetch me that lucky bone of his, and come on outta there. We'll have a good ol time!" Learning that the bone is what Witkins is after, Watts takes Tom's hand containing the bone and squeezes the holy spirit into it - they burn a cross onto the blade of a shovel and give it to Hellboy ("That fella's got a hard road ahead of him, and no end of trouble ... let him get some licks in while he can.") who dispatches Witkins with it. The witches go fleeing, and in the morning with Tom's father buried in the churchyard, Tom and Hellboy go up to Wikins' mansion to finish him off. Witkins sits clutching the souls of his victims which appear as gold coins in jars - Tom tosses him his witchbone which sends him and perhaps his victms' souls to Hell. They find Effie who is a very old woman and put her bridle on her, turning her into a horse on whose side they paint the words "BEWARE! I AM A WITCH!"
's Hellboy: The Science of Evil video game. The story pits Hellboy and Abe Sapien
against the ghost of the pirate Blackbeard
. The title is from Psalm 107
: "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters/These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep."
, 1986 - Marc Arrow, a waterfront fortune teller, finds a truncated skull in an antique shop when the cabinet containing it spontaneously topples over - touching it brings him his first legitimate psychic vision and so he kills the proprietor with a handy sextant
and steals it. A month later the BPRD are staking out North Carolina
's Ocracoke Island
, the antique dealer's ghost (communicating via medium) having tipped them off to the theft of what they realize is the skull of the legendary pirate. A walkie-talkie carrying Abe Sapien
encounters a robed figure sitting on the beach which legend has haunted by Blackbeard's headless body, while in a motorboat approaching the beach a local historian fills Hellboy in on the known history of Blackbeard's death and of his skull, passed down from owner to owner as a macabre drinking goblet. Marc has partnered with criminal Whitey Pacelli to bring him to the island - the ghost appears, and when Marc insists on negotiating with it himself, Whitey shoots him. His partner dead, Whitey attempts to hold the head for ransom but Blackbeard's body bisects him with a cutlass. Hellboy confronts the re-formed Blackbeard and is shot in the shoulder. Meanwhile Abe finds he is talking to the undead body of one of Blackbeard's victims, as more gather in the surf. They swim off after Blackbeard and Abe follows. Hellboy punches off Blackbeard's head and the body nearly kills the historian when he reaches for it. Hellboy and Blackbeard fight in the water and Blackbeard invites Hellboy to join him as a pirate, to which Hellboy replies with a deadpan "Let me think about it." Blackbeard's dead victims rise around Blackbeard and drag him into the water - Abe, who has swum to the location, sees Blackbeard's body pulled into the depths, its head dragged behind it in one hand and screaming a stream of bubbles. Abe greets Hellboy who comments "Everybody loves a pirate," and they head back to the mainland.
. At night when the sculpts, the non-lockable chapel doors will nevertheless not open. Jerry is asleep in the house as they investigate the chapel, full of Jerry's paintings, and Hellboy notes that Jerry is "ripping off Goya
," prompting the promoter's retort that Jerry, in reappropriating Goya for relevant modern work, is "saving Goya's ass!" which Hellboy seems to find unconvincing. Hellboy investigates the sculpture whose clay bleeds when poked with a trowel. Elsewhere in the chapel he finds a mark of the Knights of St. Hagan (a fictional analogue to the Knights Templar
) of the sort left by their investigators at sites where they've stamped out serious occult practice. The two wait inside the chapel for Jerry to arrive. When he does, a miniscule hunched corpse climbs up onto his shoulders from out of a hole in the floor. As it whispers to Jerry (who begins to decorate the sculpture's base with a motif of corpses in fire), Hellboy produces a relic from his pockets, "a silver button from the coat Bishop Zrinyi was wearing when he fought the Carpathian goat" and tosses it into the corpse's eye, lighting up the inside of its skull and making it run about in agony. As the corpse topples senseless back into its hole, the Moloch statue comes to life and Hellboy readies to destroy it while a re-awakened Jerry shouts "No! Don't do it! The paintings aren't working! I'm just ripping off Goya!" When Hellboy shatters the sculpture a giant beating heart is revealed whose aortas and ventricles start to extend into tentacles as (over Jerry's protesting screams) Hellboy shoots it. Jerry laments that he'll never paint again, to Hellboy's immediate and expressed approval. "Also stay away from sculpture." He tells Jerry's friend to have their landlord do something about the hole in the floor.
, was first published as a story in the 2008 Free Comic Book Day
free Hellboy comic. It takes place shortly before Hellboy: Darkness Calls
.
, the home of Darkness Calls' Harry Middleton. A drunken Hellboy is playing cards with Middleton and two other ghosts, who notice a mole on his hand. He wakes up alone at the table to find that the mole has gotten bigger. It rapidly swells to his own size and bursts to reveal another demon, who emerges from the boil leaving nothing of Hellboy but his empty skin and his apocalyptically powerful stone right hand. Hellboy's skin tears away from the hand and blows out the window, finally coming to rest on a weathervane across town. Left alone in the room, the demon takes the stone hand and begins to use it to end the world. At that moment Hellboy awakens, for real this time, back at the table. He empties his shotglass, and, reassuring himself that it was "just a dream," refills it.
: American Mythmaker," introducing readers to the pulp writer to whom The Crooked Man was written in tribute.
Mike Mignola
Michael Joseph "Mike" Mignola is an American comic book artist and writer who created the comic book series Hellboy for Dark Horse Comics. He has worked for animation projects such as Atlantis: The Lost Empire and the adaptation of his one shot comic book, The Amazing Screw-On Head.-Career:Mignola...
's comic book
Comic book
A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...
series Hellboy
Hellboy
Hellboy is a comic book superhero created by writer-artist Mike Mignola. The character first appeared in San Diego Comic-Con Comics #2 , and has since appeared in various eponymous miniseries, one-shots and intercompany crossovers...
, collecting "Hellboy: The Crooked Man #1-3", "Hellboy: In the Chapel of Moloch," "Hellboy: They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships" and the story "The Mole" from "Free Comic Book Day 2008: Hellboy." The collected edition features an introduction by Gahan Wilson
Gahan Wilson
Gahan Wilson is an American author, cartoonist and illustrator known for his cartoons depicting horror-fantasy situations...
. As with Hellboy stories generally, it was published by Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics
Dark Horse Comics is the largest independent American comic book and manga publisher.Dark Horse Comics was founded in 1986 by Mike Richardson in Milwaukie, Oregon, with the concept of establishing an ideal atmosphere for creative professionals. Richardson started out by opening his first comic book...
.
The Crooked Man
The Crooked Man, scripted by Mignola with art by Richard CorbenRichard Corben
Richard Corben is an American illustrator and comic book artist best known for his comics featured in Heavy Metal magazine...
, was first published from July 2008 through September 2008 as issues 1-3 of an eponymous Hellboy Limited Series
Limited series
A limited series is a comic book series with a set number of installments. A limited series differs from an ongoing series in that the number of issues is determined before production and it differs from a one shot in that it is composed of multiple issues....
. The issues were numbered 33 through 35 of the overarching Hellboy series.
Synopsis
Wandering in the Appalachian mountains in 1958 (after "finishing up some stuff down South", Hellboy encounters Tom Ferrell, a native of the region returning for the first time in decades to atone for his youthful initiation as a witch. Ferrell has never practiced magic but carries a "witch-bone" which has gotten him safely through his travels. They befriend Cora Fisher, a witch driven to magic by personal tragedy, and encounter Effie Kolb, the youthful-appearing witch who first initiated Tom, and who brings Tom his dying father who she has ridden to death transformed into a horse by a magic bridle. Tom resolves to take the corpse of his father to a church up in "The Hurricaine," a part of the mountain dominated by "The Crooked Man," an eighteenth century miser and war profiteer named Jeremiah Witkins hanged for his crimes but then sent back from HellHell
In many religious traditions, a hell is a place of suffering and punishment in the afterlife. Religions with a linear divine history often depict hells as endless. Religions with a cyclic history often depict a hell as an intermediary period between incarnations...
to be the region's own version of the Devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
. Tom invites along Hellboy and also Cora whose soul he hopes to save from the Crooked Man - "It's too late for me. He's gonna have me -- but if I can do right by her and my pa -- I guess I will a done somethin."
Tom and Hellboy discuss the burden Hellboy is carrying that must be many times worse than Tom's but which he hasn't started to feel yet. They try to take Cora through a region of coal mines but since a 1902 collapse the mines had been infested with deformed cannibal witches descended from the Roanoke
Roanoke
Roanoke may refer to:*Roanoke , Carolina Algonquian-speaking tribe in eastern North Carolina*Roanoke , an American ship *Roanoke Colony, a former English colony that mysteriously disappeared...
colony. Cora can hear the witches calling her. Tom tells Cora they're safe while it's daylight but in the Hurricane they're "on the devil's time" and night falls immediately. Cora explodes into a shower of small demonic animals from whom Tom and Hellboy are only saved by Tom's first use of his witch-bone. They arrive at the church to find Cora's ghost waiting for them, and the church's pastor, blind Reverend Watts, who tries to persuade Tom that whatever he's done he can still be saved. Effie and the region's witches surround the church grounds which they cannot enter, calling to Ferrell to join them. The Crooked Man arrives.
There is a brief interlude how-to page where a witch named Grammy Oakum and her cat familiar instruct the reader on how to create witchball projectiles for cursing enemies and in the process damning oneself to Hell.
Back at the church Witkins calls in demanding Tom pay him his debt. Reverend Watts confronts Witkins and is tempted with piles of gold for rebuilding his church, and with the return of his youth and his sight. Witkins sends the coffins of the graveyard's more evil residents hurtling into the church, some of them young women restored to beauty to torment Watts further. Watts prays, successfully, to be made old and blind again. The Crooked Man reminds Hellboy of his demonic origins: "Be a sport, reach over there and snap Tom's neck for me. Fetch me that lucky bone of his, and come on outta there. We'll have a good ol time!" Learning that the bone is what Witkins is after, Watts takes Tom's hand containing the bone and squeezes the holy spirit into it - they burn a cross onto the blade of a shovel and give it to Hellboy ("That fella's got a hard road ahead of him, and no end of trouble ... let him get some licks in while he can.") who dispatches Witkins with it. The witches go fleeing, and in the morning with Tom's father buried in the churchyard, Tom and Hellboy go up to Wikins' mansion to finish him off. Witkins sits clutching the souls of his victims which appear as gold coins in jars - Tom tosses him his witchbone which sends him and perhaps his victms' souls to Hell. They find Effie who is a very old woman and put her bridle on her, turning her into a horse on whose side they paint the words "BEWARE! I AM A WITCH!"
They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships
They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships, story by Mignola and Josh Dysart, art by Jason Shawn Alexander, was published by Dark Horse in 2007 for limited free distribution to promote KonamiKonami
is a Japanese leading developer and publisher of numerous popular and strong-selling toys, trading cards, anime, tokusatsu, slot machines, arcade cabinets and video games...
's Hellboy: The Science of Evil video game. The story pits Hellboy and Abe Sapien
Abe Sapien
Abraham "Abe" Sapien is a fictional character in the comic book series Hellboy, created by Mike Mignola. He takes his name from "Icthyo sapiens," the fanciful species designation chosen for him by his colleagues in the 19th-century Oannes Club, and from Abraham Lincoln, on whose assassination date...
against the ghost of the pirate Blackbeard
Blackbeard
Edward Teach , better known as Blackbeard, was a notorious English pirate who operated around the West Indies and the eastern coast of the American colonies....
. The title is from Psalm 107
Psalm 107
Psalm 107 is a psalm in the biblical book of Psalms. Written by King David, this psalm is a song of thanksgiving to God, who has been merciful to his people and gathered all who were lost. It is beloved of mariners due to its reference to ships and the sea Psalm 107 (Greek numbering: 106) is a...
: "They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters/These see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep."
Synopsis
Newburyport, MANewburyport, Massachusetts
Newburyport is a small coastal city in Essex County, Massachusetts, United States, 35 miles northeast of Boston. The population was 21,189 at the 2000 census. A historic seaport with a vibrant tourism industry, Newburyport includes part of Plum Island...
, 1986 - Marc Arrow, a waterfront fortune teller, finds a truncated skull in an antique shop when the cabinet containing it spontaneously topples over - touching it brings him his first legitimate psychic vision and so he kills the proprietor with a handy sextant
Sextant
A sextant is an instrument used to measure the angle between any two visible objects. Its primary use is to determine the angle between a celestial object and the horizon which is known as the altitude. Making this measurement is known as sighting the object, shooting the object, or taking a sight...
and steals it. A month later the BPRD are staking out North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
's Ocracoke Island
Ocracoke, North Carolina
Ocracoke is a census-designated place and unincorporated town located at the southern end of Ocracoke Island, located entirely within Hyde County, North Carolina. The population was 769 as of the 2000 census...
, the antique dealer's ghost (communicating via medium) having tipped them off to the theft of what they realize is the skull of the legendary pirate. A walkie-talkie carrying Abe Sapien
Abe Sapien
Abraham "Abe" Sapien is a fictional character in the comic book series Hellboy, created by Mike Mignola. He takes his name from "Icthyo sapiens," the fanciful species designation chosen for him by his colleagues in the 19th-century Oannes Club, and from Abraham Lincoln, on whose assassination date...
encounters a robed figure sitting on the beach which legend has haunted by Blackbeard's headless body, while in a motorboat approaching the beach a local historian fills Hellboy in on the known history of Blackbeard's death and of his skull, passed down from owner to owner as a macabre drinking goblet. Marc has partnered with criminal Whitey Pacelli to bring him to the island - the ghost appears, and when Marc insists on negotiating with it himself, Whitey shoots him. His partner dead, Whitey attempts to hold the head for ransom but Blackbeard's body bisects him with a cutlass. Hellboy confronts the re-formed Blackbeard and is shot in the shoulder. Meanwhile Abe finds he is talking to the undead body of one of Blackbeard's victims, as more gather in the surf. They swim off after Blackbeard and Abe follows. Hellboy punches off Blackbeard's head and the body nearly kills the historian when he reaches for it. Hellboy and Blackbeard fight in the water and Blackbeard invites Hellboy to join him as a pirate, to which Hellboy replies with a deadpan "Let me think about it." Blackbeard's dead victims rise around Blackbeard and drag him into the water - Abe, who has swum to the location, sees Blackbeard's body pulled into the depths, its head dragged behind it in one hand and screaming a stream of bubbles. Abe greets Hellboy who comments "Everybody loves a pirate," and they head back to the mainland.
In The Chapel of Moloch
In The Chapel of Moloch, story and art by Mignola, was first published in October 2008 as a one-shot issue of Hellboy (numbered Hellboy issue #36 on the inside front cover).Synopsis
Tavira, Portugal, 1992. Hellboy and a New York art promoter visit the home which the latter has rented for his friend and protege Jerry, an American painter meant to be preparing work for an important gallery show. Jerry has been working in the old chapel attached to the premises, but has stopped painting and turned to sculpting a gigantic bull-headed humanoid in clay which (based on his now-incoherent mumblings) depicts the deity MolochMoloch
Moloch — also rendered as Molech, Molekh, Molok, Molek, Molock, or Moloc — is the name of an ancient Semitic god...
. At night when the sculpts, the non-lockable chapel doors will nevertheless not open. Jerry is asleep in the house as they investigate the chapel, full of Jerry's paintings, and Hellboy notes that Jerry is "ripping off Goya
Francisco Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era...
," prompting the promoter's retort that Jerry, in reappropriating Goya for relevant modern work, is "saving Goya's ass!" which Hellboy seems to find unconvincing. Hellboy investigates the sculpture whose clay bleeds when poked with a trowel. Elsewhere in the chapel he finds a mark of the Knights of St. Hagan (a fictional analogue to the Knights Templar
Knights Templar
The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon , commonly known as the Knights Templar, the Order of the Temple or simply as Templars, were among the most famous of the Western Christian military orders...
) of the sort left by their investigators at sites where they've stamped out serious occult practice. The two wait inside the chapel for Jerry to arrive. When he does, a miniscule hunched corpse climbs up onto his shoulders from out of a hole in the floor. As it whispers to Jerry (who begins to decorate the sculpture's base with a motif of corpses in fire), Hellboy produces a relic from his pockets, "a silver button from the coat Bishop Zrinyi was wearing when he fought the Carpathian goat" and tosses it into the corpse's eye, lighting up the inside of its skull and making it run about in agony. As the corpse topples senseless back into its hole, the Moloch statue comes to life and Hellboy readies to destroy it while a re-awakened Jerry shouts "No! Don't do it! The paintings aren't working! I'm just ripping off Goya!" When Hellboy shatters the sculpture a giant beating heart is revealed whose aortas and ventricles start to extend into tentacles as (over Jerry's protesting screams) Hellboy shoots it. Jerry laments that he'll never paint again, to Hellboy's immediate and expressed approval. "Also stay away from sculpture." He tells Jerry's friend to have their landlord do something about the hole in the floor.
The Mole
The Mole, story by Mignola and art by Duncan FegredoDuncan Fegredo
Duncan Fegredo is a British comic book artist born in Leicester in 1964.-Career:Fegredo first managed to get into comics after showing his portfolio around UKCAC in 1987 and meeting Dave Thorpe. Together they worked on a strip for a short lived British magazine called Heartbreak Hotel...
, was first published as a story in the 2008 Free Comic Book Day
Free Comic Book Day
Free Comic Book Day is an annual promotional effort by the North American comic book industry to help bring new readers into independent comic book stores. Retailer Joe Field of in Concord, CA brainstormed the event in his "Big Picture" column in the August 2001 issue of Comics & Games Retailer...
free Hellboy comic. It takes place shortly before Hellboy: Darkness Calls
Hellboy: Darkness Calls
Hellboy: Darkness Calls is a comic book limited series created by Mike Mignola published by Dark Horse Comics starring Hellboy.- Plot :In Darkness Calls, several plotlines and characters from earlier stories converge....
.
Synopsis
EnglandEngland
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
, the home of Darkness Calls' Harry Middleton. A drunken Hellboy is playing cards with Middleton and two other ghosts, who notice a mole on his hand. He wakes up alone at the table to find that the mole has gotten bigger. It rapidly swells to his own size and bursts to reveal another demon, who emerges from the boil leaving nothing of Hellboy but his empty skin and his apocalyptically powerful stone right hand. Hellboy's skin tears away from the hand and blows out the window, finally coming to rest on a weathervane across town. Left alone in the room, the demon takes the stone hand and begins to use it to end the world. At that moment Hellboy awakens, for real this time, back at the table. He empties his shotglass, and, reassuring himself that it was "just a dream," refills it.
Addenda
The collected edition featured a section of Dysart's, Mignola's and Corben's preparatory sketches for the collected stories, and an essay by John Pelan entitled "Manly Wade WellmanManly Wade Wellman
Manly Wade Wellman was an American writer. He is best known for his fantasy and horror stories set in the Appalachian Mountains and for drawing on the native folklore of that region, but he wrote in a wide variety of genres, including science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, detective...
: American Mythmaker," introducing readers to the pulp writer to whom The Crooked Man was written in tribute.