HELLBOY: ODD JOBS.
Prose writers get their hands on Big Red, but is it worth it?

Writers: Various
Artist: Mike Mignola
Editor: Christopher Golden
Book (Collection of prose short stories, illustrated by Mignola)
Published by Dark Horse Comics 1999
$14.95

Reviewed by Ben Peek

In the years that I've been reading comics, I have developed had a big soft spot for Mike Mignola's HELLBOY comic. Hellboy himself is wonderful: big, red and with a tendency for beating things up, he is instantly likeable. Together with Mignola's rich, gothic illustrations which combine with the big adventure feel usually found only in monster movies and INDIANA JONES, there was very little about HELLBOY that I didn't like. Until recently, that is.

In the last two years, there have been numerous HELLBOY spin offs: a handful of crossovers with other company characters, none of them worth a mention or the money that I paid. Then there was the Hellboy novel, THE LOST ARMY. It wasn't as bad as the crossovers and the spin off comics, but was written by a minor novelist, Christopher Golden (also the editor here) and cost about the same as a trade paperback edition of one of the HELLBOY story arcs.

And now, as I sit here, I can add one more overpriced HELLBOY item to the list: HELLBOY: ODD JOBS. It has very few good points, though ultimately it has very few bad points as well, and if it was a cheap and nasty paperback, I'd tell you to go and try. But the price is simply too high for what you are given, and frankly I'm starting to feel like me and my bank account have been taken advantage of.

"It seemed I would be in for a fun and interesting read... I wasn't"

At the best of times, short story collections are a dubious thing, but it must be said that on paper, this collection looked good: Poppy Z. Brite, Nancy A. Collins, Chet Williamson, Greg Rucka, Nancy Holder, Max Allan Collins and Stephen Bissette. Out of fourteen stories, seven writers that I have either enjoyed in other short story collections, or who I was somewhat curious to have a read of. Like I said, on paper it seemed I would be in for a fun and interesting read.

I wasn't.

To begin with, it's impossible to read this collection in one setting, because so many of the writers double up on information that another has said before: Hellboy's strange looks, his stone hand, the cut off horns, all the things which are very important to the character Hellboy, but which, after reading descriptions that are almost identical in three stories, I found myself unable to read in another.

(Added to this, at least four stories have jokes of Hellboy in some American city where he could walk without getting many strange looks. The same joke, four times, maybe more. It's not funny the first time, and just grates by the fourth. I spent a week between stories because of this, simply unwilling to return to it.)

To continue this feeling of having read it before, some of the stories in the collection simply go over information that is covered in the comic. A good example of this is the Poppy Brite story ('Burn, Baby, Burn') which features Liz, my favourite supporting character.

The story, nicely written, is about Liz having run away from the Bureau and the memories of when her power kicked in and she killed her family. Over half the story deals with this, and the other half of it works off this information, as Liz has a nightmare about her mother - all which really doesn't give the reader anything new about the character, and leaves you knowing that you've been here before, only weren't there illustrations the first time round? Some of the other stories also suffer from this problem.

"There are some downright horrible stories in this collection"

That, however, is not the biggest problem with the collection. No, rather it is that most of the stories are simply eyes-closed, fingers-off-the-keyboard works. They go from A to B with no suspense. In Greg Rucka's case it's as if Hellboy had gotten up, lost something, found it at some guy's place (actually, a rat's place) and had it handed back to him. Gee.

In many of the stories, Hellboy just shows up for the mystery, meets someone, and then beats someone up - and in some cases, he doesn't even get to beat people up, but instead becomes an bystander to a demon fight, which pretty much sums up a very disappointing effort from Chet Williamson.

To be fair, this is similar to the short HELLBOY adventures, collected in HELLBOY: THE CHAINED COFFIN AND OTHERS (which I recommend above this book). But those Mignola stories come with a sense of atmosphere and are usually built upon some mythology which lends a fascinating edge to the pieces, neither of which the stories here possess.

Bland, uninteresting things like 'A Night at the Beach', by Matthew J. Costello, 'Medusa's Revenge' by Yvonne Navarro and 'The Nuckelavee' by Christopher Golden and Mike Mignola will have you passing a fairly uninteresting half an hour for each, give or take, before you go off to find something else.

Worse, there are some downright horrible stories in this collection. Brian Hodge's 'Far Flew the Boast of Him' is inspired by the legend of Beowulf, but half the story is an uninteresting information dump where all the characters simply slip away, so much so that I had to force myself through reading it.

'Demon Politics' by Craig Shaw Gardner is one of those stories that covers ground you've seen before, this time with Commander Freedom. But the simple fact is that demons inhabiting the bodies of politicians is a big fat cliche, likely to have you looking for a HELLBOY comic just to remind yourself that there is originality in the world.

"The severed head seemed unnecessary, but who's going to argue with a severed head?"

'Demon Politics' is also shockingly written, but the one story that was almost impossible for me to digest because of its prose was Nancy Holder's 'Folie A Deux'. But that's okay because the story is about on a par, being set in the Vietnam/American War/Invasion. Snide marks aside about that, the story just isn't worth mentioning. Had the writing been better, I wouldn't have done so.

Philip Nutman's 'A Mother Cries at Midnight' starts with the wonderful premise of having J. Robert Oppenheimer talking to Hellboy. But then the story simply moves away from this premise, into a very boring tale of Hellboy looking for a kid and how it links to his own past. This one really annoyed me, because it started off with something promising and then just dropped it. Along with my enjoyment.

There are a few enjoyable stories here. By far the largest piece is Stephen Bissette's 'Jigsaw', which is a good thing because it is by far the most enjoyable story in the book. Undeniably horror - and with an image that will stick in your mind for a few days - it deals with a head that is fitted together, piece by piece. The one fault of the story is that Hellboy and Abe Sapien are treated as supporting characters. But that is something I'm happy to overlook because it is, simply put, the best story in the collection.

Nancy Collins captures the right sense of adventure and dark fantasy in her 'A Grim Fairy Tale', and surprisingly, I enjoyed Max Allan Collins's 'I Had Bigfoot's Baby!', a story that I avoided until the end simply because of the title.

Finally, Rick Hautala and Jim Connolly's 'Scared Crows' is a fun little drinking story which I liked, mainly because it did something different - though not entirely new - and worked without many problems. The severed head seemed unnecessary, but who's going to argue with a severed head?

Even Mignola's illustrations at the beginning of each story are generally disappointing (though the ones for the Nancy Collins and Stephen Bissette stories are quite nice), and the pictures of Hellboy look like ones I've seen before. At least the cover itself is attractive. There is also a horribly drawn cartoon by Gahan Wilson, which, without a spark of originality, is about demons serving un-hot chili.

The Hellboy collections are only three dollars more, and they deserve your attention. This collection of short stories, however, does not.

Not Recommended

Ben Peek is Online Comics Editor of PopImage.

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