"The City in the Sea" by Christopher Golden & Mike Mignola-Part One

Born in Berkeley, California, in 1960, Mike Mignola is a comic book artist and writer. He has also worked as an illustrator, designer, and artist in the movie business. His co-author on "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story," Christopher Golden, was born in 1967 in Massachusetts. He is a novelist, editor, and scriptwriter for animated cartoons, comic books, and at least one movie, a Hellboy movie in fact. Among his credits are TV tie-in books and prose adaptations of comic book characters. Mike Mignola is one of his co-authors. So is Tim Lebbon, who also has a story in Weird Tales #367. Already we can see a pattern developing in the Cosmic Horror Issue.

The cover illustration for Weird Tales #367, dated 2022, is by Mike Mignola. The same drawing is in the interior as a full-page illustration on the title page of the story. There are also pieces of it used more or less as spot drawings or filler, and so it does triple duty. Although there have been comic book-like covers before in Weird Tales, I think this is the first that is overtly in that style and that features a comic book character. As far as I know, this is also the first story ever in Weird Tales adapted from a comic book. So already there are new things here, but only to Weird Tales, for Hellboy has been in comic books since 1993. He has also been in movies, animated cartoons, and video games. Maybe these are firsts, too: Hellboy may be the first character from each of these media or forms to appear in the magazine. On the other hand, all are just adaptations from Hellboy's original comic book appearances. Maybe we can expect to see soon a story in Weird Tales adapted directly from a TV show or movie with no other origins and no stops in between.

The inside information in "The City in the Sea" begins with the main character himself. If you have never read Hellboy comic books or seen him on screen, you might not know who or what he is and you probably know nothing at all about his origins or purpose. There isn't even a very good description of him in his own story. If you want to know what he looks like, see the illustration. In this way, Hellboy continues to work as a comic book character in that, in this story, the words and pictures must be taken together if we are to understand fully what's going on. The good thing in reading it is that you can get by without knowing very much about the main character. That's partly because the authors carefully observe the conventions and employ the trappings of genre fiction in their storytelling. The character may be unknown to you, but you have seen everything else here before. Maybe we can call this institutional weird fiction.

There is in "The City in the Sea" a mystery. A man is missing, an old scholar who lives in an old house in an old town somewhere in America at some indeterminate time in the past or present. He has a lone housekeeper, who explains that he has vanished after having received a mysterious package. It's clear that Hellboy is an investigator, like Edgar Allan Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and hundreds of other detectives--occult or not--born since then. He finds that the package contains a statuette of a woman. In gazing upon it, Hellboy is transported into an otherworldly vision or experience, an encounter with the missing man, who has preceded him on his journey, and what he calls the Black Goddess, alive but dealing death in the city of the title. There is narration of other, strange times and places, of vast, mysterious, and possibly menacing realms. This is a kind of crossing-over that is almost diagnostic of weird fiction, except that Hellboy is already a supernatural being. There really isn't any crossing-over. He has seen and experienced things like this before. An encounter with the supernatural can mean very little to him, nor can it have much effect. "The City in the Sea" isn't a very long story, and so Hellboy returns soon enough to the real world, alone, to where he was sitting in the old man's study. He may have gained some kind of knowledge or insight, but as proof of the lack of effect upon him, his final thought is of his hunger: he has his eye on a diner down the street.

To be continued . . .

Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley