The authors of "The City in the Sea: A Hellboy Story" were obviously inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and his works, but they have also drawn from other sources. You will encounter here some very familiar conventions of gothic fiction and weird fiction: the title character arrives at a creaky and dusty old house where something mysterious has happened, and so on. You could call these things tropes or clichés and no one could or should argue with you. Many of these conventions or tropes are indirect, harmless, and not too bothersome or distracting. You might even find them comforting. Conventions and tropes are, after all, an appeal to the child in the reader to whom one reads a story or shows a video, the child who says "Read it again" or "Play it again" after it is finished. Children--and maybe all of us--want what is familiar to us. Repetition is comforting. Like a prayer, a chant, or a mantra, it soothes us and relieves us of our fear and anxiety. Again and again, the story turns out the same. Again and again, all will be well in the end.
But there are also some self-references and meta-references in "The City in the Sea" that are more distracting, and some that are a stepping-down, too. They make it so the story can't stand on its own. The main character is the most obvious example of this lack of stand-alone ability. Hellboy has been in prose before, but he is really just a comic book character. If you want to fully understand this story, you have to know something more about him and his universe, going back decades in another form. Related to that, "The City in the Sea" will never be anthologized because it's basically an issue of a comic book or an episode of a TV series. It uses and relies on what has gone before and what will be used again in future stories. The character and his universe are the important parts, the story itself less so. And what is really at stake here? Hellboy will go on. He has to. He has to appear in the next episode just as if nothing happened in this one.
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On their surface, self-references and meta-references begin in "The City in the Sea" with Poe, but they actually begin on the cover, on the title page, and in the subtitle, for that is where you will find Hellboy. Hellboy is of course the creation of an artist and a fictional character, but he is also a branded product. Don't ask who or what he is. You're supposed to know already. You're supposed to have that inside information in your possession before you begin. If you don't, you won't get much of an explanation inside. You'll have to look elsewhere for what's missing from your experience as a consumer of the pop-cultural products of twenty first-century America. Or twentieth actually, because Hellboy is really that old. Should I point out that Hellboy is as old now as Weird Tales was in 1954 when it reached its end after thirty-one years in print? This after we were promised something new in "The Eyrie."
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Again, in addition to being an artistic creation, Hellboy is a recognized brandname and a successful commercial product. That's the dream of every artist, I guess, to create something that proves itself a moneymaker. I wouldn't object if one of my creations took off that way. Anyway, you could say that Weird Tales #367 is just another venue for Hellboy, in addition to those that include comic books, movies, animated cartoons, video games, and I'm sure other kinds of media and merchandise. And you could say that in addition to being branded Cosmic Horror, this issue is branded Hellboy. So a double brand. That's okay I guess. If you're the publisher or editor, you should take into account the readers' tastes and give them what they want or what you think they want. You should also give them things they don't yet know they want. After all, what precedent was there for Lovecraftian horror before there were horror stories written by Lovecraft? Anyway, if you look at things from the publisher's and editor's points of view, this all makes sense, for why take a chance with an unknown quantity when you can use a brandname that has already proved itself a mover of merchandise?
In any case, there is an implication here that these self-references, meta-references, inside information, and use of brands and brandnames are meant for insiders. If you're an outsider, well, too bad for you. Remember that Lovecraft wrote a story called "The Outsider," one that will forever appeal to people who feel themselves to be like his eponymous character. Weird Tales in its original incarnation had the same kind of appeal, and it had broad appeal, too, not only across this great country but also in Canada, Great Britain, and other places far from its big-city American home. That appeal also went from top to bottom, from bankers, composers, theater directors, medical doctors, and university staff and faculty; to teachers, archaeologists, anthropologists, actors, writers, and psychologists; to military men, industrial workers, farmhands, dwellers in shacks, and schoolchildren. Maybe people like these are no longer the target readership. That would be a shame if it were true. Maybe the Cosmic Horror Issue should have been called instead the Insider Issue.
To be continued . . .
Original text copyright 2024 Terence E. Hanley
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