In discussing the TV network's decision to force him and Twin Peaks cocreator Mark Frost to reveal the solution to the show's central question ("Who killed Laura Palmer?") long before they had intended to do so, and to move on to other plotlines, David Lynch has said, "They killed the goose that laid the golden eggs."

I think Mike Mignola killed his goose.

I remember reading every single issue of Hellboy Universe comics, year after year, totally enrapt no matter the quality of the comic in question. Many of them were absolutely excellent, some of them kinda bad, but they all captivated me for a reason that transcended the books' innate qualities. Each book contributed—or potentially contributed, which is really just as good—to the central question of the Hellboy Universe: "At the end of the world, what will Hellboy do?"

The books have always done a fantastic job of intertwining various stories, with many of the flashback stories foreshadowing developments in the present-day stories, in an utterly delightful way. A lot of this was Arcudi's doing, and the greatest such moment was probably the final panel of an early Lobster Johnson series, when a character asks LoJo, "Boss . . . how do you beat the devil?"—in a chilling reference to Memnan Saa, whom the present-day BPRD was facing up against in concurrently released story arcs. But it wasn't all Arcudi; Mignola has engaged in quite a lot of that, too—for example, Gamori in Midnight Circus promising to leave Hellboy alone as long as Astaroth lived, when the reader knew that in the present, Astaroth had just died, leaving Hellboy no longer protected by that promise.

But now that the "present" is over, the goose is dead.

I keep reading the new Hellboy comics, but I'm finding that these days, I'm only enjoying them on their own self-contained merits. Often that's enough, but it's never as much as it used to be. I don't think this has to do with the reduced publication schedule (due to COVID and the Allie scandal). That special feeling of narrative engagement that tied everything together with suspense, and that kept me poring over every newly published adventure for clues about what might ultimately transpire at the conclusion of the whole epic saga—all that is gone. It's not that I'm bored with new Hellboy stories; far from it. I just wish that the vital "room to dream" about what was coming up wasn't so absent. And man, do I feel its absence. I still enjoy the new comics, but I just don't care as much about them.

Hellboy occupied a lot of my imagination space for a quarter-century. He's still there, I guess, but he's a lot smaller than he used to be. I wonder whether perhaps Mignola might realize this; if so, that might explain the new push to make the Outerverse into a sort of ersatz Hellboy Universe. For the first time, I find myself not caring much whether new Hellboy stories are produced, and I guess I don't think they should continue producing the Hellboy flashback comics for too much longer, unless they can give us something new to dream about while we read them. (Some continuation of the present timeline in the Hollow Earth might possibly do the trick, but given the finality of the Hell on Earth ending, such a continuation would have to be awfully compelling even to justify its existence.)

I'm glad Mignola got to slaughter his goose on his own terms (though I wish he'd gotten someone more talented than Allie to write the scripts). But it's dead now, and I don't know how much longer he can keep cooking the eggs before they run out.

Does anybody else here share this feeling?