Academic Books and Articles on HB

[Bruttenholm]

Can anybody point me to critical, published scholarly works on Hellboy? There's so much published on comics, and HB is such a long-running and popular property, I'm really surprised a Google search doesn't turn up more...

[grogtheslayer]

Can anybody point me to critical, published scholarly works on Hellboy? There's so much published on comics, and HB is such a long-running and popular property, I'm really surprised a Google search doesn't turn up more...

Nine years ago at a conference I did a presentation on “The Right Hand of Doom, The Left Hand of Franchise: Media Incarnations of Hellboy”. I'll pull my presentation notes for some bibliographic info. I'm pretty sure there was a Hellboy monograph, but I can't find the reference right now.

I also wrote the encyclopedia entry on the BPRD for the Critical Survey of Graphic Novel: Heroes and Superheroes (2012) from Salem Press, which also contains an entry on Hellboy.

In Comics and the U.S. South (2012), edited by Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted, there is a chapter by Joseph Michael Sommers "The Laughter of the Melungeon Witches in Mike Mignola's Hellboy: The Crooked Man".

The Encyclopedia of Superheroes on Film and Television, 2d ed., has an entry on Hellboy.

In the works is a collection The Mignolaverse: Hellboy and the Comics Art of Mike Mignola that is being done for Sequart.

There's some mention of Hellboy in Entertaining Judgment: The Afterlife in Popular Imagination by Greg Garrett.

A couple of other hits:
Sculpture, Stasis, the Comics, and Hellboy by Scott Bukatman in Critical Inquiry, v40 n3 (201403): 104-117
The Corpse on Hellboy's Back: Translating a Graphic Image by LAURA O'CONNOR in The Journal of Popular Culture, v43 n3 (June 2010): 540-563

Stuff is out there, it's just really scattered. I use a combination of Google Scholar, my university library, and amazon.com.

[middenway]

Thanks for bringing this stuff to my attention. I'll have to check them out.

[Shargor]

While Scott Bukatman is mentioned, here is his book, fully dedicated to Hellboy's World - http://www.amazon.com/Hellboys-World...dp/0520288041/

[The Lobster]

In the works is a collection The Mignolaverse: Hellboy and the Comics Art of Mike Mignola that is being done for Sequart.

This sounds fantastic, do you think this is a sign of a wave of critical literature being written about the Mignolaverse?

[grogtheslayer]

This sounds fantastic, do you think this is a sign of a wave of critical literature being written about the Mignolaverse?

I wouldn't say a wave so much as finally a comprehensive critical collection. It certainly will help to advance subsequent scholarship.

The book I couldn't remember from earlier was Right Hand of Doom: A Critical Study of Michael Mignola’s Hellboy (2006) by Benjamin Szumskyj.

[Joseph Lacroix]

When I was finishing my art school in Paris (ENSAD) in 1999.
I wrote my thesis (end of school memorandum) on "The storytelling in the artwork of Michael Mignola" (in french).
It was a great lttle book, This was fun to do and very usefull for me... but a dumb-ass teacher was mad at me because there was a panel in it with a nazi soldier with a swastika... so he refuses to give me a good note: I got 15/20...and If I had 16/20 or more my thesis would have been incorporated in the school library ^^ and the teacher was against it.
The sad thing is that, because of this f****, I failed to have the "very well" mention in my diploma (15,6/20 and I needed 16/20)!
The good thing is that, nobody cares about mentions^^