HELLBOY IN MEXICO (A DRUNKEN BLUR)

One of my continuing disappointments is that  Mike Mignola gave up drawing Hellboy, but Hellboy in Mexico (or, A Drunken Blur), drawn by Richard Corben, eases the disappointment somewhat. Mignola’s characteristic flatness of color and figure modeling is missing, but Corben has adapted his more robust rendering manner to the character and its visual tradition with gratifying success, preserving both his style and a hint of Mignola. Hellboy and Abe Sapien are in a Mexican desert in 1982, and to get out of the sun’s heat, they enter a ruined roadhouse, where the find an idol festooned with newspaper clippings about wrestlers. One of the clippings depicts Hellboy and three wrestlers, all wearing masks. Hellboy then tells the story of his 1956 trip to Mexico to fight monsters.

When his two companions gave up in fear and disgust, Hellboy recruited a trio of wrestlers, brothers, and they toured the country and tromped monsters by day and drank gallons of adult beverages by night. Then one night, one of the brothers—the one Hellboy was closest to, Esteban—goes missing. They can’t find him.

Months later, a masked wrestler named Camazotz challenges Hellboy. He’s pretty good, flinging Hellboy around the ring; but then he admits being Esteban and takes off the mask, saying, “Look what they did to me—because you weren’t there!” He has the hideous face of some sort of pig.

Hellboy admits he was at fault, and to make up for his previous neglect, he kills Esteban, impaling him on one of the sharpened uprights supporting the ropes around the ring. “It was the only thing I could do,” Hellboy says, “but that didn’t make me feel any better about doing it.” Esteban’s last words: “Gracias, mi amigo.”

Then Hellboy gets drunk for several months. He can’t remember what he did during that time, but before this one-shot book ends, Mignola tells us in a nicely timed, nearly wordless, sequence that Corben pulls off with Mignolian aplomb.

The book is, surprisingly, a genuine treat. We don’t see enough Corben these days, and he here creates Mignola’s Hellboy ambiance without losing his own distinctive mannerisms. And in this book, Mignola gives the story a punchline that wraps it up nicely, something he often neglects to do, preferring to leave us suspended forever after, bewildered on the doorstep of horror. But he leaves wholly unsolved the mystery of the locked trunk that Hellboy is carting around the Mexican desert when this issue opens.