Hellboy vol. 6: Strange places.

The Third Wish. 

The sixth volume has great stories about Hellboy and among them, my favourite: The Third Wish. Taking Andersen's Little Mermaid seed and watered by Mantlo's Namor back in 1983, this story tells the voyage to the bottom of the Ocean that our hero fares.

He meets in the heart of Africa a warlock, Mohlomi, asking for guidance and how not to fulfill his destiny (in fact, the creatures of the night, outspoken by Sir Edward state that Hellboy's story is not yet written and if it is, he is rewriting it). In a vision, he discovers that his next step should be taken at mermaids lair.

So, aided by an amulet that allows him breath underwater, there he goes. He is then attacked by three mermaid sisters that work under the command of a Witch. Hellboy looses the amulet in the fight and without air, he is vulnerable. A magic nail tailed in his horns allows to breath water and a chain made with bones of a werewolf ties him magicaly.

The witch, the grandmother of the mermaids and a mermaid herself (the Bog Roosh), ask their granddaughters what do they dessire (therefore the three wishes). The first two ask for their lovers and their needs and perishes by their fulfillment (the first ask to give back to live to his old lover, that comes from the dead and kills her in order to rejoin in death and the second wants to transform into a human being to join his human lover, dying by pressure and suffocation). The third one only wants the spear of his deceased father. That she obtained and return the weapon to his father's grave. There the ghost of his parent is angry. By harming a being that did nothing against mermaid, the girl has doomed them all.

The old witch knows that if Hellboy dies, he would bring the Armageddon to Earth. In order to avoid it, she would destroy Hellboy's body and give part of it to her fellow witch companions.

The young mermaid knows what to do to prevent the damnation of her family: free Hellboy. With the Spear she broke the chains and them with the same weapon, Hellboy kills the witch. Now the young mermaid should take the place of the old one. But now she would be together with her father.

I think this is the first time I found Hellboy interested, or really interested in someone of the opposite sex. And the young mermaid deserves. As you can see, the story is one of a kind. A true jewel.

The Island.
Opposite to the first story of this book, The Island is a difficult one. I came from a two part miniseries that was started and then interrupted by illness of the author. Then, retaken, the story turned into a three part miniseries and stopped again. Mignola rethink it again and the final version of two issues is what we can see here, along the eight pages of the beginning of the first version.

And well, so much versions means in this case too much information to chew. Absolutely.

It starts in the Sargasso Sea, based on Willia Hope Hodgson's Work. But we change place very early. From the drinks Hellboy has with a bunch of ghost sailors to a conversation with old Iron Maiden to a castle were we can see an Inquisition procedure incriminating a devil follower. That process follows after the dead of the participants. And here Hellboy doesn't know nothing about it. He fights and fights a dragon and a demon while all other participants develops the content. What is important: we are now aware that Hellboy is coming home. Wow!