Hellboy Christmas Special is a Dark Horse Comics one-shot comic book horror anthology edited by Scott Allie and featuring the work of Mike Mignola, Gary Gianni and Steve Purcell.
| Hellboy Christmas Special | |
|---|---|
 Cover by Gary Gianni | |
| Publication information | |
| Publisher | Dark Horse Comics |
| Format | One-shot |
| Genre | |
| Publication date | December 3, 1997 |
| No. of issues | 1 |
| Main character(s) | Hellboy |
| Creative team | |
| Written by | |
| Artist(s) |
|
| Letterer(s) | |
| Colorist(s) | |
| Editor(s) | Scott Allie |
Creation
editMignola has stated that when he and Gary Gianni came up with the idea for this Christmas special and that for his own entry for it he took a story based on an old folktale that he had long mooted and added a Christmas angel to it.
Publication history
editHellboy Christmas Special (December 3, 1997) featured a cover by Gary Gianni.[1][2]
| Title | Creators | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Christmas Underground | by Mike Mignola | ||||
| In the story Hellboy travels to England on Christmas Eve 1989 where he descends through a passage in a graveyard in search of the daughter of a dying woman who is married to a prince of the underworld. | |||||
| Ernie’s Holiday Ditty | by Steve Purcell | ||||
| This one page feature relates the lyrics to a horrific and satirical take on traditional Christmas carols from the fictional Little Ernie and the Citizens of Toybox Community Glee Club who appear in Toybox also in this special. | |||||
| A Strange Story | by Gary Gianni | ||||
| Corpus Monstrum creator Gianni relates how his case of writer’s block, that threatened to leave a blank page in this special, was overcome by a series synchronistic incidents that pointed to 1870, the year Charles Dickens died. | |||||
| Christmas | by Geof Darrow | ||||
| A double page Christmas themed pinup. | |||||
| Toybox | by Steve Purcell | ||||
| In the story Ernie and Suda take shelter on Christmas Eve in the home of an old lady who they discover devoured by spider larvae and while Suda sleeps Ernie does batlle with the giant spider who returns down the chimney with a surprise. | |||||
| A Gift for the Wicked | by Gary Gianni | ||||
| Hodgson, St. George and Benedict of Corpus Monstrum spend Christmas night in a forbidden chamber at the ancestral home of Baron Grodak in an attempt to lift the curse that has left him the last of his line. | |||||
| Further Reading | by Mike Mignola | ||||
| Hellboy creator Mignola lists some yuletide ghost stories including his all-time favourite story A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens along with his two best movie adaptations of the story Alastair Sim in 1951 and George C. Scott in 1984. | |||||
Awards
editThe special won two 1998 Eisner Awards;
- Best Writer/Artist: Drama for Mike Mignola.
- Best Anthology, edited by Scott Allie.
References
edit- ^ "Hellboy Christmas Special". Dark Horse Comics. Retrieved February 18, 2009.
- ^ "Hellboy Christmas Special". Hellboy.com. Archived from the original on 2009-07-07. Retrieved February 18, 2009.