First Boom! Wednesday, now we’ve got Dark Horse Friday!
Hellboy is one of the most celebrated comics series in recent years. The ultimate artists’ artist and a great storyteller whose work is in turns haunting, hilarious, and spellbinding. Mike Mignola has won numerous awards in the comics industry and beyond. When strangeness threatens to engulf the world, a strange man will come to save it. Sent to investigate a mystery with supernatural overtones, Hellboy discovers the secrets of his own origins, and his link to the Nazi occultists who promised Hitler a final solution in the form of a demonic avatar.
Matt Blurdy’s day has gone from crap to worse. Not only did his girlfriend break his heart at work–and in front of all of the video-store patrons–but he just got fired. All that’s left to do is minibike his sorry, thirty-year-old (and freshly unemployed!) butt back home to his mom’s basement and drown his sorrows in a bucket of extra-crispy chicken while contemplating where his life went wrong.
On the way home, Matt decides to quiet his aching heart with a brief detour to a garage sale. When an ancient-looking helmet calls to him as “the Chosen One,” exhorting him to don the mantle of the “Valhalladrim,” Matt touches it with trembling fingers–and is jolted by raw magical power. Holy crap! Is he going to be a superhero? Is this why he always felt special even when everyone else thought he was a loser? Then the helm gets a sense of whom it’s dealing with. Suddenly, it changes its tune: “I was mistaken. You are not the chosen one. Good day.”
Two hundred years ago, Britain lost the Napoleonic War and fell under the thumb of French domination. Gaining independence after decades of civil disobedience and anarchist bombings, the Socialist Republic of Britain is now a small, unimportant backwater connected by a railway bridge, steam-powered dirigible, and mutual suspicion to France. When a British diplomat’s murder is made to look like suicide, ferocious Detective-Inspector LeBrock of Scotland Yard stalks a ruthless murder squad through the heart of a Belle Epoque Paris, the center of the greatest empire in a world of steam-driven hansom cabs, automatons, and flying machines. LeBrock’s relentless quest can lead only to death, truth . . . or war. o Following on the heels of his internationally acclaimed graphic novels The Tale of One Bad Rat and Alice in Sunderland, Grandville is a fantastical and audacious roller-coaster ride, visually stunning and rich in memorable detail.
