Hellboy, Mike Mignola’s famed comic book demon hunter, wanders through a haunting and horrific world steeped in the history of weird fictions and wide-ranging folklores. Hellboy’s
World shows how our engagement with Hellboy is also a highly aestheticized encounter with the medium of comics and the materiality of the book. Scott Bukatman’s dynamic
study explores how comics produce a heightened “adventure of reading” in which syntheses of image and word, image sequences, and serial narratives create compelling worlds for the
reader’s imagination to inhabit.
In Mignola’s work, the imaginative space that exists on the page and within the book becomes a self-aware meditation upon the imaginative space of page and book. To
understand the mechanics of creating a world on the page, Bukatman draws upon other media—including children’s books, sculpture, pulp fiction, cinema, graphic design, painting, and
illuminated manuscripts. Hellboy’s World delves into shared fictional universes and occult detection, the riotous colors of comics that elude rationality and control, horror
and the evocation of the sublime, and the place of abstraction in Mignola’s art to demonstrate the pleasurable and multiple complexities of the reader’s experience. Monsters populate the
world of Hellboy comics, but Hellboy’s World argues that comics are themselves little monsters, unruly sites of sensory and cognitive pleasures that
exist, happily, on the margins. The book is not only a treat for Hellboy fans but will entice anyone interested in the medium of comics and the art of reading.
