Hellboy: The Sleeping and The Dead

Hellboy’s most recent two shot, The Sleeping and the Dead, is a fantastic classic horror story, illustrated brilliantly by Scott Hampton, and filled with such awesome twists and turns and eerie folklore that you wish the thing could last a little bit longer.

I don’t follow Hellboy religiously, (Jake could tell you more about him than I could) but I am a big admirer of Mignola’s art and character design, and am fairly familiar with the good natured demon himself. Its stories like this one that make me wish I picked it up more often, though. Scott Hampton, (being no stranger to the monster magazine, having worked on comics such as Simon Dark,) teamed up with Mignola for the first time in this series, adopting certain “classic” Hellboy style, while maintaining own his distinctions. I think he fit beautifully with this book.

The story follows the repercussions of Hellboy’s killing a female vampire. We learn from her brother, an emotionally enslaved caretaker, that both she and their sister were transformed by an English Vampire, who will avenge her death by calling on a whole graveyard of his victims. But that’s not even the scary part. The second sister, the one we’ve yet to meet, has indeed transformed, but not into a vampire: into something far worse, less definable, and fantastically terrifying. This creepy little girl, who wanders ghostlike about the basement singing nursery rhymes, transforms into a being of pure horror. The brother, last remaining alive and in the human world, takes care of his family despite their wicked transformations, and soon Hellboy finds himself offered as a meal to this thing in the basement. I’ll let you read the ending to see how the whole thing unravels… its classic Mignola.

There’s a cool distinction between American and English Vampires in this book. I like the idea of Vampires going into hiding for years—centuries—so that the world forgets and no longer suspects them, so as to rise and conquer later on. Apparently they have it a lot worse in England, as far as blood suckers go.

And can I just say how refreshing it is to see Vampires back in the horror genre where they belong? I’ve had about all I can take of our culture’s recent infatuation with sexy teenage “vampires.” It makes me ache for the classics. I want that old magic back. I want to be scared of Vampires again: to see them portrayed as the monsters they ought to be: truly unsettling, terrifying and dreadful. This series delivers, I recommend you all take the fun journey I did and end up delightfully creeped out.

See you in the Funnybooks! -Stephanie