The Comicon Advent Calendar: Day 2 – Hellboy’s Christmas
by Richard Bruton
Time again for a peek behind one of the doors in the Comicon Christmas present to you – The Comicon Advent Calendar. And today, something wonderful from Mike Mignola’s Hellboy in ‘A Christmas Underground.’..
Found in the collection, The Chained Coffin and Other Stories, ‘A Christmas Underground‘ gets its inspiration from an old folktale of a girl finding stairs to a magical palace under a bush. But Mignola takes it in stranger directions and turns it into a Christmas tale.
Hellboy finds himself summoned to an old, darkened mansion by an old woman, Mrs Hatch, laying on her deathbed, lamenting the loss of her child so many years before. The girl disappeared one night, many years back.
All Mrs Hatch wants is to give her girl one little keepsake, before she goes, and seems totally unfazed by Hellboy’s presence in her room. Until Mignola gives us the reveal…
You’ve got to just admire Mignola’s simplicity there, the simple transition from Hellboy into something else, an older version of the Santa we know, something more fitting to the tale.
The rest of the tale is spent seeing to the old lady’s near-death wish, with Hellboy seeking to give the old lady the one Christmas wish she has, to find her long-lost daughter.
So, finding a secret entrance to somewhere below in the graveyard outside the house… down he goes…
Down he goes, into somewhere fantastical, where he finds young Ann Hatch, captivated by her fantasies and held captive by something far darker…
But, true to his nature, true to the wish of the old lady, true to the spirit of the season, it’s none too long before he’s giving the monster down here a good beating, having awakened Ann with her mother’s gift.
The final battle ends as Hellboy lures the beast to the surface, just at the moment where Christmas Eve turns into Christmas Day with the ringing of the bells…
And to end it all, a bittersweet moment of course, with the passing of Mrs Hatch, but she got her one wish and, with a little help from Hellboy, she saved her little girl…
She saved her little girl and she thought I was Santa Claus. So merry Christmas, Mrs Hatch...
