Hell-O! My name is John Salinas and I host the Hellboy Book Club podcast, where we are going through the entire Hellboy chronology, picking out all the details and connecting branches of the different stories. I’ve been a fan of the Hellboy comics for almost 20 years, but I’ve never gone through the stories in the order that were going through on the podcast and never in this much detail. One of my favorite things about the podcast is researching and picking out all the components embedded into the stories. Doing so has taught me a few things about big red. DISCLAIMER: This article only covers Hellboy stories prior to “Darkness Calls,” and does not include the “Hellboy In Mexico,” tales. This week, we released our 12th episode and now we will be switching gears away from Hellboy and focusing on the B.P.R.D. for the next few weeks. As we get ready to break from Hellboy I thought it would be interesting to share

“WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM RE-READING HELLBOY or HOW HELLBOY OVERCOMES HIS FEAR OF DESTINY SOMETHING LIKE THAT, A BETTER TITLE IF I CAN THINK OF ONE BECAUSE THIS IS PROBABLY TOO LONG FOR A TITLE.”

Let’s go back to 1947, Hellboy’s hesitation to accept truths can be traced all the way back to age 2 and being asked to eat pancakes. Young Hellboy is afraid to accept the truth that pancakes taste amazing. But really, ignoring my bad attempt at humor, you can definitely draw some parallels with Hellboy down the line, once he eats the pancake (and accepts the truth), he loves it. I’ll have to save that juicy idea for a future article…

We learn in the short story “Makoma” that, later in 1947, young Hellboy met the spirit of Africa as a boy, something that he can’t believe he’s forgotten. Perhaps, Hellboy forgot it or blocked it out of his memory for some reason. Studies in psychiatric science tell us that the brain can essentially block a traumatic memory in a process called dissociation—or detachment from reality where the brain will attempt to protect itself.