2019 has been a big year for the comic book industry as a whole. Conan the Barbarian returned to Marvel Comics. IDW completely rebooted the Transformers line. Major event comics like Heroes in Crisis and War of the Realms have ushered in major changes for their respective universes. But none of these developments can measure up to what Dark Horse Comics and creator Mike Mignola accomplished with the release of BPRD: The Devil You Know #15. This issue brought the entire Hellboy and BPRD saga to a close, capping off a story that began 25 years ago. It's difficult to understate how unique and impressive an accomplishment this is.

View Hellboy's Devilishly Awesome Covers 13 IMAGES

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Hellboy Gallery 18 IMAGES

The Hellboy franchise as we know it began humbly enough with the release of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #1. While that story featured an epic battle between good and evil and between the mortal realm and dark, Lovecraftian gods, there was little sense that readers were in for a journey that would ultimate span two and a half decades and hundreds of comics. Only in hindsight does it become obvious that Mignola was telling one mammoth story about a demon brought into the world to serve as its destroyer, only to instead become its redeemer at the end of all things.Though as Mignola explains in his afterword to The Devil You Know #15, he's always had a fairly clear idea of where the story of Hellboy was ultimately leading. "Way back in the first Hellboy miniseries, Seed of Destruction, Rasputin was going on and on about Ragna Rok, about the world 'transformed by holocaust and fire' and 'the fall of mankind.' Sure, a lot of bad guys rave about stuff like that, but even then I knew he knew what he was talking about."Hellboy is a true rarity. It's 25-year-old, creator-owned franchise in an industry where only company-owned franchises like Batman and Spider-Man normally last that long. Apart from a handful of indie books like Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon and Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo, you don't often see a creator stick with one character for that long.But even more impressive is that the franchise grew beyond the scope of its creator without ever losing touch with his vision. While Mignola mostly wrote and drew the early Hellboy comics himself (with some early assistance by John Byrne), he increasingly began to rely on collaborators to help expand this rapidly growing universe. Co-writers like Chris Roberson, John Arcudi and Joshua Dysart and artists like Duncan Fegredo, Guy Davis and Laurence Campbell became essential partners, transforming Hellboy from a a lone creator's project to a truly collaborative saga that steadily grew in the telling.Thanks to the contributions of these writers and artists, Hellboy himself became just one piece of a larger puzzle. His story diverged from that of the BPRD, allowing former supporting players like Liz Sherman, Abe Sapian and Kate Corrigan to become major protagonists. New spinoff series like Lobster Johnson, Witchfinder and Frankenstein Underground helped expand the scope of the universe and define its complex history.These new creators each brought their own voice and flavor to the franchise while still producing books that felt very much like pieces of a coherent whole. There's no mistaking a Hellboy or BPRD comic for anything else, regardless of how directly involved Mignola might have been in its creation. Artists like Fegredo and Davis became so good at channeling Mignola's distinctive art style that some fans actually prefer their work.But no matter how big the Hellboy/BPRD universe became, Mignola always maintained a clear vision and continued building toward that predetermined endpoint. Far too many ongoing comic book series overstay their welcome and end as a pale shadow of their former selves. With help from his many collaborators, Mignola managed to maintain a consistently high level of quality and close out the saga in the way it deserved. How often does any franchise grow this big and yet end so definitively and satisfactorily?The Hellboy saga isn't quite done. Some of the spinoff and prequel books will continue for the foreseeable future, and there's nothing necessarily stopping Mignola from revisiting his iconic creation years or even decades down the road. But for all intents and purposes, Hellboy's comic book journey is done. And we should all take a moment to appreciate what a wild, unprecedented journey it's been.

Jesse is a mild-mannered writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter , or Kicksplode on MyIGN