The first Hellboy Christmas Special was published in December of 1997. The special issue won two Eisner Awards in 1998 and has been a holiday tradition ever since, with Hellboy Winter Special 2018 due out on Dec. 12.
In the Hellboy universe, created by Mike Mignola, the half-demon Hellboy fights back supernatural threats to a mostly-oblivious mankind, all while pushing back against his own destiny: triggering the apocalypse with his Right Hand of Doom. 2018 marks 25 years of Hellboy, which has previously been adapted into two movies by Guillermo del Toro. A new Hellboy movie, starring David Harbour of Stranger Things and directed by Neil Marshall (The Descent, Game of Thrones), will be out in theaters on April 12, 2019.
This year's Hellboy Winter Special opens with a story written by Mike Mignola meant to emulate Britain's long tradition of holiday horror. "The Victorians had a wonderful tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas and while my story here is NOT Victorian it COULD be—certainly I tried like hell to give it that feel," Mignola told Newsweek.
Mixing Christmas with the occult stretches back to pagan tradition, particularly winter solstice events like the festival of Yule, celebrated on the darkest day of the year, when spirits are most close at hand. But perhaps the most obvious modern precedent of Christmas ghosts is Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol, first published in 1843.
More contemporary versions of the tradition are often attributed to English author M.R. James, who would write a ghost story every Christmas and invite his Eton students and fellow professors for a candlelit reading. His ghost stories, written throughout the beginning of the 20th century but first collected in 1931, later formed the backbone of the BBC's influential 70s television films, aired annually as A Ghost Story for Christmas.
In "Happy New Year, Ava Galucci," written by Mignola, with art by Ben Stenbeck and colorist Dave Stewart, Hellboy spends a pleasant New Year's Eve in the snowy English countryside, until some sozzled good ol' chaps decide it's time to hold a seance and summon a dead devil worshipper. It's a story that would fit right in with M.R. James, at least until the punching starts.
The final story in the winter special, written and drawn by Tonci Zonjic, ties into Hellboy's second spin-off comic, Lobster Johnson. In "The Empty Chair," The Lobster, a 1930s pulp crimefighter who has become a legend to most in Hellboy's modern settings, foils a den of mobsters with plans to pin their murders on the hero.
But Newsweek has an exclusive preview from second ghost story in the Hellboy Winter Special 2018, "Lost Ones." It's about Bulgarian kukeri—elaborately costumed ritual practitioners; if you've seen German comedy Toni Erdmann, you've seen a kukeri costume—confronting powerful shapeshifters during a midnight ceremony.
"Lost Ones" revisits characters from B.P.R.D.: Vampire, a five-part miniseries that ran in 2013. Original writers and artists Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon are back to explore this corner of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense's extensive purview.
Hellboy Winter Special 2018, published by Dark Horse Comics, will hit comic book stores on Dec. 12.
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