Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Readers of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy have been well-served by the collection of his adventures into a series of oversized hardcovers as the series went on, in seven Hellboy Library Editions. These didn’t reprint every story in the Hellboy timeline and notably split the catacysmic ‘The Storm and The Fury’ by Mignola and Duncan Fegredo over two volumes. In 2020, a new series of Hellboy Omnibus books brought together every page of Mignola and his collaborators’ work on this character in softcover format. Six volumes reprinted the entire series, with an extra-long third volume featuring ‘The Storm and The Fury’ in its entirety. Those omnibuses were only standard trade size, so there was obviously room for something grander: and now there is Monster-Sized Hellboy. Weighing in at 360mm high, 235mm wide and 92mm thick, this book is 1512 pages long. That page count makes it approximately three times as wide as a typical Library Edition – and it’s 50mm taller.

This heavyweight collection is somewhere between Omnibus and Library Edition in terms of range, containing ten graphic novels: Seed of Destruction, Wake the Devil, Conqueror Worm, Strange Places, Into the Silent Sea, Darkness Calls, The Wild Hunt, The Storm and the Fury and Hellboy in Hell Volumes 1 and 2, interwoven with shorter stories ‘The Wolves of St August’, ‘The Chained Coffin’, ‘Almost Colossus’, ‘The Right Hand of Doom’, ‘Box Full of Evil’, ‘Being Human’, ‘The Mole’, ‘The Magician and the Snake’, and ‘The Exorcist of Vorsk’. It does not contain ‘The Corpse’, ‘The Crooked Man’, ‘Hellboy in Mexico’, ‘The Troll Witch’ or The Midnight Circus, and many other short stories aren’t here either. This is probably because they had to stop somewhere; another three to four hundred pages would have made it unbindable. Thanks to excellent design and production, page edges don’t disappear into the deep folds and this book is surprisingly readable despite its bulk, although you will need a flat surface to place it on. It is not comfortable to hold in your hands or place on your knees.

So: Monster-Sized Hellboy is hugely impressive but it’s not a one-purchase solution for absolutely all your Hellboy needs. If you’re not a completist this should not bother you. None of the missing material adds much to what’s collected here (although ‘The Corpse’ is considered a key story by most fans). All the hits are in this book and it’s pretty much everything you could want in one shelf-testing hardcover package, on nice paper that makes all that black ink pop off the page.