Is this story a kind of call back to the more fast-paced, light-hearted Hellboy tales?
It is. The best thing I did – and it wasn’t necessarily intentional – but the best thing I did with Hellboy was having that character appear on earth in 1944 and then begin the first actual Hellboy story in 1994. So I have 50 years where Hellboy ran around as a character who didn’t really evolve very much. He was just a regular guy. Once I started doing things in “Seed of Destruction” and “Wake The Devil,” that character started evolving pretty fast. As soon as I started telling that story, he started changing from a regular guy to the guy who was possibly the Beast of the Apocalypse. It’s really difficult to do Hellboy stories set now where we don’t deal with the baggage of that character. BUT…there’s a period of 50 years where that guy is completely obliviously to or avoiding that. Actually, he was kind of unaware that he was this Apocalyptic creature. So stories like “Hellboy in Mexico” or “The Crooked Man” are definitely chances for me to draw a much less complicated character. I
