The Occult Aesthetic in Hellboy

I’ve been reading Mike Mignola’s original Hellboy run straight through recently. The following are some off-the-cuff thoughts that I’ve had regarding potential reader experiences of Hellboy and the cultural positioning of those potential experiences. These ideas are half-baked and potentially incoherent. But hopefully the speculative and open-ended tone of this post will be fitting, given its content.

The mythology referenced and invented in the original Hellboy series is so all encompassing and intricate that there is no obviously clear dogmatic or narrative foundation. It draws on everything from Aleister Crowley to the European Witch Craze to traditional Irish and English folklore to Dante’s Divine Comedy to the tropes of 1940’s pulps in order to fill out the storyworld and expound the exploits of the reluctant Beast of the Apocalypse. It’s dizzying.

            The narrative qua plot is complex enough, but can be summarized clearly, if not succinctly. I will not do so here. Go read Hellboy. However, it is the nature of the underlying mythology that I find most interesting because is so broad, and to my eye, potentially vague. I don’t mean this as a criticism in any way. Hellboy is one of my favorite comics titles to date and I love the feeling of reading stories that take place in such a deep, dense, and lived-in storyworld. The narratives take place in a world that (rendered in Mignola’s minimalist noir-infused art style) feels ancient and expansive.

Still, the mythological world, the expectations built by the implied rules of this fantasy world are unclear and this allows for a fair amount of genre bending (e.g., hard-boiled pulp, horror, high fantasy, science fiction). This strategy for dealing with the core mythological structures of narratives reminds me of the tactic of Grant Morrison and (to a lesser extent) Alan Moore. Moore’s uses of occult and religious systems are intensely intricate, but do have an air of coherence. It may be that a more astute or determined reader than myself could understand, for example, the Hermetic system of magic that Moore puts forth in Promethea to a workable degree. To be honest, I never thought that the return would be worth the investment to attempt to understand Moore’s esoteric cosmology in more than a superficial way. Morrison seems to import any religious or cultural references at his disposal into his comics, coherence be damned. His narratives recklessly swerve from referencing Britpop bands to engaging with the ideas of chaos magicians.

            Mike Mignola’s Hellboy functions in much the same way to these two examples. Mignola draws from highly disparate sources, which rely on potentially mutually exclusive cosmological systems. And rather than confusing the reader, this potpourri of mythology serves to create a general emotional tone, a feeling, an aesthetic. The world of Hellboy is ill-defined, fantastical, and amorphous. Many cultural artifacts that are influenced by Western esotericism and occultism seem to follow this method. To some extent, this seems to be a response to and rejection of the highly propositional, dogmatic, and belief-focused mainstream religions in the U.S. (namely, Western-style Christianities). The Protestant Christianities that have always been highly influential in the United States are focused on adherents accepting propositional beliefs, which are (or often purport to be) part of a coherent theological system of beliefs.

            The occultisms of Crowley, Blavatsky, and Mignola’s Hellboy storyworld, seem to purposefully buck this expectation for metaphysical and mythological coherence and instead, weave an occultist aesthetic, which can permeate the mood and emotions of practitioners and/or readers.