Hellboy: The Wild Hunt

Hellboy: The Wild Hunt  is the ninth file Managed edition in Mike Mignola ‘s Hellboy comic book series, the second of three connected story arc written by Mignola and illustrated byDuncan Fegredo . Its eight chapters, collected in March 2010, have been released from December 2008 through November 2009 as issues 1-8 of the  Hellboy: The Wild Hunt  Limited series , also numbered (on the inside front cover) as issues 37 through 44 of the continuing Hellboy series. The storyline delves into Irish and Arthurian legend, reprising several characters first introduced in Hellboy short story “The Corpse”. As with Hellboy, it was published by Dark Horse Comics .  ^[1]

Summary

Asleep in the home of deceased friends in Italy, a dreaming Hellboy visits the funeral of the Dagda , king of the Irish fairies, attended by Tuatha de Danaan and also by  Alice Monaghan  , the baby he saved from the fairy changeling The Gruagach in the Hellboy short story “The Corpse”. Hellboy Receives An Invitation from British Noblemen Hunt Giants, Who Call They “The Wild Hunt” after the legend of Herne the Hunter. Meanwhile, at the site of the Dagda’s murder, a restless fairy army awaits the resurrection of the ‘Queen of Blood’ who, the vengeful Gruagach argues, will get to hellboy and humankind. Having joined the Wild Hunt, Hellboy and companions ride to a bridge where they will ambush a party of giants, but his fellow huntsmen betray and attack him, declaring that “the devil shall never sit on the throne of England.”

While unconscious, Hellboy finds himself in the tomb of King Arthur , before they have been hoping to ambush. The little bird from Hellboy’s dream makes Hellboy’s invisible goal Hellboy seeks out the giants, and shedding his invisibility, attacks them. Meanwhile, the arch-devil Astaroth (last seen in  Full of Evil Box  ) appears to the Gruagach, hears his story, and gives him a small chalice filled with the blood of an entire English village Astaroth has just killed. The Gruagach for the Queen of Blood, and she rises from it.

With his giants, who he remembers ruefully, Hellboy visits Alice ‘s cottage in Ireland. A lifelong friend of the fairies, she has been expecting him since the Dagda’s funeral and takes a walk to meet Fairy Queen Mab. Meanwhile, the Queen of Blood has been responsible for the killing of the dead. She then begins to assemble her full army. Back in Ireland, Alice and Hellboy wait for Queen Mab, discussing their responsibility for the brewing war. Mab, arriving, not only agrees, predicting that Hellboy’s good works are doomed to end the world, but also that demonic savagery has begun to consume Hellboy, as evidenced by his ruthlessness in fighting the giants. Before vanishing, she tells him to be one of his ancestors, and lead an army against the army of the Queen of Blood. Once they are gone, they are going to be happy.

Hellboy’s flashbacks back to his brutal fight with the giants and then confronts his new guide, who he assumes is working for Queen Mab, and who’s repeatedly insists Hellboy is an Englishman despite Hellboy’s protests to the contrary, as Hellboy and Alice follow him through a sudden unearthly landscape. The two discusses Hellboy’s recent death and resurrection (in short story “The Island”Until their guide announces that, in revenge for all the faerie creatures Hellboy has killed in his career, he has led them into an ambush. Hellboy and Alice are besieged by a horde of pygmy fairy savages wielding poison-tipped weapons. Alice is struck and fatally poisoned, when three bird-women arrive, killing or scaring off Hellboy’s attackers. They tell Hellboy that “their mistress” has medicine for Alice’s poisoning and then transporting them to a hill overlooking their castle, which is wreathed in flame.

Awaiting her own army, the Queen of Blood comforts Gruagach and promises to grant her prayers to be restored to the strength of her youth to have her revenge on Hellboy. Meanwhile, Hellboy, outside the flame-ringed castle, is told that he’s been brought to hell by Eligos , a duke of hell commanding a troop of demons who besiege it. The demon batters Hellboy unstoppably until, in return for a promise of heirs to the claim of the throne, Hellboy learns from a nearby imp the secret of Eligos’ one weakness, an insignia worn as a ring. Hellboy destroys the ring and kills the weakened demon, ignoring his pleas for mercy, before racing The mistress of the castle appears and is revealed to Morgan the Fay. Meanwhile, the Queen of Blood receives a deputation from the dwarf-like King of Jutland. She rejects the king’s gift of a crown and orders the king’s tearful craftsman-ambassador to return home and murder the king, and to feed her heart to the forge to make her a helmet suitable for her new incarnation as Badbh , Macha , and Mor- rioghain , the triple goddess of war.

As Alice recovers from her poisoning, Morgan the Fay tells Hellboy that his witch mother, his demon father’s having been Azzael, was the last in a line of female descendants, all witches, of Mordred , her son by King Arthur. This means that Hellboy is Mordred’s first male descendant, and “rightful king of Britain”. While conveying Alice to a sickbed, she identified Hellboy with the Red Dragon of Britain as Merlin identified under Vortigern ‘s Tower . She then takes Hellboy to a garden where the sword Excalibur floats embedded in a stone. She reveals that the Queen of Blood is the witch Nimue, who, following his seduction and defeat of Merlin, has used Merlin’s stolen powers to commune with (and be driven mad by) Hellboy’s nemesis, the Ogdru Jahad , before being killed by his fearful fellow-witches. Morgan the Fay insists that to defeat Nimue, Hellboy must draw Excalibur and then summon an undead army of British noblemen (many of whom seemingly hang in full armor of the branches of a great tree growing through her castle). As Morgan le Fay Describes Nimue’s bloodlust, Hellboy relives the finding de son fight with the giants, qui in His Own bloodlust (using a makeshift sword), HAD Apparently Caused _him_, in panels accompagné by quotes from the Book of RevelationBeast of the Apocalypse. He awakens from his memories and Morgan leaves him, dejected and shaken, alone with the sword.

Walking through the castle Hellboy broods on the situation. In Alice’s room he has gone to a ghostly Vasilisa (last seen in  Darkness Calls ) who warns caution before disappearing. Alice awakens and urges him to take a swing, telling him about a dream in his life. . ” Later, Hellboy hears a new wave of leaves and leaves Alice to investigate. Astaroth appears to him and tells him he hears the dogs of the mythical Wild Hunt who smell the war that’s coming. Hunt but tells Hellboy that Satan has been asleep under Hell’s Pandemonium for Pandemonium. and generals, and claiming his waiting crown and his father’s sword. Astaroth insists that Hellboy will be in a state of war in the future. As Hellboy battles a reflection of himself, bearing sword and crown, which attacks him from a nearby mirror, Astaroth tells him that he takes Excalibur father’s sword, and himself destroying the world. His battle with his mirror image concludes with the castle being briefly engulfed in flame, leaving him alone and worrying aloud what has happened to Alice. As Hellboy battles a reflection of himself, bearing sword and crown, which attacks him from a nearby mirror, Astaroth tells him that he takes Excalibur father’s sword, and himself destroying the world. His battle with his mirror image concludes with the castle being briefly engulfed in flame, leaving him alone and worrying aloud what has happened to Alice. As Hellboy battles a reflection of himself, bearing sword and crown, which attacks him from a nearby mirror, Astaroth tells him that he takes Excalibur father’s sword, and himself destroying the world. His battle with his mirror image concludes with the castle being briefly engulfed in flame, leaving him alone and worrying aloud what has happened to Alice.

Hellboy finds Alice’s charred remains in her sickroom, where Vasilisa appears to Hellboy to ask him why he did not take Excalibur. Hellboy explains that he does not trust Morgan the Fay and that, in light of the bloodlust he showed wielding a sword against the giants, he fears what he would do if he took Excalibur. She argues that rather than trusting what he’s been told of his world-destroying destiny, he should trust Alice’s faith in him and her desire for him to take over the sword. He goes back to the sword, and – watched by Vasilisa and Astaroth, and from afar by Queen Mab and Dagda’s old servant, Sir Edward Gray and the witch doctor Mohlomi, the Baba Yaga and her servant Koku, and three witches watching scrying their cauldron – he pulls the sword easily from the stone, saying “Son of a …” and somewhere else in the world, where they had to go to where they had been, where they had met. They embrace, and in her castle Morgan the Fay notes the event while reviewing a chessboard populated by white and black skeletons and one red king. The Gruagach begs Nimue to empower him as promised, but when he leaves the power to do so he becomes enraged at his lack of faith and banishes him from his service to wander off in tears. Hellboy and Alice wander down the hill musing over Hellboy’s newfound kingship, as Lady Hatton of the Osiris club observes them in her scrying glass. When the club’s newer members begin to panic over Hellboy’s accession to kingship, they are killed by the club ‘Larzod , also inspiration of long-time Hellboy adversaries the Heliopian Brotherhood of Ra , had appeared to them and granted them immortality with which to await Hellboy’s death in final battle, cutting off and seizing his world-controlling stone right hand. The craftsman-ambassador from Jutland, having murdered his king for the heart he has extracted to fuel, tearfully holds the helmet he has forged for Nimue, in the form of a trio of ravens.

References