Yes, you did. After finally getting around to seeing one of the Hellboy Animated TV movies, I decided to give the comics a try. And aside from signifying that I have, perhaps, gone too far into the rabbit hole of Mike Mignola's universe, The Black Wedding, and its companion volumes, is also an index of Hellboy's open and malleable textuality.
In Hellboy fandom, “Is it a comic, and did Mike Mignola write it?” is pretty much the strict standard for canon. Interestingly, one reason for that filter is that Mignola himself is, seemingly, pretty ready to share his creation with others. But, also interestingly, according to Tad Stones' introduction to Black Wedding, Hellboy Animated is not meant to look like Mignola's art, and the meta-narrative is intended to be parallel, but independent. This describes the relationship of Guillermo del Toro's films to Mignola's books pretty well, too.
As Stones notes, maintaining the difference between the original and mainline comics and other media is enforced by licensing, a point also made by Scott Allie in his introduction to Hellboy: The Companion (Dark Horse Books, 2008). There is a clear economic incentive to doing this: it allows each line to, essentially, become it's own franchise with its own potential audience/readership, while, at the same time, adding additional value to Mignola's original works. On the other hand, I think we all know that there are corporations that tightly control their characters and storyworlds (see Stones' intro re: Disney as a case in point). It would be easy enough for Mignola and Dark Horse to have chosen to lock down their creation, and to keep other creators on a tight leash rather than allowing them to run free within the broad parameters of Hellboy's world. However, the big red guy's universe has always been plastic and intertextual.
It's not much of a revelation to note that the world of the Hellboy comics is a mashup of occult mythology, folk tales, 20th century political history, and pulp fiction. The range of influences, though, is indicative of Mignola's inherently flexible framing of the storyworld. This is underscored by the introductions that he sometimes provides for individual stories in the Dark Horse TPBs. Particularly in the collections of one-shots, it becomes clear that Mignola will write and draw based on fragments of myths and folk tales, or individual images or ideas that he has stuck in his head, without much regard to where those pieces come from. As Stephen Weiner points out in his contribution to Hellboy: The Companion, the fact that the stories about Hellboy and his companions are told out of linear chronology gives Mignola and others creative license to introduce new characters, transport those characters to different times and places, and explore new ideas. There are always little niches to be filled in or filled out.
One significant way in which Black Wedding takes advantage of this intrinsic openness, as opposed to that simply required by the licensing agreement, is in its cute and hilarious second story involving kid Hellboy and Lobster Johnson (something that looks to be standard in the Hellboy Animated comics). This story, “The Pyramid of Death”, is made possible by the holes left in the canon, and both it and the main story are enabled by the varied and synthetic nature of the original comics. The Hellboy canon promotes speculative thought, which maybe one reason why so many other writers and artists seem eager to work with Mignola's characters.
I don't want to give the impression that I necessarily think that the pliability of Hellboy is somehow superior to more tightly constructed narrative universes. As a matter of imagination, both offer different opportunities and challenges. It just happens that one of the distinctive features of the Hellboy world is its openness and intertexuality, which makes the Hellboy Animated comics more interesting than maybe they should be.
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