Hellboy - Comic BookIn 2005 Guillermo Del Toro brought Hellboy to the masses. But before the Mexican director had considered the live action movie, Hellboy was a hugely popular, yet relatively new, comic book character.

The oversized red beast was the creation of comic artist/ writer Mike Mignola (alongside John Byrne, of X-Men and Fantastic 4 fame) for Comic-Con Comics #2, distributed at the 1993 San Diego convention.

The story begins with a group of Nazis, who attempt to summon the devil in an effort to win WWII. Instead they end up with a small, red, baby demon who is rescued and raised by the US government and later goes on to work for a covert agency as something of a demon hunter.

Mignola's distinctive style of artistry - sharp edges, heavily shaded tones - made Hellboy a stand out character, and it  wasn't long before the demon cropped up in his own series of adventures.

Mignola co-wrote the first series, 1994's Seed of Destruction, with John Byrne before going it alone. Most of Hellboy's adventures were then collected for trade paperbacks (comic book talk for comic strips collected for a single book), with the later stories being penned by comic book creators other than Mignola, including Guy Davies, Ryan Sook and Christopher Golden, who went on to write numerous novels based on the character.

The popularity of the numerous mini-series' of comics allowed Mignola to spin off other stories based in the Hellboy universe. Alongside Hellboy, who works for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), are a range of quirky characters, of which Abe Sapien and Lobster Johnson have both found their own comic homes.

Due to the backstory he'd given Hellboy (the character faces becoming a key part of a forthcoming apocalypse, knowingly or otherwise), Mignola felt the character was being lost in a bigger picture and unable to remain the freak-of-the-week demon hunter that he'd become in the majority of stories, and decided to change tact with the future comics.

At the same time, Mignola decided he couldn't give his stories the attention that they required. He put this down to his age, not to mention the various projects he'd undertaken since, including work on the big screen versions.

And so Mignola has passed the mantle on to English comic book scribe, Duncan Fegredo, who's first effort, and the 8th volume in the Hellboy works, is Darkness Falls, a story that takes Hellboy in the direction hinted by Mignola - back to his roots.

While the likes of Spider-man, X-Men and Superman have large followings built up since their inceptions so many years ago, Hellboy is something of a newcomer, making the Hollywood adaptations edgier, and perhaps truer to the source material.

It remains to be seen what will happen to the comic book character now that originator Mike Mignola has moved on, but it's hard to believe, given the quality of the two instalments thus far, that his cinematic outings will end any time soon.