Edit 07/22/2010: The Hellboy Universe Trade List is now up!
Some chatting on forums has motivated me to take a break from everything else to work on the Hellboy reading order again. Here’s what I’ve got as far as trades go. Links to Amazon for now, since they’re not in the online version of the database yet.
Hellboy Volume 1: Seed of Destruction
Hellboy Volume 2: Wake The Devil
Hellboy Volume 3: The Chained Coffin and Others
Hellboy Volume 4: The Right Hand of Doom
Hellboy Volume 5: Conqueror Worm
Hellboy Volume 6: Strange Places
Hellboy Volume 7: The Troll Witch and Others
Hellboy Volume 8: Darkness Calls
Hellboy Volume 9: The Wild Hunt
Hellboy Volume 10: The Crooked Man and OthersHellboy: Library Edition Volume 1: Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil
Hellboy: Library Edition Volume 2: The Chained Coffin and Others and The Right Hand of Doom
Hellboy: Library Edition Volume 3: Conqueror Worm and Strange Places
Hellboy: Weird Tales Volume 1
Hellboy: Weird Tales Volume 2
Hellboy JuniorHellboy Animated Vol. 1: The Black Wedding
Hellboy Animated Vol. 2: The Judgment Bell
Hellboy Animated Vol. 3: The MenagerieHellboy Sourcebook and Roleplaying Game
Hellboy: The CompanionB.P.R.D. Volume 1: Hollow Earth & Other Stories
B.P.R.D. Volume 2: The Soul of Venice and Other Stories
B.P.R.D. Volume 3: Plague of Frogs
B.P.R.D. Volume 4: The Dead
B.P.R.D. Volume 5: The Black Flame
B.P.R.D. Volume 6: The Universal Machine
B.P.R.D. Volume 7: Garden of Souls
B.P.R.D. Volume 8: Killing Ground
B.P.R.D. Volume 9: 1946
B.P.R.D. Volume 10: The Warning
B.P.R.D. Volume 11: The Black Goddess
B.P.R.D. Volume 12: War On Frogs
B.P.R.D. Volume 13: 1947
B.P.R.D. Volume 14: King Of Fear (Upcoming?)Lobster Johnson: The Iron Prometheus
Abe Sapien: The Drowning
Witchfinder: In the Service of AngelsCrossovers (thanks wikipedia!)
Next Men Volume 4: Faith (collects Next Men issues 19-22, 21 contains the first appearance of Hellboy?)
Savage Dragon/Hellboy (collects Savage Dragon issues 34-35 with cover and pin-up gallery)
Savage Dragon Volume 9: Worlds At War (collects issues 41-46, 41 has a cameo from Hellboy [And Cerebus, apparently??])
Goon Volume 3: Heaps of Ruination (collects The Goon issues 5-8, 7 contains a Goon/Hellboy crossover)
Madman Vol. 2 (collects Madman issues 1-11, 5 contains a major cameo from Hellboy)
Gen¹³ Vol. 2: Road Trip (collects issues 7-13, 13 contains a cameo from Hellboy)
The Heretic (collects issues 1-4, 4 contains a cameo from Hellboy and Abe Sapien)
Danger Unlimited (Babe 2 contains a major cameo from Abe Sapien)
Essential Painkiller Jane Volume 2: Hellboy And Friends
Hellboy: Masks and Monsters (finally available for preorder – I gotta get this one no matter what for my DC reading!)
Starman Omnibus Vol. 4 (Contains the same Batman/Hellboy crossover as the previous book.)
Prose (Not sure if I’m including these yet)
- Hellboy: Odd Jobs
- Hellboy: Odder Jobs
- Hellboy: Oddest Jobs
- There are a bunch more prose books that can be here at some point, these are just ones I’m putting here mainly to stop myself from thinking I’ve missed comics.
The Big question is this: Should I just be organizing these by the collected issue release dates? Or is there something more complicated going on?
For now, I’m starting to get these in date order so I can upload them to the database. But let me know if anything is missing!
A while back I was curious about whether Hellboy’s first appearance was really in the pages of John Byrne’s Next Men series, so I checked it out myself, and indeed it is. He pops up out of nowhere to help some characters escape a monster or something, and there’s not much explanation of who he is. Then at the end it says to check out Hellboy #1…basically, it was an issue-long advertisement. I suspect it worked out because John Byrne was the writer of Next Men as well as the co-writer for the first Hellboy miniseries.
Also, don’t forget about the Batman/Hellboy/Starman series (two issues), collected in the fourth Starman Omnibus.
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Thanks Marc – that’s pretty funny about the Next Men thing.
The Starman/Batman crossover is also included in Masks and Monsters, so I wasn’t sure if I should include the omnibus in there or not. I guess I might as well for the sake of completionism.
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Ah, I didn’t realize it was going to be in the Masks and Monsters trade as well. But yeah, I guess it can’t hurt to have both listed.
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Yeah, I’ll throw it in there.
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