Hellboy: Odder Jobs

    (Dark Horse, 2004)

Like Odd Jobs before it, this prose anthology presents original Hellboy short stories by various writers including Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, director/screenwriter), Guillermo Del Toro (Hellboy, director/screenwriter) and Sharyn McCrumb (Songcatcher, author). The far-flung adventures veer between comedy and tragedy as the assembled writers delve into Hellboy's world and come back up with whimsy and pathos.

Odder Jobs finds Hellboy getting some questionable information in Central Park, meeting a lost sibling in rural England, litigating against a vampire in New Orleans, slaying a ravaging manticore in California, and spelunking in Romania. Associates from the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense make numerous appearances. Liz Sherman enlists H.B.’s help to tame some fiery devil dogs in the scorching Libyan desert, while back at BPRD headquarters, Abe Sapien's subaqueous meditation goes a little too deep.

These sixteen stories draw on Mike Mignola's rich mix of world mythology, H.P. Lovecraft and Ed Wood to comment on such universal concepts as the recovery of what’s been lost, mysteries of the self, and the ontology of being. Each story has a black and white frontispiece illustrated by Mignola.

— Leland Burrill
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