About Me
***Character biography:Hellboy is a creature summoned in the final months of World War II by Grigori Rasputin, on Tarmagant Island, a small isle just off the coast of Scotland, having been commissioned by the Nazis to change the tide of war ("Project Ragna Rok"). He appeared in a fireball in a ruined church in East Bromwich, England, on December 23, 1944. Hellboy proved not to be a devil, but a little boy-like creature with red skin, horns, a tail, and a large stone right hand — hence the name given by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm (pronounced Broom).Taken by the U.S. forces to an Air Force base somewhere in New Mexico, Hellboy was raised by the United States Army and by the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), a U.S. government agency dedicated to combating occult threats.As an adult, Hellboy became the primary agent for the BPRD alongside several other human and quasi-human agents. It must be pointed out that up to 2007, Hellboy has only appeared once in all of the several BPRD mini-series and that is in the fourth issue of The Universal Machine. His fellow agents include Kate Corrigan, a professor of folklore at NY University; Abe Sapien, an amphibian humanoid ("ichthyo sapien"); Liz Sherman, a pyrokinetic young woman; and Roger, an unusually large homunculus.During a visit to Bromwich Church, Hellboy learned of his parentage: he was conceived some 300 years earlier by a witch, Catherine Tanner-Tremaine, and a demon Prince of Sheol. Hellboy did not exist as a baby in the real world at this point in time; the prince's 'favorite son' was a power waiting to be born. Hellboy's "Mother" also had children, a nun and a priest who now haunt the church, dying in an attempt to stop the demon from claiming their mother on her deathbed.In the comics, Hellboy is at least semi-famous, having been granted "honorary human" status by the United Nations in 1952 and being known as the "world's greatest paranormal investigator." As such, he interacts regularly with normal humans, most of whom are not presented as overtly reacting to his strange appearance (though his primary interactions in the comics are with law enforcement officials from different organizations, the military, and various "scholars of the weird"). In the film version, however, Hellboy is kept under lock and key, and considered simply an "urban legend" by the general populace.Hellboy's adventures in the comics span the 1940s to the present day, and involve elements such as sorcerers, Nazis, the Thule Society, hollow earth explorers, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and other oddities, such as the Ogdru Jahad. Several of the storylines deal with Hellboy's Right Hand of Doom and its purpose in initiating the Apocalypse.
