The Visitor: How & Why He Stayed

The World of Hellboy: Standalone Books

by Mike Mignola, Chris Roberson, Paul Grist (Illustrator)

In 1944 Hellboy was conjured in a ceremony meant to give Hitler the ultimate occult weapon. Fortunately, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm was there to witness and to guide Hellboy to become the world’s greatest paranormal detective. But Bruttenholm wasn’t the only witness to Hellboy’s arrival. This collection reveals the aliens who monitored Hellboy’s arrival, and why the assassin they sent to Earth stayed his hand.

Collects The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed #1–#5 and the The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed short story from Hellboy Winter Special 2017.

Genres: Comics, Graphic Novels, Horror, Fantasy, Science Fiction, Graphic Novels Comics, Comic Book

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 4, 2017

About the author

Mike Mignola was born September 16, 1960 in Berkeley, California and grew up in nearby Oakland. His fascination with ghosts and monsters began at an early age (he doesn't remember why) and reading Dracula at age 13 introduced him to Victorian literature and folklore from which he has never recovered.

In 1982, hoping to find a way to draw monsters for a living, he moved to New York City and began working for Marvel Comics, first as a (very terrible) inker and then as an artist on comics like Rocket Raccoon, Alpha Flight and The Hulk. By the late 80s he had begun to develop his signature style (thin lines, clunky shapes and lots of black) and moved onto higher profile commercial projects like Cosmic Odyssey (1988) and Gotham by Gaslight (1989) for DC Comics, and the not-so-commercial Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser (1990) for Marvel. In 1992, he drew the comic book adaptation of the film Bram Stoker's Dracula for Topps Comics.

In 1993, Mike moved to Dark Horse comics and created Hellboy, a half-demon occult detective who may or may not be the Beast of the Apocalypse. While the first story line (Seed of Destruction, 1994) was co-written by John Byrne, Mike has continued writing the series himself. There are, at this moment, 13 Hellboy graphic novel collections (with more on the way), several spin-off titles (B.P.R.D., Lobster Johnson, Abe Sapien and Witchfinder), three anthologies of prose stories, several novels, two animated films and two live-action films staring Ron Perlman. Hellboy has earned numerous comic industry awards and is published in a great many countries.

Mike also created the award-winning comic book The Amazing Screw-on Head and has co-written two novels (Baltimore, or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire and Joe Golem and the Drowning City) with best-selling author Christopher Golden.

Mike worked (very briefly) with Francis Ford Coppola on his film Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), was a production designer on the Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001) and was visual consultant to director Guillermo del Toro on Blade II (2002), Hellboy (2004) and Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008). He lives somewhere in Southern California with his wife, daughter, a lot of books and a cat.

Reviews

[Chad · Rating 2 out of 5]

Chris Roberson takes an oddity from an old Hellboy miniseries, Conqueror Worm, and expands on how he ended up in this place.



The Visitor was an alien watching Hellboy throughout the years, working behind the scenes to help out when Hellboy or the BPRD missed things. Basically he's the Uatu the Watcher of the Hellboy universe. Paul Grist's art was not very good. It was Mike Mignola lite, without the nuance or shadows.

[Sam Quixote · Rating 1 out of 5]

A more accurate title for this book would be The Visitor: Why???

An alien race of watchers is unnecessarily introduced to the Hellboy universe for no reason other than to sell more comics to Hellboy fans. One of them is there when Hellboy first appears during World War 2 and his orders are to kill him because of that cliched literary trope, a “prophecy” - but the Visitor instead decides to give Hellboy a chance. From then on, he watches Hellboy’s adventures over the decades in the background, occasionally saving his ass in secret, and fighting some monsters/frog worshippers.

Really: why?? This was such a pointless addition to Hellboy! I kept waiting for a reason to explain this book’s existence and it never materialised. It’s entirely superfluous!

There’s almost no story, the Visitor has a contrived magic green card that does whatever it needs to in the moment - weapon, communicator, disguise, door unlocker - and his wife is included to show us how kind the alien is... except we already got that from his initial actions in sparing Hellboy’s life so she’s basically just filler. Paul Grist was brought onboard because he can sorta draw like Mike Mignola so if you want a pale Mignola-imitation, here it is?

Boring and needless, The Visitor: How & Why He Stayed is completely disposable - don’t bother.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely amazing book! The artwork was fantastic; Paul Grist is a master. The story was so moving... It broke my heart, it did. A truly brilliant mini-series; I wish it could've been longer!

[Ill D · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hellboy is Red
Alien is Blue
The Visitor is ok
Dooty doo doo

Just like a juvenile rhyme that a child might come up with, so to is The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed. With about as much importance to the HellBoy canon as a grain of rice and piecemeal action to boot, The Visitor feels more akin to a silly jingle than a properly fleshed out story. Failures and all, there's definitely a bit to say about this. So, let's jump in.

First of all the art is cute. In fact it's so downright cutesy that it detracts from an otherwise gritty universe suffused with legit evil and all sorts of nasty stuff. In other comics in the canon, Hellboy dukes it out with universally despised nasties such as Rasputin and Baba Yaga (to name a few). These conflicts sit uneasily alongside an Alien that acts as his guardian angel.

Just as bizarre are the juxtapositions of artistic decisions, so to are the insertions of *ahem social issues. Again, just as cutseyness has never been in the Hellboy universe, neither have social issues (whether as a conscious decision or not) which it's steered clear of. Although clearly grounded in history, this alternate history (as it were) has never dealt with racism or miscegenation, for example. It's a little jarring for a cutsey story with equally cutsey art to feature a depiction of a lynching about halfway into it.

Jeepers!

And all this incoherence is strikingly odd for a style (visually at least) that has so very effectively aped Mignola's. Although downright minimalist, the typical style of the Hellboy Universe has been well replicated by Chris Roberson. Instead of striking angulations or harsh contrasts of color, simple rounded lines and warm colors have sufficed. How quaint.

Quaint, it very well may or may not be yet, the internalized references within will surely be up for debate within the Hellboy community. Throughout the comic there are very generous pepperings of well-known scenes in the series. The fans might dig this but, some of the replications can come across as quite lazy and simplistic.

Just like Nas said, "... there's nothing new under the sun, its never what you do, its how its done." Chris Roberson has been given a lot of already prepared material and we'll have to decide how well he (re)made Mignola's world in his own image. These thoughts will definitely color the questions we'll have to wrestle with over, The Visitor, How and Why He Stayed.

One thumb halfway up.

[Juho Pohjalainen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's been a while - several years - since I read the relevant story, so I can't recall if the protagonist of this one was seen there as well. I should pick it up again and make sure. If he was there, all along, then this comic just gets better.

Either way, it offers a fresh perspective to Hellboy's life, the mythos as a whole, and has a touch of human nature and inherent goodness that I can also appreciate. Well worth the read.

[Frédéric · Rating 2 out of 5]

The backstory of a body- as in dead- Hellboy found in a story decades ago.

An alien supposed to kill Hellboy on his arrival on Earth decides to let him live and monitor him, convinced he might be a solution more than the problem. So he does over 5 decades and  gets involved in a relationship with an earthling along the way.

The point is, is it really interesting? Does it add something to the overall plot? Answers are no and not really. The plot drags on, rehashing formulaic good sentiments before concluding as predicted. The main character is as unentertaining as can be and his relationship with a human woman so cliché it nearly hurts.

Paul Grist, an author I really like when working solo, does his best impersonation of Mignola while conserving his main style and storytelling. Cool but not enough to maintain interest throughout this boring and cash-grab story designed for hardcore completists.

[Wing Kee · Rating 3 out of 5]

A beautiful story marred by irksome art.

World: First and foremost, as much as I enjoyed this story the art really pulled me out of the story. I would have loved this story way more if the art was able to carry the emotions the words was bringing to the story. The world building is fantastic. It weaves between the history of Hellboy and from the single panel of the Seed of Destruction and the body we see in Conqueror worm Mignola creates and weaves this interesting little piece of the Mignolaverse that no one else will know except this character and Ruby. It’s beautiful how it’s placed in the world.

Story: A beautiful story of love and discovery that weaves itself expertly around main events of the first couple of years of HB’s life. The racial issues, the human commentary and the ideas of fate and choices is done simple and well here. The feeling of melancholy and hope weaved together is a wonderful one. I can’t believe how much the ending effected me.

Characters: A nameless character and a toss away in the Mignolaverse finally gets his little tale, it’s beautiful and his journey is that of discovery and wonder and learning about us, humans and his arc is fast and choppy but also really emotionally well done. I love the relationship he has with Ruby and his observations with the world, the character work is done well.

A simple tale that brings a lot of emotions but the art really takes away some of the powerful words.

Onward to the next book!

[Stewart Tame · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mike Mignola strikes me as the perfect blend of Jack Kirby and Kim Deitch, and, the more I see of his work, the stronger this conviction becomes.

Like Kirby, he seems blessed with a boundless imagination and the ability to draw anything. His writing and drawing can imply so much depth of backstory in the smallest detail. Other creators can spend entire careers just expanding on single panels of his work.

And, like Deitch, all of his work seems to interconnect in interesting and complex ways. Each new series, be it Hellboy or BPRD or whatever, gives us a glimpse of some small part of the enormous universe contained in Mignola’s head. In his Afterword, Chris Roberson calls it the “Mignolaverse.”

In this book, the Visitor is an alien sent to assassinate Hellboy at the moment of his birth. He stays his hand at the last minute, sensing the potential for good in the infant, and instead remains on Earth to closely monitor HB’s progress, promising his associates that he will resume the assassination if necessary. And so the years go by as he assesses and files his reports. We get an outsider’s perspective on humanity's capacity for both good and evil. We also see glimpses of various Hellboy adventures over the decades. In the end, the Visitor meets HB in person, and renders his judgment.

Among other things, this book is a meditation on humanity and the passage of time. Although the Visitor ages at a different rate than humans, he does age. And his alien nature doesn't prevent him from bonding on an emotional level. Paul Grist’s artwork is lovely, working very well for the material.

As with any Mignolaverse title, this is only a small piece of a much larger mosaic. The more pieces you're familiar with, the greater the impact of any individual title. I’ve only read a handful of them myself, but liked this one a great deal. Getting deeper into the Mignolaverse is one of those projects I keep meaning to get around to. I very much like what I’ve seen so far. Recommended!

[Orrin Grey · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed falls into the same trap that a lot of recent Mignolaverse spinoff titles have been catching themselves in lately: In order to stay accessible to readers not as well-versed in the by-now complex (if also amazingly well-developed) Hellboy mythos, it ends up repeating a lot of stuff that we already know, and showing us a lot of things that we've already seen. This can be handled better and worse, and in the case of The Visitor, it is largely excused by the fact that this is the story of that weird alien guy who has shown up on and off since Seed of Destruction all those years ago, which means that he's been around for several of Hellboy's big adventures.

Unfortunately, knowing why that guy was there doesn't really add a whole lot, so it's good that they also included some nice moments about memory, grief, and humanity--not to mention the cultural zeitgeist in which the story takes place--to help give the tale some depth. Still, The Visitor ultimately felt a little slight to me, compared to some of the other Hellboy spinoff titles we've gotten. That said, Paul Grist's art is absolutely perfect for the work that he needs to do here, so that's certainly something.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

A classic 'observer' trope from countless books and tv shows is used to full advantage in the Hellboy-verse.

[Drew Canole · Rating 1 out of 5]

I felt like this ruined the "questions" it set out to answer. The story doesn't really work and takes away from the Hellboy mythos. Best to forget this book exists!

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

I don't really understand all the work that went into this. Talk about an inconsequential story--this has only the barest of minimum connections to the larger Hellboy universe. Paul Grist's artwork looks like he grew up tracing Mike Mignola and never went much further. Still, this isn't completely terrible, although it really is only for the Hellboy completist.

[Peter Derk · Rating 4 out of 5]

The titular visitor had this gizmo that was like a floating, glowing iPhone. And it also blasted people or disintegrated them or something. I've been very seriously considering going to a flip phone when my phone breaks. I talk to ONE person regularly, and everyone else I talk to is every couple months, a text like, "Wanna eat lunch?"

I started looking around at not-smart phones and found some options. The weirdest? The NoPhone, which is a phone-shaped piece of plastic. For like $15. Fun gag, I guess but is it $15 of fun? The only use I see for this, when the current generation gets dementia, we can give them these little plastic bars to fool them into thinking they're doing what they've always done without exposing them to the dangers of people selling whatever it is that telemarketers are selling right now. I don't actually know, although I hear i can get lower interest rates?

[Jiro Dreams of Suchy · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little side story to one of the early Hellboy collection- a random side character ends up being of great importance. An alien is sent to kill baby Hellboy before he becomes the destroyer he was born to be BUT through the trials and tribulations of becoming human (adjacent at least) the alien learns that people can change from their past or their destiny. The alien dies happy knowing Hellboy can be good.

A lot of sweetness in this so the- the alien covers as a white guy married to a black woman in the 50s so he learns about the horrors of mankind but gets to see how good people can be as well.

[Pop Bop · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, "What Is the Deal With This Alien Guy?"

This is, clearly and hands down, the best Hellboy spinoff I've ever read. It is immersive, melancholy, thoughtful, and totally in tune with the rich history of both Hellboy himself and the multi-decade arc of the Hellboy books.

This volume collects issues 1 to 5 of "The Visitor: How and Why He Stayed". It tells the full story of that mysterious alien who was present when Hellboy first arrived on Earth and who has appeared in the background from time to time since in other Hellboy tales. That alien has been a "sleeper", hidden by Mignola in the background literally more than twenty years ago, and now finally his role has been revealed. That, alone, is pretty darn cool. Who thinks that far ahead?

But, even if this tale were simply a one off that just popped into someone's head recently, it would be worthwhile. Why the alien appeared, why he stayed, and what happened to him are fascinating questions, and the reader is rewarded with clear, well imagined, and surprisingly touching answers. Roberson describes the tale as being about "mortality, memory and loss", and that is a fair and elegant summary.

And of course there are some sketches, an author interview, and a bonus Christmas story, just to round things out. It's also worth especially noting that the drawing - spare, clear, clean, crisp, a touch modern and angular - serves the story exceptionally well. It is restrained, which adds to the power of the message, and it features a lot of white, grey, ink, and big pastels, which helps carry the slightly melancholy mood.

That's not to say that we don't have suspense, action, and a compelling story. We also slip in and out of Hellboy episodes familiar from other Hellboy books, (only this time from the alien observer's point of view and for the alien's purposes). But, this is the alien's book most of all, and it is a worthy and, (again in Roberson's words), elegiac contribution that enriches the Hellboy canon. A very nice find.

(Please note that I received a free advance will-self-destruct-in-x-days Adobe Digital copy of this book without a review requirement, or any influence regarding review content should I choose to post a review. Apart from that I have no connection at all to either the author or the publisher of this book.)

[Aritra Dasgupta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I said this in my review of Hellboy Volume 7, that I really hoped Mike Mignola puts faith in himself and tries to "go further." Hellboy has always had a sense of melancholia, of times gone by, regret and almost of the living dead. But Mike has never cashed in on that. He always went the other way, with a lot of flashy fights and a rush to go from one scenario to another. And I enjoy that, because the stories are really good, but there are such fascinating characters here that it always felt a shame to me that they never got to breathe. I wanted to hear Abe, Liz, Hellboy talk, just talk, not deliver exposition or discuss objectives and plans, but just talk like friends and discuss how they're doing. I really wanted Mike to have faith in his writing skills, that he could keep our attention without explosions or exposition or bloody Hellboy getting beaten the fuck up but still being so so cocky.

The Visitor is what I have wanted from this universe. It is almost unconcerned with plot. There is his own life story here, but most of the time here is spent just going through the major events of Hellboy's life. Except this time, we are pulled out of the action, the urgency and we get this beautiful poetic prose, full of kindness and hope as it quietly strolls through it all. All the bullets, the blood, the monsters. The Visitor is like a prophet. He knows everything that is going to happen. He isn't surprised by the violence. He doesn't even care. He is surprised by the kindness.

So what we get, is this beautiful emotional beat, where we look at Hellboy's soul. There is no "Shut up, let's fight" here. Hellboy has survived so long ignoring his destiny, blazingly choosing his own path. We see the kindness within him, the pure goodness and urge to help others. It's beautiful. It is so beautiful to me. The Visitor constantly muses on the nature of good and evil. He is in the truest sense of the word, an alien. Always, he has lived in solitude, never fitting in, always observing, thinking. I am so glad this book goes there. It has to go there. So, we see the Visitor falling in love with a black woman. I have seen so many people being turned off by the social issues present here. But well, what art isn't political. How many black people have we seen in Hellboy before this? For a series with an outsider, an outlier as a protagonist, how can you just ignore the implications? It was a very unexpected twist for me, honestly. Because when you think about it, the visitor being white is such a brilliant thing to use. 99% of Mike's characters are white, I had just assumed and moved on with that(really the only colored people are guest appearances by natives). To subvert that and bring this on, and build on it, well, I just loved this so much.

The prose is so beautiful too. The whole arc here is so subtle in a way, so uncharacteristic of what Mignola himself would do. Chris Roberson, take a bow man. How does goodness exist? Is it inherent? These are such philosophical questions, Mignola would never confront this, a touch wrong and you could appear pretentious, but the writing is absolutely perfect. This is not a sermon. This is an alien mulling over human ideas in his personal diary. He doesn't know where he will end up, he is just documenting his thought process. This could easily become chaotic, distracted from the essential plot or too wooden, acting as filler to the action on the page. But it's not. All of it beautifully complements each other. The art is so sweet and cute, it has the impressionistic vibe of Mignola but it trades the horror of the shadows for this melancholic, NOT GLOOMY, this feeling of already knowing what is going to happen and just accepting it.

I must talk about Ruby. Is it a very simple portrait? Yes. But it is perfect, it doesn't overstay itself, it doesn't unnecessarily add subplots or ideas. The whole book is very economical, which is necessary if you want to be good when you have so many philosophical ideas to handle here. Ruby is an amazing plot device honestly. She grounds the alien, brings solace to his confusion over humanity's chaotic differences in behavior. She is the emotional core to this story. Hellboy is just a device to push the momentum forward. Did I say Ruby is a plot device? Well everything is, but Hellboy is just the legs of this story, Ruby is the heart to the Alien's brain.

What surprised me honestly (I mean besides all the rest of the surprises), is also how the Alien deals with human villains. He is at once, extremely sympathetic to them(stopping short of just begging to them to stop their childish behavior) but also he basically kills them. It is a shocking juxtaposition and it just made me think a lot. The Alien isn't a hero you should adore, I admire the writers' absolute belief in themselves here. They know that they don't need to make you obsessively like and agree with him all the time. It's a beautiful way to showcase the guy's flaws, he maybe kind and helpful, but he is like a giant with ants, a little offhand step and he could crush them. I love how he grows, I love how the comic stays, it fucking breathes with Ruby and their conversations are amazing. The love is so sweet, so pure, I just. It's beautiful. You need to be a special kind of fearless to know when to let the love just take control of the panels and when to cutaway, before it just becomes a sugar trip.

Anyone who read like upto Conqueror Worm, knows how this is supposed to end, even before the first page. The brilliance and the fearlessness of this is that the writers don't care. As all the best stories, it is about the journey. The alien accepted his death right in those very first pages. That was never his concern. He lived among us for so long, even his kind thought he had gone too native. Maybe that's the beauty of it. He was the Visitor everywhere except for his wife, who in her own way, was the same as him. And both of them were more human just because of that reason. That's beautiful.

[Adan · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quirky little story about those funny-looking aliens we first saw way back in Seed of Destruction and Conqueror Worm. Everything makes sense now (well, not everything; this is still a Mignolaverse story, after all).

[Rex Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

This character goes way back in the Hellboy universe, to a bit part in The Conqueror Worm. It was so long ago, that I forgot this character’s existence. The place of aliens in the Hellboy universe - that is alien life with inanimate technology similar to humans, rather than eldritch cosmic beings of yore - has been a sticky point and only mentioned in that one comic for a total of two pages. Hellboy gets a warning from the alien, the creature dies, and Hellboy remarks, “Roger look. A dead alien.” I remember being fascinated at the time, figuring the series was about to go in a weirder direction, but it was never mentioned again and I sort of forgot about it.

Finally this old image is dusted off and given life. The Visitor’s initial mission was to destroy Hellboy upon his first manifesting on Earth, but cannot bring himself to destroy the child, seeing the potential for good in him as well as evil. Thus we follow the Visitor through the decades, watching him watching Hellboy, in addition to him creating his own family on this planet. Like The Man Who Fell to Earth, the alien loses sight of his mission and becomes wrapped up in the problems of this planet.

For those who know Hellboy’s long history, a lot of ground is retread, albeit from a different perspective. It was nice to revisit several old menaces from past stories, with some clever additions, until the alien meets his doom with Herman von Klempt - the head in the jar. Not the most important Hellboy story, but it neatly wraps up a mystery which I has assumed the creators had forgotten all about.

Some people have a problem with Paul Grist’s art. They claim it’s childish, or bigfoot lines, and that most of the characters look the same, but that’s all nonsense. He had his own unique style and if you think it's cheap and easy, try replicating it on your own sometime and see just how intricate it can be. Looking at some of his earlier works, Kane and Jack Staff, his ability to capture fast paced motion and violence in page after page lends itself well to a Hellboy tale.

[James · Rating 2 out of 5]

For Hellboy completists only, this trade fills in the backstory for an alien that shows up chained in a castle and murdered in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction. Here we see that that alien was actually an agent dispatched to Earth to eliminate Hellboy. Present at Hellboy's birth, he stays his hand and decides to monitor the young devil instead, checking in over the decades and dealing with assorted cults and monsters along the way.

The format of the series, which leaps through time with the alien, doesn't give us a solid connection with any time or place. The "visitor" does enter an interracial marriage, which provides some nice domestic scenes as well as solid reflections on human racism and exclusion. But even as he checks in across the lightyears with the rest of his alien squad, he just seems to be spinning his wheels, waiting for the next big moment in the Hellboy mythos.

The storytelling by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson and the art by Paul Grist are done well enough, but the story feels unnecessary. I would rather see this creative team explore something new as opposed to mining deeper into the past.

[Jonathan Maas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very good !

[Jesse VanDeWalker · Rating 4 out of 5]

It only took 20+ years to finally explain this guy from Seed of Destruction. It was a fun little romp through Hellboy history though!

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

An intriguing if ultimately unnecessary side story to the Hellboy mythos.

[Václav · Rating 3 out of 5]

(3,9 of 5 for a decent outsider view on the world where Hellboy goes step by step for his destiny)
Chris Roberson... well, I'm always sceptical seeing this name in Hellboyverse. Mike is, without doubt, the godfather of this universe and creator and storyteller of the best stories. There are also other authors in Mike's realm. Roberson is one of them. And as I want that every one of them would be great, to get the best from this rich "Hellboyverse", he is not one of the better ones. But I actually enjoyed Visitor. Even if it is a kind of slow-going story, it adds to the universe and somehow works okay enough. Toberson takes in Paul Grist, whom he excitedly calls "one of the best visual storytellers". His scenes are fine. I wouldn't call them "one of the best", especially since the art is kind of mediocre. I am happy that the Visitor's story was published, and I enjoyed reading it, but I will hardly pick it in any future for the second round.

[Абрахам Хосебр · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Look, Roger. A dead alien."
"I am simply a visitor here."

Черговий спіноф про одного з побічних персонажів Геллбойверсу.
Читав цю роботу раніше, але зараз чомусь сподобалось, більше ніж вперше.
Історія інопланетянина з "Черв'яка завойовника". Дуже цікаво показана критика сект - явна сатира на Саєнтологію. Також тут йдеться про расизм, любов і смертність. Така ненав'язлива історія, що швидко читається.
Тим не менш, ця лімітка повністю фанатська , не прочитавши базу (перші п'ять томів Геллбоя), цей комікс нема сенсу читати.

[Dakota Morgan · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's 100% a weird concept, but I really liked The Visitor's thoughtful, third-party exploration of the Hellboy mythos. I mean, sure, it detracts somewhat from the main Hellboy storyline for it to be revealed that there was some alien visitor manipulating events in Hellboy's favor all this time. But that visitor has his own story, his own problems to deal with. In particular, a black wife (in a time where that's frowned upon) and a lifespan that doesn't match hers. So, sure, there's some fascinating Rosencrantz & Guildenstern stuff relating to Hellboy, but there's also a touching story about an alien stuck on Earth. I dug it.

[Otto Hahaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tämä toimi! Näin se tehdään: Zoomataan yhteen henkilöön ja unohdetaan suuret joukkokohtaukset, niin heti tarina on koskettavampi. Viime vuosina Mignola-universumi on ollut välillä aika tylsä: kun halutaan kertoa tosi isoja tarinoita, joissa kokonaiset maat katoavat tuosta vaan, niin samalla ihmiset muuttuvat tilastoiksi ja tarinat eivät enää ole jänniä. Ne ovat vain uusia versioita Korkkari-tarinoista. Siksi tämä tuntui vaihteeksi niin virkistävältä.

[Cale · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm always a little leery of revisionist stories, where a new character is painted into the background but turns out to have been a pivotal driving force (see Ender's Shadow for example) - it tends to lessen the original story without bringing anything of real value to the world it's added on to.
The Visitor is like that - it's a shadowy man in the background of Hellboy's life who has had an outsized impact compared to the places his story has actually overlapped. But I think it manages to find the balance a little better than most as its focus is less on how The Visitor saved Hellboy on multiple occasions, and instead exploring the why. The book describes itself as elegiac in the afterword, and I got that feeling from it too. It's less interested in actions than it is emotions. It's focus on the relationship between the Visitor and the world he inhabits (and the relationships he forms) take up most of the book, which feels appropriate.
One interesting aspect is the art, which is distinctively different from the traditional blocky Hellboy style, but is used to illustrate scenes we've seen from different perspectives. It's a nice touch, but ultimately not much more than an accent on the main theme.
This is more a meditation on patience and observation than a rock'em-sock'em Hellboy volume. It's interesting to see that the Hellboy world can support that kind of story, but it does still feel a little out of tune with the setting. It's a nice piece for Hellboy afficianados, but not something I would actively recommend.

[François Vigneault · Rating 4 out of 5]

A satisfying bit of "secret history" filling in a minor bit of Hellboy Lore: Who was the unnamed alien who Hellboy meets in Hellboy, Vol. 5: Conqueror Worm? Finding out the (partial) answer to this question is a fun, discursive, and surprisingly emotional journey. A rather sweet and introspective tale with a few bits of action thrown in. At the heart of the story is a romance that is quite touching despite being very loosely sketched in, more suggested than described.

One of the big highlights here is Paul Grist's art, drawn in his classic flat style which lends itself very well indeed to a tale in the Mignolaverse. Grist has been a long-time favorite of mine since waaay back in the day, so it was a total treat to see his work here, and I think he did a great job, I hope the folks at Dark Horse will bring him back for more Hellboy- and BPRD-adjacent tales, and I also hope that interested readers check out some of Grist's earlier work, esp. his seminal Kane series).

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Visitor explores the story behind the alien that helped Hellboy during his imprisonment at Hunte Castle in the Hellboy, Vol. 5: Conqueror Worm. It also clearly ties the alien to those that made a brief appearance in Hellboy, Vol. 1: Seed of Destruction where they watched the Ogdru-Jahad.

In the CW, the alien helped bring out the elements of fate and freewill that are part of the Hellboy story while drawing on the short story Hellboy: The Nature of the Beast and Others. This emphasized the importance of the lilies that grow from Hellboy's blood. These are all explored again in this story, which also focuses on the kindness and cruelty of people. It was a solid tie-in story about a jaded yet hopeful alien with art-work that really doesn't measure up to Mignola's style or the grim mythos.

[Lacee · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few weeks ago I finished the Devil You Know series and was so confused about the alien guys. I completely forgot about the alien scene in Seed of Destruction and I guess the scene in The Conqueror Worm completely flew over my head. One of the Hellboyverse's most endearing qualities is it weirdness! While reading you're like "there's aliens too?...of course there's aliens, why not?" You just kinda go with it.

I will say, "The Visitor" is much different than anything Mignola and company have ever done in the Hellboy universe. Its tone is different, emotional even, I actually cried while reading it. I can see how this missed the mark for some people but for me it has become a new favorite read and I'm so happy I picked this up. Not only for the answers, but for the beautiful, touching story. I didn't expect this to grip me like it did. Though I personally LOVED this, I can't recommend it to just anyone. You might need to be a seasoned Hellboy reader to get the full experience. The emotional parts might get you but without the proper backstory it may lose you.