New Hellboy comic adapts novel from Mike Mignola and Christopher Golden

Isn’t this usually the other way around? A novel of prose, set in the Hellboy universe, is about to get the comic treatment with Hellboy: The Bones of Giants.

Let’s go giants

Admittedly, this is one I’ve never heard of. Being a big Hellboy fan myself, that’s a little odd. Then again though, Bones of Giants is a novel… of prose. So maybe it’s not all that strange after all.

Nevertheless, a heck of a lot more people are probably about to get exposed to the book, because it’s getting a comic book adaptation. Dark Horse has a four-part story planned to bring Bones of Giants to comics fans, and it sounds pretty interesting.

In Hellboy: The Bones of Giants, lightning strikes from a clear sky on a frozen riverbank in Sweden. The skeleton of a huge man is revealed, his fingers clutched around the handle of an iron hammer. No one who comes to see this marvel from Norse mythology can move it. No one, that is, but Hellboy, who lifts the hammer just in time for lightning to strike again, welding it to his hand and leading him toward a bizarre series of visions and encounters. What ensues is a wild adventure full of Norse legends, mythical creatures, and a threat that could bring not just Earth, but the Nine Realms of Norse mythology to their knees. 

Dark Horse

With Matt Smith attached as artist, Hellboy: The Bones of Giants #1 (of 4) is coming to stores on November 3rd.

Here’s a bit more about the book, from the creative team:

“Elves, dwarves, wolves, and giants. These are things I’ve drawn for myself many times before, because I love them,” said Matt Smith. “I expect I’ll continue to draw them until the wolf eats the sun or I am taken by trolls (fate goes as fate must). What I did not expect was to be invited to draw them for an adaptation of a novel I also love, and have read many times since it was released. Now I can only hope fellow Hellboy and Norse mythology fans have as good a time reading it as I did working on it. Skál!”

““It’s a thrill to return to the world of Hellboy: The Bones of Giants,” said Christopher Golden, whose highly anticipated new novel The Road of Bones has been endorsed by the likes of Stephen King, Paul Tremblay, and Stephen Graham Jones, and will be published in 2022 by St. Martin’s Press. “I’ve been deeply in love with Norse mythology since first reading Dorothy Hosford’s Thunder of the Gods in the fifth grade. I might have been the only one to take it out of the St. Bridget’s School library that year, but I read it fifteen times, so there wasn’t much opportunity for other kids to read it. When Mike first told me he had this image in his head of lightning flashing down from the sky to strike Mjollnir, where it lay in the grip of the corpse of Thor…well, that was like Christmas morning, getting to indulge my love of Norse myth and my love of Hellboy. The story that Mike and I created in the novel is epic, and now Hellboy’s fight against the Frost Giants will get the full color treatment it deserves by one of the great artists making comics today—Matt Smith—who also happens to love Norse mythology even more than Mike and I do. This adaptation exists purely because Matt wanted to draw it, and when you see the art, you’ll see how much fun we all had on every page.”