The Corpse on Hellboy’s Back: Translating aGraphic Image

L A U R A O ’ C O N N O R

IN HELLBOY (2004), GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S MOVIE ADAPTATION OF MIKE

Mignola’s eponymous comic-book series, Del Toro performs anunusual cameo as the voice of a talking corpse. Del Toro’s wheezing

voice stutters unintelligibly in Russian, and we learn from the trans-lated subtitles that the corpse has ordered Hellboy to ‘‘Go that way, redmonkey!’’ The cameo role is more than a good-humored joke at his ownexpense by Del Toro. As fans of the comic-book superhero wouldimmediately recognize, the talking-corpse persona pays homage to aclassic issue of the comic book, The Corpse.

The play between Del Toro’s mutterings and the translated subtitleresembles the play between comic-book personae and their speechballoons and serves as a gloss on the translation of one form of popularculture into another. Moreover, Mignola freely acknowledges that TheCorpse (which he retrospectively sees as ‘‘the turning point,’’ the issue he‘‘was firing on all cylinders when [he] was doing’’ it) is ‘‘pretty much astraight adaptation of Irish folklore’’ (Singh, Brayshaw interviews). TheCorpse is based on a story, ‘‘Teig O’Kane and the Corpse,’’ which Mig-nola read in Peter Haining’s The Wild Night Company: Irish Stories ofFantasy and Horror (1970) when he was an art student (personalinterview). Mignola had always wanted to ‘‘shoehorn’’ folk materialinto his comic-book art and felt that if a recurring character likeHellboy caught on, he would have a perfect vehicle for doing so(Brayshaw).

The multiple incarnations of the talking corpse do not end there,however. ‘‘Teig O’Kane and the Corpse’’ was adapted by Irish cultural –

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 43, No. 3, 2010r 2010, Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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nationalist and folklorist, Douglas Hyde, from an obscure Gaelic balladand originally published in what became two landmark texts of thecoeval Irish Literary Renaissance and Gaelic Revival: W. B. Yeats’sedited anthology, Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (1888), andHyde’s Gaelic collection, Leabhar Sgeulaiochta (‘‘Book of Storytelling’’)(1889). Hence the pointing-corpse fabula found expression in fourdifferent media as a result of three kinds of intersemiotic translation:from Gaelic song to printed prose in English and Gaelic; from prosefable to the sequential art of the comic book; and from two-dimen-sional comic-book graphics to the three-dimensional virtuality of themovie screen. A remarkable creative synergy characterized both thecultural – nationalist activism of Hyde and Yeats and the Mignola – DelToro collaboration. Del Toro—who turned down an offer to direct aHarry Potter movie to do Hellboy—worked closely with Mignola and agroup of artists on preproduction design work and says in Hellboy: TheArt of the Movie that the five-year project ‘‘may be the most joyfulexperience of my professional life’’ (1).

The word graphic in my title not only refers to Mignola’s comic-book art, but also emphasizes how the vivid and memorable quality ofthe image has captured the imagination of successive artists and theiraudiences. The ‘‘carrying across’’ (translatio) of the corpse’s remains is anevocative allegorical figure for the transmission of tradition and trans-lation across cultures, epochs, and different media. The work of trans-mission and translation emblematized by the corpse-carrier isreplicated again and again by purveyors of the folkloric motif as theyseek ways to translate it into their various media.

The process of translating the comic book into a feature film isdocumented by Mignola in The Art of Hellboy, a book that anticipatesand stokes a perceived audience demand for observing the behind-the-scenes process in addition to enjoying the film that results from it. TheArt of Hellboy caters to an avid curiosity among fans and scholars alikein the theoretical and artistic issues raised by such intersemiotic trans-lations. For Hellboy fans, the corpse’s cameo appearance makes visiblethe palimpsestic relationship between the Irish corpse of the comicbook and the Russian corpse of the movie, and their pleasure in themovie is increased by the play between both texts and by the recog-nition of the adaptation as an adaptation. Introducing the presence ofthe folktale and ballad in the palimpsest enhances that pleasure, bothbecause of the resonances between the four texts and because it makes

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the pointing-corpse fabula apprehensible in the light of the respectivemedia and cultural moments of the three adaptations.

As well as providing an opportunity to examine the translation ofone popular form into another, the pointing-corpse fabula presents twoexemplary instances of translating obscure folk material into popularconsciousness. The first exemplifies the role of folklore in nation-building, because Hyde’s recovery and popularization of Ireland’s na-tional language and folklore was central to the cultural – nationalistmovement that led to the formation of the Irish Free State andNorthern Ireland in 1922. Mignola’s rendering of the tale into thesequential art of the comic book and the subsequent development ofthe ‘‘Hellboy’’ persona into the Hellboy movie and Hellboyt franchiseillustrate by contrast the formation of a trademark superhero in today’sglobal, mass-mediated, consumerist culture. In both instances, thetransitional figure of the talking-corpse persona resonates with mill-enialist anxiety about the challenges of the new century. Gaelic Re-vivalists’ bid to revive Gaelic culture was embedded in a rhetoric ofmoribundity and revival, laced with a millenialist hope that the turn ofthe twentieth century would witness the cultural and political decol-onization of Ireland. Many of Hellboy’s exploits also have a millenialisttenor, as the operative for the Bureau for Paranormal Research andDefense (BPRD) finds ways to outwit and overpower the hostile forcesthat imperil US security at the turn of the twenty-first century.

� � � �The pointing-corpse fabula tells the story of a man who is compelled tocarry a corpse and lay it to rest before daybreak. The corpse’s talk andpointing arm guide his carrier from one potential burial-ground to thenext. Aarne-Thompson’s Types of the Folktale does not include an exactcognate of the pointing-corpse fabula, though Hyde’s ‘‘Teig O’Kaneand the Corpse’’ features the motifs of fairy abduction and the disposalof a corpse. Mignola supplements these motifs with those of thechangeling infant and the legendary river hag, Jenny Greenteeth.

There is an extensive Irish repertoire of tales about changelings andabductions by the sidhe (fairies). Associated with a vanquished ancientrace and the dead of the locality, the otherworldly sidhe inhabit aparallel, and often competing, plane to humans. Jan Brunvand hastracked many contemporary versions of the proper-disposal-of-the-corpse motif in the United States and elsewhere, notably the urban

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legend of the ‘‘Runaway Grandmother,’’ in which a grandmother dieson a family excursion and her corpse is stolen by an unwitting car thief.Alan Dundes interprets the legend as the rejection of old age and dyingin a youth-oriented society. It is significant, he argues, that after hercorpse is wrapped and secured to the roof ‘‘there is much more room inthe car’’ and yet she ‘‘is a burden whether alive or dead’’ (qtd. inBrunvand: 119). The fact that due to the disappearance of the corpsethe family cannot probate the grandmother’s will or collect insurance isemphasized in several versions collected by Linda Degh (Brunvand118 – 19). This aspect informs a comic subplot in the movie Little MissSunshine, which features the family smuggling the grandfather’s corpseto avoid prohibitive out-of-state funeral costs. Intergenerational con-flict and the vicissitudes of bequests also feature prominently in Hyde’sadaptation of the pointing-corpse fabula.

Hyde’s two versions of the tale, ‘‘Teig O’Kane and the Corpse’’/‘‘Tadhg O’Cathain agus an Corpan,’’ are based on a Gaelic ballad he hadheard once from an old man near Feenagh, County Leitrim. He ‘‘wrotedown the most of it from memory, but forgot a good deal of it, andhave never since met anyone who knew either the story or the ballad’’(Hyde, Leabhar 231– 32). Later he came across an incomplete variantfrom County Louth in the nineteenth-century manuscript collection ofNicholas O’Kearney, who had preserved it ‘‘on account of the singularwildness of the air’’ (232). The text, which is appended to LeabhairSgeulaiochta, is drawn from O’Kearney’s version, along with nine ad-ditional stanzas from the Leitrim ballad added by Hyde.

The Gaelic ballad is antiphonal, with the speaker quoting orventriloquizing the corpse’s pleas and instructions as he stumblesfrom one graveyard to the next ‘‘with that sidhe corpse that could notget permission to lie/among the dead, among the dead’’ (‘‘leis angcorpan sidhe sin nach bhfaghadh cead sıneadh/ameasg na marbh, ameasg namarbh’’) [my translation] (Leabhar 232). The meaning of the posses-sive epithet (sidhe-corpse or sidhe’s corpse?) is ambiguous, but thecorpse may be denied admittance because it is somehow ‘‘touched’’ orbewitched by the sidhe. The corpse’s entreaties betray his dependency,intensifying dramatic uncertainty about whether the speaker willcomplete the task. The speaker undertakes the task in exchange for aland-contract in O’Kearney’s variant, though the Leitrim variant mayhave revolved around abduction by the sidhe (fairies, shape-shifters)because that is given prominence in Hyde’s tale. On each grave-

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digging attempt, the speaker breaks a bone of the incumbent corpse(a trooper, a smithy, and a settler of yore) who threatens him inEnglish. (Neither Hyde’s Gaelic version in Leabhar Sgeulaiochta,‘‘Tadhg O’ Cathain agus an Corpan’’ nor the English version in Yeats’sFairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, ‘‘Teig O’Kane and theCorpse,’’ [hereafter cited as FFT] preserve the language switch.) Themultivocality of the macaronic ballad with its ‘‘wild air’’ accents thetension between the Irish-speaking carrier and corpse and the En-glish-speaking incumbents who threaten them with a pistol (thetrooper) and a hammer (the smith). The competition for a plot ofearth between the corpse and the English-speaking occupants, whichdoes not feature in the other three versions of the pointing-corpsefabula, lends an anticolonial strain to the Gaelic ballad.

Hyde’s tale opens with a crisis. Teig O’Kane, the wild and irre-sponsible son of a strong farmer, is ‘‘between two minds as to what heshould do’’ (FFT 25). His hitherto indulgent father has issued him anultimatum: he must marry the girlfriend he has made pregnant or hewill be disinherited. As he roams the neighborhood that evening, he istorn by rebellion against his father, real affection for the girl, andreluctance to settle down. He is besieged by a host of the sidhe whoplace him under compulsion (geis) to carry a corpse on his back andbury it before dawn, eight hours later: ‘‘Listen to me now, TeigO’Kane,’’ the leader of the twenty or so trooping fairies instructs:

and if you don’t obey me in all I’m telling you to do, you’ll repentit. You must carry with you this corpse that is on your back toTeampoll-Demus, and you must bring it into the church with you,and make a grave for it in the very middle of the church, and youmust raise up the flags and put them down again the very same way,and you must carry the clay out of the church and leave the place asit was when you came, so that no one could know that there hadbeen anything changed. But that’s not all. Maybe that the bodywon’t be allowed to be buried in the church; perhaps some otherman has the bed, and, if so, it’s likely he won’t share it with this one.If you don’t get leave to bury it in Teampoll Demus, you must carryit to Carrick-fhad-vic-Orus, and bury it in the churchyard there; andif you don’t get it into that place, take it with you to TeampollRonan; and if that churchyard is closed on you, take it to Imlogue-Fada; and if you’re not able to bury it there, you’ve no more to dothan to take it to Kill-Breedya, and you can bury it there withouthindrance. (FFT 27 – 28)

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Teig duly hauls the corpse from one burial place to the next, followedby a band of taunting sidhe. He manages to bury the corpse in the nickof time, and his character is transformed by the harrowing ordeal. Hegives up drinking, gambling, and womanizing, marries the girl, andorder is restored to the patriarchal family.

In Hyde’s prose tale the dialogue between carrier and corpse is terse.The emphasis falls instead on the weight and physicality of the cadaver:‘‘[Teig’s] fear and his wonder were great when he found that the[corpse’s] two arms had a tight hold round his neck, and that the twolegs were squeezing his hips firmly, and that, however strongly hetried, he could not throw it off, any more than a horse can throw off itssaddle’’ (FFT 27). Despairing after an abortive attempt to bury thecorpse at Teampoll Demus, Teig ‘‘rose up, and looked about him’’: ‘‘‘Idon’t know the way,’ he said. As soon as [Teig] had uttered the word,the corpse stretched out suddenly its left hand that had been tightenedround his neck, and kept it pointing out, showing him the road heought to follow’’ (FFT 31). The grip of the corpse imprisons Teig andweighs him down, and at the same time it drives him onward with itsimperious pointing hand.

The pointing corpse directs their itinerary and indicates the allegor-ical freight of the cautionary tale. The corpse is a witty figuration both ofthe law of the father and the predicament of the son who cannot quitebring himself to settle down. When a ‘‘lively’’ female cadaver remon-strates, ‘‘‘Ho, you bodach (clown)! Ha, you bodach! Where has he been thathe got no bed?’’ the question has personal relevance for Teig (FFT 30).The father’s threat of disinheritance preys on the youth like the un-yielding corpse. And there is an appealing poetic justice in the symmetrybetween Teig’s task of carrying the corpse unaided for eight hours andhis girlfriend’s plight of bearing a pregnancy alone. The specificity of thelocale and the corpse’s directions are a crucial part of the tale’s charm.Topographical legend and lore (dinnsheanchus) are prominent in the Irishtradition, and Irish modernists created a literature of place in order toreclaim the colony, imaginatively at least, by reenvisioning Ireland as astoried hinterland with its own history and culture. The implied au-dience for Leabhar Sguelaiochta (which translates as ‘‘Book of Storytell-ing’’) is a local community listening to a read-aloud tale, and part of thetale’s intrigue for this implicit audience is to place the known andunmarked burial grounds in the surrounding locale. The catalogueof place names is a way of repossessing, through iteration, the local

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landscape. By contrast, Mignola’s preservation of the unpronounceableplace names and some Gaelic loanwords has an estranging effect in theAmerican comic book. It reminds readers of the story’s provenance else-where, and of the international scope of Hellboy’s exploits.

The frame tale of Mignola’s The Corpse develops the sidhe-abductiontheme. Associated with a ‘‘vanishing’’ people, the sidhe abduct youngwives and infants to replenish their stock. Hellboy, a clandestineoperative for the trouble-shooting BPRD, steps in to help a distraughtcouple who believe that a changeling has been substituted for theirinfant daughter. He is familiar with the otherworld of the sidhe and itsestablished protocols for interchange with humans. ‘‘They are avery weird little people, but they do play by certain rules,’’ he tells thepeasant couple (the episode is set in Ireland in 1959). ‘‘This is an oldgame and I’ve got to play it their way’’ (4). In double-quick order, heestablishes that the infant is indeed a changeling by testing it with irontongs. The changeling is forced to tell Hellboy where to go to recoverthe baby and then disappears in a puff of smoke up the chimney.Hellboy looks satanic, with blood-red skin, an obtrusive tail, and hornsthat he keeps carefully filed down to stumps in a vain attempt to appearnormal. As if that were not enough, his right forearm is made of amysterious impregnable stone. He makes an incongruous do-gooder ashe stands, red tail swinging, beside the infant’s cot.

When Hellboy arrives at the designated crossroads near midnight,he finds three sidhe hauling the corpse: ‘‘The King was fond of ol’Tammie and says ta us: ‘you lads go and lay ’im in such a place as ’e,bein’ a Christian, might like’’’ one of the sidhe tells him, adding ‘‘now’ow are WE to do a thing like that? NO SIR! But you now . . . maybe. . . /Take ’im. Get ’im buried and we’ll get YOU that nice baby’’ (6).Tammie O’Clannie was the king of the sidhe’s favorite because he was adrinking, card-playing, womanizing rogue. With deft irony, Mignolaassociates the corpse with the unreformed Teig O’Kane. A deal isstruck: if Hellboy carries and buries the putrefying corpse before day-break, the sidhe will relinquish the infant. Hellboy sets off with thecorpse through the graveyards of Leitrim and is rebuffed at his firststop, Teampoll-Demus (6 – 7) (Figure 1).

The loud ‘‘NO ROOM’’ of the rising host of the dead makes itimpossible not to ‘‘get the picture’’ from this visual – verbal narrative(7). The conspicuous pointing arm is vintage Mignola, who loves towork a ‘‘boneyard’’ scenario.

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FIGURE 1. Hellboy is rebuffed at his first stop.

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Hellboy is in color, although the bold line-drawings transpose well toblack and white. The stark black outlines are shaded with a palate ofgrays, ochers, blues, and browns that sets off Hellboy’s redness. Mig-nola’s arresting superimposition of blocks of bright primary color onshadowy backdrops vividly captures the scene of arrival at Carrick-fhad-vic-Orus depicted by Hyde, for example: ‘‘there broke out a flashof lightning, bright yellow and red, with blue streaks in it, and wentround about the wall in one course’’ (FFT 33). Mignola has said in aninterview with ‘‘Debbie’’ (no last name given) that putting in color islike adding the soundtrack, and mood generated by the right color-tones makes it ‘‘possible, [he] think[s], to create rhythm.’’

Deixis (pointing) is a key technique for the comic-book artist, whomust find economical and clear ways to convey the logic of his se-quential art. The pointing corpse is an evocative emblem for deixis,and Mignola exploits it to the full. The long arm of the corpse ex-tending out to an unseen horizon in the final panel of Figure 1 is a goodexample. The crossroads scene at midnight is even more striking in thisregard. As Hellboy approaches the crossroads, he is directed toward thecorpse-bearing sidhe by a phantom corpse that fleetingly appears on thegallows (5) (Figure 2).

The use of a double and Hellboy’s timepiece to register the phan-tom’s fleeting apparition highlights the duality and difference betweenthis world and the chimerical otherworld. Mignola’s use of the phan-tom corpse to point out the soon-to-be-pointing corpse is a metadeicticgesture—a pointing at pointing—that calls attention to the self-reflexivity of his sequential art.

Working one hundred years earlier, Hyde could hardly have envi-sioned the visual punning of Mignola’s sequential art. Indeed, Hydeadvocates modern literary adaptations of folklore as a means to weanthe Irish public off their dependence on English ‘‘penny dreadfuls andshilling shockers’’ in his ground-breaking cultural manifesto, ‘‘TheNecessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’’ (1892) (169). Yet several con-ventions of comic books (those penny dreadfuls and shilling shockers)are very effective in conveying the fantastic subject matter of tradi-tional tales. The interplay between the visual tableaus and speechbubbles captures something of the ventriloquizing of two voices,the corpse and his carrier, found in the ballad. Here is Hyde’s accountof one encounter, followed by Mignola’s version of the episode (Figure3): ‘‘He moved over to the gate, but as he was passing in, he tripped on

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FIGURE 2. The pointing corpse.

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FIGURE 3. The corpse and his carrier attacked.

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the threshold. Before he could recover himself, something that he couldnot see seized him by the neck, by the hands, and by the feet, andbruised him, and shook him, and choked him, until he was nearlydead; and at last he was lifted up, and carried more than a hundredyards from that place, and then thrown down in an old dyke, with thecorpse still clinging to him.’’ The oof, bam, wham, SWAK conventionsof comic-book sound effects are ideally suited for conveying a magicalrepelling force. The silhouette in the second SWAK panel depicts theentangled limbs—four legs, stone forearm, and tail—of the duo as theyare flung headlong into space (13) (Figure 3).

Mignola complicates and extends Hellboy’s quest with a vengeancesubplot. Though the sidhe’s fidelity to their code of honor is empha-sized overall, Mignola also represents their unruly, capricious, andmalevolent aspect in the person of the exposed changeling known asgruagach (a scowling, hairy goblin). The gruagach refuses to accept theKing of the sidhe’s decision to ‘‘honor the beast,/honor the deal . . . /though by the doing, we die a little more,’’ steals his key, and prevailsupon water-hag Jenny Greenteeth to unlock a gigantic pig-man, Grom(14). The gruagach gleefully hails Grom (Russ. thunderbolt) as theantagonist of the Irish hero Cuchulain, the champion of the Ulstercycle and Irish epic Tain Bo Cuailnge and an archetypal hero for earlytwentieth-century writers and nationalists and for latter day UlsterUnionists: ‘‘Grom, war monster-champion of Connacht. Champion ofQueen Medb, who fought Cu Chulainn in the valley of the deaf’’ (17).Grom almost overpowers Hellboy but is foiled by Hellboy’s use ofCornelius Agrippa’s charm against demonic animals.

In the course of the altercation between Hellboy and Grom, thecorpse loses an arm (21) (Figure 4).

The comic interlude, with its marvelous silhouette of Hellboy andthe corpse racing against time, makes an indirect allusion to Hellboy’sown mismatched arms. In a funny earlier scene, Hellboy ignores thecorpse’s pleas to retrieve a stash of gold exposed by a circle of bouncingstanding-stones, but he has empathy for the corpse’s loss of an arm.Rescued as an infant from being used as a weapon of mass destructionby the Nazis, and raised in the United States by the kindly paranormalscientist, Professor Bruttenholm, Hellboy’s Right Hand of Doom pre-destines him to bring about an apocalypse. Several paranormal crea-tures try to wrest control of this vessel of demonic power, either todisable it or to wreak havoc upon the world. The hand protects him

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FIGURE 4. Altercation between Hellboy and Grom.

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and must be protected from those who wish to seize it, and yet it is alsoa profoundly alien prosthesis. Hellboy speaks, behaves, and is treatedlike the regular Joe he likes to believe he is, but as he confesses in RightHand of Doom, he survives by ‘‘never deal[ing] with what I am . . . I justdo my job, which usually involves me beating the crap out of things alot like me’’ (Epilogue, 2).

After he successfully buries the corpse, Hellboy returns to claim theinfant. Mignola’s emphasis falls on the sidhe’s loss rather than onHellboy’s triumph. (In later issues of the series, including The ThirdWish and The Island, the sidhe return, like a chorus, to witness Hellboy’sfortunes.) The King of the sidhe launches into a mournful ubi sunt forhis dwindling race, soon to disappear underground (sidhe means‘‘mound’’). The burden of the plaintive chant is illustrated in the panel-by-panel fade-out of the speaker, who fades to a trace, a chimerical cats-eyes or (in the case of the gruagach) a dragonfly (Figure 5).

With the laconic skepticism of the hard-boiled investigator, theunlikely child minder taps the infant with an iron shoe to verify herhuman babyhood and carries her safely home. The corpse and the infantare restored to their proper place; Hellboy remains out of place and(unlike Teig O’Kane) unchanged by the ordeal. This is hardly sur-prising because Mignola names The Corpse as a good example of ‘‘justpopping Hellboy into the story’’ as a vehicle for narrating a folktale(Brayshaw).

Hellboy began as a persona without ‘‘a lot of baggage,’’ but over thecourse of the comic-book series a backstory emerges about the originand purpose of his stone arm and devilish physique, and his ‘‘KnowThyself’’ quest assumes more centrality. The ‘‘big picture’’ of Hellboy’slife is the subject of Del Toro’s movie, which focuses on humanizingHellboy both in terms of plot and of form. Indeed, in filling outHellboy’s story Del Toro scooped some plotlines that Mignola had notyet used in the comic books. In the preface to The Island (2005),Mignola writes that he had been ‘‘keeping a lot of secrets’’: ‘‘Then alongcomes this Hellboy movie, and suddenly we have the Ogdru Jahadpopping out of their prisons and waggling their tentacles at the cam-eras. Hell, if you were going to see them, I figured I should show thereal version of them in the comic first.’’ The tone of mock chagrincontains an edge of real chagrin, as Mignola reasserts his authorialownership over an original that has been preceded by its movietranslation.

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FIGURE 5. Hellboy recovers the infant.

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The translation of the comic series into a feature film was a col-laborative venture, as Del Toro, Mignola, and a team of artists fleshedout the characters, settings, and screenplay of the movie. The prepro-duction team necessarily undertook a heuristic approach, improvising,and seeking feedback on whether or not, say, the monstrous physiog-nomy of a character was captured exactly. The creative interactionbetween Del Toro and Mignola’s vision and the exquisite care andingenuity of the production team is tracked in the DVD documentaryaccompanying the movie. The large capital and technological invest-ment in movie making supports an extravagant array of special effectsand grotesque monsters that make virtual reality out of the hyperbolicfantasies of comic books. The movie-goer is led into the undergroundlabyrinths of the New York subway and of Grigori Rasputin’s vastmausoleum, with its intricate clockwork-and-dagger chambers of hor-ror and apparently invincible monsters.

In the preface to The Art of the Movie, Mignola remarks on how heused to say ‘‘‘[w]hen I see Ron Perlman’—both Guillermo and I alwaysknew who should play Hellboy—‘painted red with cameras pointed athim, then I’ll believe [that the movie will actually happen] . . .. [onMarch 4, 2003] the ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ moment came andwent, and, after all the years of building up to that moment, the wholething seemed very . . . normal. How weird is that?’’ (2). Del Toro andMignola believed that Perlman would capture the ‘‘been there, donethat’’ quality of Hellboy’s demeanor. They could envision him, with hisstrong mouth and jaw and deep-set eyes, becoming a simulacrum ofHellboy and, conversely, the cartoon persona becoming a Perlmanesquesuperhero. According to Perlman, the translation of the cartoon figureinto the movie superhero was ‘‘a combination of Guillermo’s vision andmy face’’ as sculptors worked up a maquette from his life mask toprovide a template for make-up artists (DVD). ‘‘Hellboy’’ is refash-ioned in Perlman’s image, and the celebrity of the comic-book personaand actor merge in the cyborg-superhero.

Del Toro’s screenplay, based on Seed of Destruction and other episodesfrom the series, develops the relationship between Hellboy and hisadoptive parent/mentor, Professor Broom (John Hurt). Del Toro’s de-velopment of the father/son relationship pleased and gratified Mignolabecause he had based Hellboy’s physique and demeanor on that of hisfather, a tough blue-collar cabinet maker who matter-of-factly pullednails out of his own and his fellow workers’ hands (Server). Del Toro

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also creates a romance out of the friendship between Hellboy and LizSherman (Selma Blair) and invents a new character, FBI agent JohnMyers (Rupert Evans). Liz, a beautiful young woman with unwantedpyrokinetic powers, joined the BPRD after she caused an apartment-block fire that killed her mother. Myers, who is recruited to the BPRDby Broom to provide moral support to Hellboy after Broom’s immi-nent death from cancer, serves as a potential rival for Liz’s affections andas a sympathetic observer of Hellboy’s tribulations.

Broom’s steadfast belief in Hellboy’s fundamental goodness count-erweighs others’ perceptions of him as a freak or a demon. When atransfigured demonic Hellboy is about to bring about the Apocalypseto save Liz’s life, he is stopped short by Myers’s exhortation: ‘‘Remem-ber who you are! You have a choice. Your father gave you that’’ (DVD).Hellboy eschews his congenital identity as Anung an Rama, an agentof apocalyptic doom, and acts instead as the honorable son of the bythen murdered Broom. As Hellboy and Liz seal their romance with akiss, Myers’s concluding voice-over opines that it is not his origins thatmakes a man but ‘‘the choices he makes—not how he starts things buthow he decides to end them’’ (DVD). Though ‘‘Teig O’Kane and theCorpse’’ was not a direct source text for Del Toro, the movie replicatesthe moral lessons of Hyde’s prose fable.

The movie abounds with playful additions, and arch allusions, to thecomic series. Hellboy is covertly transported to trouble spots in a re-fitted garbage truck, and although he is (largely) kept hidden from thepublic the movie accents his fame as a comic-book hero and an urbanmyth, the stuff of tabloid sensationalism. The pointing-corpse’s cameoappearance occurs at the beginning of the movie’s climax in a Moscowcemetery when Hellboy unearths the corpse—a splendid maquettesculpted by Norman Cabrera—to lead the BPRD team to GrigoryRasputin’s mausoleum. Cameo appearances function much in themanner of citations, calling attention to the status of the movie as anadaptation and encouraging the audience to shuttle back and forth intheir awareness of the two texts. Moreover, the corpse’s signature ap-pearance in the movie advertises the comic series, and this mutuallyreinforcing role of star power is underscored by the inclusion of acomplementary copy of The Corpse with the Hellboy DVD.

The appearance of Hellboy on the silver screen increased his vis-ibility and celebrity and thereby boosted the persona’s commercialvalue. Hellboy is published by an independent company, Dark Horse

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Comics Inc., and Mignola owns the copyright and trademark franchise(most franchised superheroes are owned by large conglomerates likeMarvel and Disney). The brand appeal of comic-book personae stim-ulates consumer demand for emblazoned tee-shirts and other spin-offcommodities, and the visibility and perceived popularity of these self-advertising products enhances the cult of celebrity surrounding them.Consumers of Hellboyt merchandise, which includes figures, calen-dars, and lunchboxes, advertise their sense of belonging to a subcom-munity of Hellboy fans.

� � � �Against the odds, the pointing-corpse fabula was transmitted and trans-lated from a nineteenth-century Gaelic ballad with a ‘‘wild’’ air to a cameoappearance in a twenty-first-century movie. Its survival is testament to theuncanniness and allegorical richness of the tale, and to the memorableiconicity of its presiding graphic image. The tale stayed with Mignola andHyde for a long time. As was the case with Hyde, Mignola mulls overfolklore until the right occasion for using it presents itself. Their suretouch with folk material owes much to this long latency, and to theirwillingness to allow the tale to determine the mode of its telling. Indeed,as a figure of translatio, the pointing corpse suggests that the toted remainshave uncanny power to inflect and alter the frames of its mediation andreception. Not only the carrier but the corpse itself influences its trans-mission and translation as it is carried from one context to the next.

The variant plots of the tale juxtapose birth and death, the uncertaindestiny of new life and the intrusion of the undead dead upon theliving. The fabula raises questions of origins and destiny, intergener-ational bonds, child custody, and paternity. Will Teig uphold his fa-ther’s code of conduct and assume his responsibilities as a father? Willthe sidhe or her parents win custody of the abducted infant? WillHellboy fulfill the destiny of his monstrous birth as Anung un Rama orremember the humane ethos inculcated in him by his adoptive father?These questions point to the future with fear and foreboding. Con-ditions of anxiety about imminent, perhaps catastrophic, change pro-vide receptive ground for the fabula. Hyde and Mignola’s fin-de-siecleadaptations indicate that the fabula especially resonates with millenia-list apprehension about the shifting fortunes of empire.

Ezra Pound believes that he speaks on behalf of all literary mod-ernists when he declares that ‘‘[w]e are all futurists to the extent of

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believing with Guillame Appollonaire that ‘On ne peut pas porter partoutavec soi le cadavre de son pere’’’ (you cannot carry your father’s corpse withyou everywhere), but the burden of the past is more problematic forIrish modernists writing in a colonial context (82). There is a parallelbetween Teig’s predicament of being ‘‘between two notions as to whathe should do’’ and the cultural ambivalence that besets the nationaccording to Hyde in his epochal lecture, ‘‘The Necessity for De-An-glicizing Ireland.’’ ‘‘It has always been very curious to me how Irishsentiment sticks in this half-way house,’’ Hyde muses, ‘‘how it con-tinues to apparently hate the English and at the same time continues toimitate them; how it continues to clamur for recognition as a distinctnationality, and at the same time throws away with both hands whatwould make it so’’—namely, Irish (Gaelic) language and culture. De-spite an ‘‘ever-abiding animosity’’ toward England, the nation ‘‘hastensto adopt, pell-mell, and indiscriminately, everything that is Englishsimply because it is English’’ and has been ‘‘possessed with a mania’’ forAnglicizing personal- and place names (153 – 54). The nation cannot‘‘produce anything good in literature, art, or institutions’’ because it isunable to get over the unavowed and intertwined losses produced byEnglish-only Anglicization: a thwarted and hotly denied ambition toembrace an Englishness that is interminably withheld, and a repressedidentification with a Gaelic culture that is reviled as worthless andyet revered. ‘‘[D]o what they may the race of today cannot whollydivest itself from the mantle of its own past,’’ Hyde opines in figurativelanguage that evokes ‘‘Teig O’Kane and the Corpse,’’ and because‘‘there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good members ofthe Empire,’’ the Irish ought to ‘‘cultivate what they have rejected, andbuild up an Irish nation on Irish lines’’ (155, 154).

Hyde delivered the de-Anglicizing lecture as an inaugural address tothe newly established National Literary Society, a group of nationalistintellectuals (including W. B. Yeats) who strove to create a genuinely‘‘national’’ literature based on folklore and legend. The popular prov-enance and gradual gestation of folklore—‘‘tales that are made up by noone man but by the nation itself through a slow process of modificationand adaptation’’ as Yeats describes them in ‘‘Nationality and Litera-ture’’—facilitates creative collaboration and fosters a sense of solidarityamong those who share the lore (1: 273). In a letter to the editor ofUnited Ireland, which had published Hyde’s lecture the week before,Yeats (who had no Gaelic) tentatively proposed that de-Anglicization

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could also be achieved ‘‘by translation or retelling in English, whichshall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that isbest of the ancient Irish literature’’ (255). Yeats headlines the 1888‘‘Teig O’Kane’’ with ‘‘literally translated from the Irish by DouglasHyde,’’ thus auguring the importance to future Abbey writers of fash-ioning a vernacular that sounds like a literal translation from Irish inorder to create an English that is not ‘‘English,’’ but Irish. In a similarvein, Hyde’s Leabhair Sgeulaiochta attempts to develop a standardizedmodern Irish by translating back and forth between the classical Irishof the past and contemporary spoken Irish (caint na ndaoine) and oralliterature.

A crowd-pleasing staple of the de-Anglicizing stump speech Hydedelivered around the country was the claim that given the choicebetween a bilingual Ireland and a completely Anglicized ‘‘fat, wealthy,and populous’’ country with all distinguishing traits of nationalityerased, ‘‘nine out of ten Irishmen’’ would vehemently reject the latteroption: ‘‘[w]hen the picture of complete Anglicization is drawn forthem in all its nakedness[,] Irish sentimentality becomes suddenly apower and refuses to surrender its birthright’’ (155). The rhetoric ofreversal flagged by the ‘‘de-’’ prefix in ‘‘de-Anglicization’’ trades on anapocalyptic scenario of total deracination and cultural amnesia to gal-vanize the Irish into saving a Gaelic culture imperiled by extinction.The talking corpse makes an apt emblem for the ambiguous rhetoric ofrevivalism (‘‘Athbheochan na Gaeilge’’ means the revivification of Irish)and the specter of the linguistic and cultural imperialism that couldsupplant Gaelic culture. The millenialist tenor of revivalist rhetoricintensified during the Boer War (1899 – 1902), which cultural –nationalists welcomed as a sign that the fortunes of the British Empirewere on a downswing, and that the twentieth century would see theoverthrow of the colonial Goliath in Ireland.

It is only fitting that Hellboy resurrects a talking corpse to lead theBPRD to an arch villain who is himself the product of several rein-carnations, Grigory Rasputin. Rasputin has occult seeds of destructionout of which he spawns monstrous creatures of desolation (Sammaels).For every Sammael that falls, Rasputin declaims ominously, ‘‘two shallarise.’’ Both in the subway and in the catacombs, therefore, the BPRDstruggle to vanquish the translucent eggs as much as the monstrousSammaels produced from and by them. The notion that the defiance ofmortality is what makes monsters monstrous is literalized when a

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gigantic behemoth grows out of the intestines of the dying Rasputin.Karl Kroenen, a member of Hitler’s elite corps who aids in the res-urrection of ‘‘the master’’ Rasputin and murders Professor Broom,performs multiple self-surgeries, replacing his flesh and blood withclockwork body mechanisms and dust and turning himself into a kindof living corpse. Kroenen’s addiction to self-surgery is a graphic ex-emplification of popular fantasies and fears about cyborg enhancementat a time of accelerating scientific and technological advances.

Hellboy’s hybridity makes him a test case for the nature versusnurture argument, for as Broom tells Myers ‘‘he was born a demon, and[Myers, after Broom’s death] will help him to become a man’’ (DVD).Hellboy was born when Kroenen’s ‘‘portal generator’’ briefly opened upthe world to the destructive forces of Ogdru Jahad, the seven Gods ofchaos, in 1944, and his Right Hand of Doom is the key to unlockingthat portal again. He embodies a compelling human drama: how wouldit feel to be a trouble-shooting do-gooder and yet to know that oneincarnates a force of potential mass destruction? Mignola summarizesthe ethical dilemma in an interview with Gary Butler: ‘‘It’s like nuclearpower—used correctly, it’s great, but in the wrong hands, it’s the mostdevastating thing there is. (So I guess the question becomes: is Hell-boy’s hand in the wrong hand?).’’ Hellboy’s life spans the nuclear era,from his birth out of the foiled Axis-powers’ attempt to defeat theAllies, through wise and gentle fathering by Broom during the ColdWar, to his current job of neutralizing ‘‘things that really do go bumpin the middle of the night.’’ Will the ‘‘superpowers’’ of the cyborg-superhero/US military – industrial – entertainment complex, as theyhave evolved from American intervention in World War II through theCold War to the present ‘‘war on terror,’’ be kept in check or be releasedto annihilate the world?

The movie Hellboy is one of several adaptations of comic books thathave been box-office hits at the turn of the twenty-first century, in-cluding Bryan Singer’s X-Men (2000, 2003), Sam Raimi’s Spiderman(2002), and Ang Lee’s The Hulk (2003). With their immense mus-culature, wizardly stunts, and ingenious gadgetry, such superheroes area one-man invincible defense against all manner of terrorizing assaultson the public. The wave of superhero adaptations on the silver screenhas elements of a retrospect, a celebration of these icons of Americanpopular culture and of the audience’s youth in a supposedly simpler era.After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, one could behold the

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American superhero as a badge of triumph, a befitting emblem for thesole surviving superpower. Any such illusion of supremacy was shat-tered when the US public watched helplessly as New York City—afavored backdrop for so many superhero feats—was attacked by twoplanes, and nobody could avert the catastrophe. In the home-securitypanics and state-of-war since 9/11, the legendary superhero cuts areassuring figure. He embodies a fantasy of preparedness, ready to dobattle against an unpredictable menace that may strike in any place atany time. Hellboy’s lack of malice and self-interestedness identifies himwith the ethos of G2s fighting a just war against Fascism as opposed toUS involvement in a morally and politically questionable war in Iraq.And his laconic can-do attitude offers a welcome antidote to the in-effectual bureaucratization of home security.

The moral ambiguity represented by Hellboy’s Right Hand ofDoom resonates with cultural anxieties about terrorist assaults and fearthat the United States itself may wreak destruction upon the world.Visions of apocalypse are a form of catastrophizing, a mode of imag-ining the eclipse of meaningful human agency. Teig O’Kane’s nocturnalodyssey with the pointing corpse teaches him personal responsibility,and the Hellboy movie also emphasizes that it is his choices, and not hisdubious origins, that makes a man. The message of the movie’s con-cluding voice-over—‘‘it is not how [the superhero/superpower] startsthings but how he decides to end them’’—reiterates, in a different key,the memento mori of the pointing corpse. What the hybrid Hellboydemonstrates is that a choice is rarely made for once and for all. Insubsequent installments of the comic book, facing off other monstrousopponents, the choice will need to be made again.

Notes

I am indebted to Mike Mignola for permission to reproduce images from The Corpse and to

Scott Allie and others at Dark Horse Comics for their help with reproducing them. I would

like to thank my student, David Winnick, for introducing me to Hellboy, and Carol Burke

and my anonymous reviewers for their helpful feedback.

Works Cited

Brunvand, Jan Harold. The Vanishing Hitchhiker: American Urban Leg-ends and their Meanings. New York: Norton, 1981.

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Del Toro, Guillermo., dir. Hellboy. Perf. Ron Perlman, Selma Blair, andJohn Hurt. Sony Pictures, 2004.

———. Hellboy. DVD (2-Disc Special Edition). Sony Pictures, 2004.———. Hellboy: The Art of the Movie. Ed. Scott Allie. Milwaukie, OR:

Dark Horse Books, 2004.Haining, Peter, ed. The Wild Night Company: Irish Stories of Fantasy and

Horror. London: Gollancz, 1970.Hyde, Douglas. Leabhar Sguelaiochta. Dublin: Gill and Son, 1889.———. ‘‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland.’’ Douglas Hyde:

Language, Lore and Lyrics. Ed. Breandan O Conaire. Dublin: IrishAcademic Press, 1986. 153 – 70.

Mignola, Mike. Interview with Christopher Brayshaw. The ComicsJournal 189. Aug. 1996 hhttp://www.tjc.com/2_archives/i_mignola.htmli

———. Interview with ‘‘Debbie.’’ Tastes Like Chicken 4.6. Feb. 2002hhttp://www.tlchicken.com/view_story.php?ARTid=17i.

———. Interview with Arune Singh. Masters of Horror. 4.6. Feb. 2002.hhttp://www.comicbookresources.comi.

———. Hellboy: The Right Hand of Doom. Milwaukie, OR: Dark HorseBooks, 2003.

———. Hellboy: Seed of Destruction. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books,2003.

———. Interview with David Server. 2 July 2003. hhttp://www.countingdown.comi.

———. The Corpse. 3rd ed. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books, 2004.———. Telephone Interview with Laura O’Connor. 30 Jan. 2004.———. Interview with Gary Butler. Rue Morgue Magazine 38. 7 Apr.

2004. hhttp://suicidegirls.com/words/Mike+Mignola+on+Hellboyi

———. Hellboy: Strange Places. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books,2006.

Pound, Ezra. Gaudier-Brzeska. New York: New Directions, 1981.Yeats, William Butler. ‘‘Nationality and Literature.’’ Uncollected Prose,

by W. B. Yeats. 2 vols. Ed. John P. Frayne. New York: ColumbiaUP, 1970.

Yeats, William Butler., ed. Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry.Foreword by Kathleen Raine. Gerrards Cross, UK: Colin Smythe,1973.

Yeats, William Butler. Letter. United Ireland. 17 Dec. 1892.

Laura O’Connor is an associate professor of English at the University ofCalifornia, Irvine. She specializes in poetry, Irish literature, and postcolonial

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issues in Anglophone literature, with a current focus on questions oftranslation, linguistic imperialism, and minority languages.

O’Connor’s publications include Haunted English: the Celtic Fringe, theBritish Empire, and De-Anglicization (The Johns Hopkins UP, 2006) andarticles in New Hibernia Review, Postmodern Culture, The Sewanee Review, and theYeats Annual. Her current book-project examines Gaelic poet Nuala NıDhomhnaill’s work in relation to a constellation of contemporary Irish poetswriting in English and Gaelic, with an emphasis on her poet-translators.

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