As we told you last week, tomorrow is one of the greatest holidays in the land: Hellboy Day! Mike Mignola’s seminal comic book series is celebrating its twentieth (!) anniversary, and Dark Horse wants to commemorate the event in style by holding an international celebration of all things Hellboy at comic book shops across the land. Well, tomorrow is the big day, and much like those kids in the Disneyland commercials, we’re too excited to sleep (even though it’s midday; bear with me). So, rather than rest on our laurels and stare at the cruel, slow-as-molasses hands of the clock until it strikes midnight, we’re kicking off the Hellboy Day celebration a little bit early with a hellaciously rad giveaway!
Five (5) grand prize winners will receive a hardcover copy of Hellboy: The First Twenty Years and a limited edition Hellboy-themed chocolate bar created by chocolatier Richard Ruskell exclusively for Hellboy Day.
Fifteen (15) runner-ups will receive a copy of Hellboy: The First Twenty Years, but no chocolate bar. But maybe if you attend the Hellboy Day event at Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles, you’ll be able to snag one.
In order to enter to win, you must do the following:
1) Comment below with your favorite Hellboy story or memory. (Note: when prompted by the comment box, please supply a valid e-mail address so we can contact you if you win)
2) Be a legal U.S. resident. Sorry, international friends, but them’s the breaks.
Winners will be selected by Wednesday, March 26th and notified via e-mail, so make sure you enter by midnight on Tuesday, March 25th, 2014 for a chance to win. Honestly, though, we’re having Mike Mignola on the Nerdist Podcast on April 7th, so no matter how this contest shakes out, we all win.
You’ve got your marching orders, hellions! Get commenting and make sure to find out how you can celebrate all things Hellboy tomorrow for Hellboy Day!
Have the winners been notified yet?
I know the contest is over, but I still wanted to share my favorite Hellboy memory. Making my 4 year old son’s Hellboy costume was the best Hellboy memory ever! He later went on to win a costume contest in that costume, double win! 🙂
The movies, animated, and live action, brought the characters and themes alive for me. This does not discount the comics themselves, which are marvelous
I was introduced to Hellboy by watching the first movie. I picked up Mike Mignolas Amazing screw on head man and loved the artwork and story. So I started byuing the books. Love at first write!
I really enjoyed The Midnight Circus. It showed a younger Hellboy and really helps to round him out. I like when comics show characters childhoods, it’s cool to look back and see, “oh thus us why he’s like this!”, plus the Pinocchio spin was cool too.
I’m also enjoying Hellboy in Hell, awesome stuff. Now time for a Hellboy 3!
Hands down, my best Hellboy memory is taking my now-wife to see the first Hellboy movie for our first date ever.
I have been lovin’ Hellboy for nearly as long as he has been around. I’d like soe payback for the support. You hear me, Hellboy?
During the short time I lived in the Portland area I found a library that had a really great comics & graphic novels section, it gave the the opportunity to read a lot of books I probably never would have been able to afford to get. Several Hellboy volumes where among my favorites- I’m pretty sure that’s where I read ‘Pancakes’ for the first time- while it’s not my absolute favorite Hellboy story it’s always the first one that pops into my head.
I love all things hellboy!
The hair plug comment Hellboy in that sarcastic tone is a favorite moment. Seeing Ron Perlman at the gym on occasion in LA and hearing him talking in that gruff voice of his never gets old.
So I got my UV ink Right Hand of Doom tattoo and a month later my sister tells me she scored me a ticket to the Hellboy 2 premier at the Alamo Drafthouse. Hurray for evil! I get to meet Mike Mignola, Doug Jones, and Guillermo Del Toro. So they’re letting people come up and get autographs and I get to Mike Mignola and I open my mouth to tell him how important that Hellboy has been to me and this comes out instead: “I love you…..this is now really awkward isn’t it?” He just laughs and says “A little.” I offer to show him my Hellboy tattoo which he gracefully concedes to do (he didn’t even ask where it was first) and then chats me up while drawing me a little Hellboy portrait.
And that ladies and gentlemen is why Mike Mignola is awesome (and quite possibly better than everybody else).
My favorite memory was the first time we were introduced to “The Good Samaritan.” 😀
I introduced my wife to Hellboy with the Hellboy story “Pancakes” on National Pancake day!
Ever since picking up the first issue of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, I was hooked! My favorite memory is having Mike Mignola coming to give a talk at the Disney Animation Studios. After the talk, he stuck around and had lunch with us and told us great stories and patiently answered our questions. If that wasn’t enough, he hung out and signed all of our Hellboy comics and even did a few sketches. Mike is hands down one of the nicest and most generous artists I’ve met. Truly one of a kind, just like his creation, Hellboy!
I first learned about Hellboy through the movies. As such, my fondest memory is from the first film, when we first see Hellboy’s room and it’s full of cats. For some reason that really cracked me up, him being this big, tough hero and deep down he’s really just sort of a demonic version of a crazy cat lady.
Love HB and have been following for all 20 years.Ive read Wake the Devil almost until it fell apart.
He has outdone himself with Hellboy in Hell. I mean who knew he had brothers?
For the love of Mike!
a good memory-
waking up early & reading hellboy: seed of destruction while chugging down cereal before school starts:(
I have first recollections of Hellboy living with a bunch of cats at the BPRD place in the movie. I like cats+he likes cats=I like him & he likes me.
when i first started buying comics as an adult, _hellboy_ was the weird book with the art that didn’t match what i thought i wanted to see in books. mignola and his successors on the book were doing things differently, posing characters in thick fields of black ink that seemed to slow down time. i couldn’t wrap myself into them at first, but once i was convinced by a friend to start reading BPRD everything changed! i started to (slowly) understand the mignola-verse, and as i did it increasingly dawned on me that understanding wasn’t always the point–that the art style, the myth, and the monsters were there to stick with you in this uncanny, almost subversive way. mignola’s creations were fun, sure, but they were also doing really cool things with us and our expectations of comics. still life was never painted like this, and even though i still think mignola’s art is weird, i love it for the same reason. the best comics are the ones that mess with us and make us feel differently. hellboy does that and more.
Somehow, I’ve never been able to get over the original scene in that ruined church, with the Nazis performing their spells. Everytime I think of Hellboy, I think of that.
I bonded over Hellboy with a cute geeky boy in the back of my English class who couldn’t believe a girl had better taste in comics than he did. 😉
I’ve loved Hellboy since I was introduced to him by the moves, however one of my favorite stories of his has to be The Crooked Man. Mignola and Richard Corben make some of the best comics when they work together.
A boyfriend of mine introduced me to Hellboy right before the movies were coming out. He was and still is one of the biggest Hellboy fans I know and we bonded over it in so many ways. I was able to take him to his first Mike Mignola signing and he was as nervous as he was on our first date. Our romance didn’t make it but we still can geek out over Big Red himself even now. The stories of Hellboy are all amazing and a lot of my heart belongs to Abe but I think my favorite Hellboy story is ‘Pancakes,’ because pancakes :D.
I just wanna win stuff!
It was 1996, and I was working part-time at a software company in Blacksburg, Virginia, while taking classes for my MA part-time, having returned from a year abroad teaching English in Japan. It was typical cubical culture at the company, and I was hired as a technical writer. A short time later, they hired another, younger guy to do visual design assets, and he got placed in my cubicle to keep the “creative types” together. We hit it off pretty well, particularly once the topic of comic books came up. He asked me if I had ever read Hellboy. Nope, I hadn’t, so he loaned me The Chained Coffin & Others trade and that pretty much hooked me. Seed of Destruction still gives me weird dreams, all these years later. For 18 years I have read Hellboy and everything else Mignola has done for Dark Horse (and tracking down non-Dark Horse projects too), realizing that I already “knew” him from Gotham By Gaslight, Wolverine: The Jungle Adventure, and other unusual comics I really liked. Early on, I tracked down individual issues, and I still buy the floppies, but also the trades, the hardcovers, toys, prints, t-shirts, and all the other Hellboy miscellany (yes, even the Hellboy wine). I managed to take my interest in Hellboy/Mignola into the world of academia, writing about the Hellboy games for a conference presentation and doing a magazine piece on post-9/11 comics. I think most of all it is the blend of all this cool, old mythology into something “new” that engages my imagination. In a short time, Hellboy has become an iconic character.
The stories in THE CHAINED COFFIN AND OTHERS were my first exposure to Hellboy, and the ones that I return to most frequently, along with THE RIGHT HAND OF DOOM. Love all the dark ambiance and all the myths and folklore that are the basis for many of the Hellboy adventures. He’s without question my favorite comic book character. Happy Hellboy Day to All!
I picked up a random Hellboy series on my first trip to a comic book store around the age of 10. My collection has grown substantially since then. I met Mike last year at Phx comicon I nervously shook his hand and shoved a stack of comics at him for signing.
I’d have to say my favorite Hellboy memory is of a friend in college who made a functional replica of hell boy’s hand. It was flippin’ awesome.
I was introduced to Hellboy by the movies and Ron Perlman’s portrayal. Being a crazy cat lady, I love how much Hellboy care about the kittens!