How far has Hellboy come?

Hey now. Its Friday, June 3, 2011, I got lucky last night, and this is The Side. By lucky I mean I was in a convenience store last night. I was down to my last buck before payday, and since there's not much you can do with a buck nowadays, I bought a scratch off lottery ticket. I won ten dollars!

Figured I'd push my luck and used that money to get more scratch off tickets. After going through most of them I had won a dollar, so I'd at least be back where I started. Sure enough the last ticket won me twenty dollars. For a brief instant I considered getting more lottery tickets, but there's a point where you've got to quit when you're ahead.

COMIX!!

HELLBOY: THE FURY #1 begins the wrap up to the huge arc that's been going on for a while now. Big Red has gotten King Arthur's sword, been offered to be a king, and has a nasty queen witch to battle. There's a lot of elements going all the way back to the beginning of the series. There's mentions of Rasputin. Alice Monaghan, the baby from "The Corpse", is all grown up. There's a lot going on, and we jump in right with Hellboy going to confront Nimue. In the meantime its looking like King Arthur's true heir is rising up. There's a big battle going on, and looking like a bigger one is on the way. This one is tough to jump onboard on if you haven't been following what's been going on. Fortunately, Mignola and Fegredo give us a two page recap just to refresh our memories. They're going for "epic" and doing a pretty fine job of it.

With the DC reboot still just a little ways off, I'm finishing out the stories for a bit of closure for myself.

SECRET SIX #34 has the team back from Hell, but there's still the matter of Scandal Savage's girlfriend, Liana, having been kidnapped by lunatic whose torturing her and planning on killing her. Things don't go well for the dirtbag responsible. We also see Bane go out on a date. In a stunning change of pace none of the team tries to kill anyone else on the team. This is probably as close as this book gets to being upbeat. Yes, its always fun in its own unique and twisted way, but there was a slightly different tone here. We can get behind the team's motivation to save Liana and put down the guy who was torturing here. We can enjoy Bane being out on a date with the nice little stripper who really likes him in as close to a romantic comedy as this series can get. Gail Simone hits all the right points here, and fleshes them all out beautifully. Although, I'm still unconvinced about King Shark being a Shark.

MUSIC!!

The actual video is pretty cool until it turns into a "hurray for liberals" bit. Ah well. I could get it embedded in here anyways. As such. Enjoy some penguins.



That's it for me today. Got a Karate tournament tomorrow and I'm hoping for some big trophies. We'll see what happens and I'll tell y'all about it Sunday.