Hellboy Character History
Having established the timeline of Hellboy's universe up to the moment of his appearance on Earth, this is a history of Hellboy himself.
While Hellboy was technically born in Hell in 1617, he doesn't remember anything that happened there, such as how the stone-encased right hand of the watcher angel Anum was fused to his arm. As far as he is concerned, his life begins on 23 December 1944, when he appeared in the ruins of a church in East Bromwich, England. While the ritual that summoned him was being performed on Tarmagant Island, off the coast of Scotland, it is likely that he was drawn to the church because of the psychic scar upon the place caused by his father taking his mother's soul from there to take down to Hell.
Having been found by a unit of U.S. Army Rangers, costumed adventurer Torch of Liberty, and three members of the British Paranormal Society (including a young man named Trevor Bruttenholm), there was some debate as to whether the demon baby should be allowed to life. One of the B.P.S. members, Professor Malcolm Frost, insisted that they should kill it, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. Unbeknownst to all, one of the soldiers was actually an alien in disguise, sent with knowledge of the boy's destiny and orders to terminate him. Cooler heads prevailed, insisting that he's just a boy. The alien, in particular, recognizes the spark of free will, and defies his orders in the hope that the boy can find some way to avoid his destiny. Bruttenholm offhandedly describes the demon as a "Hellboy," and that becomes his name.
Bruttenholm takes Hellboy back to America with him. There, with backing from the U.S. and British militaries, he founds the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) as an organization dedicated to studying Hellboy and other supernatural phenomena. In the early days, the BPRD was located in an Air Force base in New Mexico (never explicitly stated, but later hinted to be Roswell Army Air Field). Hellboy grows up at an accelerated rate, walking and talking within his first month, and just as quickly starts charming everyone with how adorable a child he is. Bruttenholm, in particular, starts to treat Hellboy as more than just something to be studied, and in 1946, he officially adopts Hellboy as his son.
There isn't much to be said for the day-to-day life of a demon child on a military base, especially when one's father figure occasionally has to go off on trips. Still, Hellboy manages to get by. Having won over the rank-and-file troops, they buy him comic books and get him into movies -- he especially becomes a fan of the fictional representation of 1930s costumed crime-fighter The Lobster -- and he gets the occasional visit from the scientists of the Manhattan Project. (Richard Feynman teaches Hellboy how to pick locks, and is subsequently banned from the base as a result.) He has a dog named Mac. He gets used to new foods: previously a fan of noodles, one of the Generals on base insists one day that he tries pancakes for breakfast. Hellboy is initially reluctant, but discovers that "pamcakes," as he calls them, are delicious. (The legions of Hell wail in despair when they find out that he'd eaten pancakes, lamenting that he will never return to them after that.)
Hellboy even gets some traveling in, alongside Bruttenholm, after word of his existence leaked to the public in 1947: in India, he meets Mohandas Gandhi, and in Tanzania, he gets lost for a week on the Serengeti, having a vision that he would subsequently forget for many years of a giant rhinoceros spirit appearing before him and calling him, "Anung Un Rama." (While he doesn't remember what happened on the Serengeti, he would retain a subconscious aversion to visiting Africa.) In July of 1947, the Air Force hauls an alien craft on to the base from where it crashed near Roswell. An incident ensues in which Hellboy's dog Mac laps up some residue from the ship and goes on a temporarily mutated rampage, which may or may not have been a contributing factor in the BPRD moving later in the year to new headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Having been subject to much public scrutiny, Hellboy is granted "honorary human" status by the United Nations in 1952. That same year, his speedy growth brings him to the mental and physical equivalent of adulthood. He wasted little time in turning around and joining the BPRD as a field agent. Two years later, he meets with the Osiris Club, with whom Bruttenholm had history. They tell him about a monk who successfully fought off a dragon but whose injuries caused lilies to grow wherever his blood was spilled... then tell him that the dragon has returned and send him off to kill it. The dragon dies, but the circumstances make it dubious to say whether it was actually Hellboy's doing... which means no one really notices the lilies growing where his blood lands.
In 1956, he travels to Mexico with a couple of green BPRD agents, who cut out early on in the face of the massive infestation of monsters they'd encounter. Fortunately, he then encounters three luchador brothers who, having been inspired by the Virgin Mary, had taken up monster hunting. Day after day, the four of them fight monsters all day and then party all night, but one night, they get sloppy and the younger brother gets taken by the monsters. He later turns up, possessed by a bat-demon, but gets a decent death when Hellboy faces him in the ring. Hellboy then crawls into a bottle for a few months, emerging only when BPRD agents find him with no memory of what happened in the meantime. (It's possible, however, that he'd done some wrestling during that blackout period.)
A few years later, Hellboy gets sent to Ireland to help the Monaghan family, who insist that their daughter Alice had been kidnapped, and that the thing in her crib isn't the real her. The occupant of the crib does turn out to be a changeling, a member of the Daoine Sidhe named The Grugach of Lough Leane who was once a powerful shapeshifting warrior but had fallen on hard times over the centuries. Hellboy successfully performs a task for the fae and thus secures Alice's return, but his initial interaction with the Grugach was... less than diplomatic (he used iron, which is poisonous to most fae), and the insult earns him the Grugach's lasting enmity, though he wouldn't feel the impact of that for years to come. He makes another enemy in 1964, when he shoots out the Baba Yaga's left eye in a cemetery in Russia.
It's not all vampires, witches, and attempted manifestations of the Ogdru Hem, of course. In 1974, a girl named Liz Sherman comes into BPRD custody due to her uncontrolled pyrokinetic talent. While the scientists keep her isolated at first so they can study her powers, Hellboy takes the initiative to make contact with her on a personal level, since he doesn't really have a whole lot to fear from fire. That socialization helps her to get used to life at the Bureau. Similarly, four years later, when a fish-man is found unconscious in a tank, brought in, and successfully revived -- and jokingly named "Abe Sapien" based on a note found next to his tank -- it's Hellboy who finally gets the scientists to stop poking and prodding him and let him out. Despite an apparently complete amnesia, Sapien could speak English and was a quick learner, and he takes readily to Hellboy's efforts to acclimatize him to the modern world. Both Sherman and Sapien become BPRD field agents.
In 1979, Hellboy meets archaeologist Anastasia Bransfield, and they fall in love. He quits the BPRD to accompany her on a series of adventures, some of them just as odd as any he could've had with the Bureau. After two years, though, he realizes that being with him has been causing harm to Anastasia's reputation with her colleagues, and reluctantly breaks things off with her to spare her any further social pressure. They would, however, cross paths on multiple occasions in later years. Back on his own, Hellboy returns to work with the Bureau. (While the breakup was Hellboy's decision, Bruttenholm chooses to blame Anastasia, as a father may be expected to do.)
Seeking distraction from love gone awry, Hellboy throws himself into his work. He successfully captures Igor Bromhead, a thief and trafficker in occult artifacts, putting him behind bars for a fifteen year sentence. He and Abe take on a number of strange cases together, having to do with such things as the lost head of the pirate Blackbeard, a wendigo named Daryl, and the lake monster Ogopogo. Late in 1992, Bruttenholm accompanies a family of explorers on a trip north to find the supposed location of Hyperborea; when the expedition goes missing some months later, Hellboy again turns to work for distraction. He fights Anubis manifested as a giant dog monster at an Arizona gas station. He attends a display of an African mummy, which sparks his long-dormant memory of his time on the Serengeti in 1947 and then gives him a vision in which the mummy tells him what might possibly have been intended as a cautionary tale. The mummy then disintegrates. Hellboy is the only one to have this vision, and no time passes for any outside observers. He is thus blamed for the mummy's destruction and banned for life from the New York City Explorer's Club.
In May of 1994, Trevor Bruttenholm turns up alive after having been missing and presumed dead for a year and a half, and immediately calls on Hellboy. He has difficulty recalling what happened on the expedition, and before Hellboy can get far in talking him through what he does remember, a frog monster busts in. The monster kills Bruttenholm, and then is gunned down by Hellboy. Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman accompany him in his investigation, which takes them to Cavendish Hall, the home of the explorers that Bruttenholm had gone with. There, they encounter more frog monsters, and worse: the mad monk Rasputin and one of the Ogdru Hem. Rasputin tells Hellboy that he had been summoned to use the power in his stone right hand to unleash the seven-headed dragon Ogdru Jahad and bring about the end of the world. Hellboy isn't really into that, and when Rasputin tries to force the issue, Abe runs him through with a harpoon, and Hellboy finishes the job, not interested in what Rasputin has to say about his origins and destiny.
The Cavendish Hall case continues to bother him, though, and so for the first time since his "birth," Hellboy finally visits the burned-out East Bromwich church. While there, he has a disturbing dream-vision of the night that his mother died and his father came to claim her soul. Other than a letter to Abe, he resolves to put it behind him. That works for a couple of years, including one case in which he manages to introduce a long time friend, historian Kate Corrigan, to the exciting world of BPRD field work. In 1997, however, the BPRD investigates the possibly imminent return of Romanian vampire Vladimir Giurescu. Not only does Giurescu prove to be there, but so too does the source of his unlife: the witch-goddess Hecate, Who greets Hellboy as Anung Un Rama, the beast who will stand beside her at the end of the world. As with Rasputin, he's not really interested in that plan, and in the ensuing fight, he kills her by knocking her out of a window into the sunlight. She approaches him again, though, after she is resurrected by the ghost of Rasputin, his Nazi disciple Ilsa Haupstein, an iron maiden provided by the Baba Yaga, and the piece of Hecate's spirit she had given to Giurescu. She urges him to "wake his devil heart," as she puts it, but he refuses, snapping off the horns she forced him to grow.
The Giurescu case has repercussions: a mishap at another site causes Liz Sherman to pass her power -- and with it her life force -- into a dormant homunculus. Hellboy and Kate Corrigan track the now-active homunculus down, and after some trouble with his older, more malicious "brother," he gives the power and life back to Liz. Hellboy names him "Roger," and he is later fitted with an internal electrical generator to keep him active and becomes a BPRD agent.
The year after that, Hellboy meets with Father Adrian Frost, son of Malcolm Frost, the man who had insisted that Hellboy should be killed while still a child. Fr. Frost had found one of the only bits of paper that his father hadn't burned before his death, and offers it to Hellboy: it shows a drawing of his stone hand, and a bit of Old Lemurian writing. Hellboy was taught Old Lemurian by Trevor Bruttenholm, and translates it as, "The Right Hand of Doom." With that weighty revelation out of the way, they discuss Hellboy's past and how he'd have to keep the Hand if he wanted to prevent anyone else from using it. The year after that (May 1999), he and Abe investigate an occult robbery that turns out to be the work of Igor Bromhead, not long out of prison. They track him down, but find that he had joined forces with the demon Ualac, that had been trapped in the object he stole. Abe is incapacitated by Bromhead's other accomplices, and Bromhead binds Hellboy using the power of his secret name, provided by Ualac.
With further coaching from Ualac, Bromhead forces Hellboy to grow his horns... and manifest the Crown of the Apocalypse, usually kept hidden from view. Ualac takes the Crown, and prepares to take the Right Hand of Doom as well, but Hellboy has a vision in which the fae talk him through how the name "Anung Un Rama" goes with the Crown. Since he no longer has the Crown, the name has no binding power on him, and uses his freedom to beat down and capture Ualac. Bromhead flees, and foolishly begs Astaroth (one of the greater powers in Hell, who is known for exacting a high price for his favors) for protection. He gets it, but his lower half is turned into that of a lizard. Astaroth then takes custody of Ualac -- bound to be imprisoned again for presuming above his station -- and tells Hellboy that he will keep the Crown in Hell, ready for Hellboy whenever he wants it. (Hellboy tells him to cram it.) Not long after, Hellboy and Kate discuss what happened, and the paper he got from Fr. Frost, and how he tries to avoid confronting the truth about himself. He decides to discard the paper and dodge the question one more time.
"One more time" turns out to be about two years, when a Nazi rocket returns from space to the Austrian castle it was launched from in 1939. Hellboy and Roger are sent to investigate, and find that the rocket has brought back one of the now-formerly-disembodied Ogdru Hem. They also encounter the alien who had observed Hellboy's arrival in the world -- who tells Hellboy what he saw that night, about the lilies he saw grow from Hellboy's blood in 1954, and about the rocket's payload, then dies from having been shot -- and the ghost of 1930s crime-fighter The Lobster, who helps the fight off the giant worm monster. They are successful, but the new information Hellboy's received (including, before the mission started, being told that Roger's generator contained an explosive as a "fail-safe," which damaged his usually strong trust in the Bureau) is finally just too much. He quits the BPRD, telling Kate that he plans to visit Africa, when wander around while he figures things out in his head.
Hellboy spends the next year making his way down to Africa and seeing the sights there. He arrives, finally, at the hut of the witch doctor Mohlomi, who's pretty spry for someone who died two hundred years ago. Mohlomi protects Hellboy while he sleeps from the spirits of Africa (who want him to leave and never to return, as though that might somehow keep their land from being affected by the Apocalypse should it ever occur, which isn't very likely), then escorts him to the ocean, which has been calling his name. A wave from the ocean then swallows Hellboy up, and he is captured by mermaids working for the Bog Roosh, a giant talking fish woman who wishes to destroy him and send the Right Hand of Doom to the bottommost depths of the ocean so it can't be used and the world can survive. One of the mermaids has second thoughts and frees Hellboy, who then kills the Bog Roosh. (It's highly likely that she actually threw herself on her blade, not wanting to live in a world that still has Hellboy in it.)
Over two years later, after drifting out of the ocean onto an island off the coast of Portugal and boozing it up with the dead men in the wrecked ships on the shore, Hellboy encounters a giant creature, who deals him an apparently fatal blow and then throws him into a nearby building. All of Hellboy's blood runs out into the body of a priest who died in the 16th century, who forms himself into the beast Hellboy was meant to be. When Hellboy brings himself back to life (with some help from a vision of Mohlomi), the priest tells him of the Secret History of the World, as he learned it long ago. They fight, and Hellboy defeats him by successfully killing the creature who had killed him earlier (actually Urgo-Hem, one of the Ogdru Hem, reborn from the priest's blood when he died the first time). He then finds an intact boat on the shore, and sails away from the island. He drifts for another two years, this time on the ocean rather than under it.
When he reaches shore once again, it's in England, near the home of Harry Middleton, an old friend of Hellboy's who's a very gracious host for someone who died in 1984. He crashes at Harry's place for a time, spending most of his time in the various bottles of Harry's collection. In the meantime, two things happen: the witches of the world recover Hellboy's discarded horns from Castle Giurescu, fashioning one of them into his likeness; and Igor Bromhead uses the remains of Vladimir Giurescu which he had stolen to learn the secrets of Hecate, and in turn uses those secrets to steal her power. That power, which he would've tried to use to become king of the witches, proves too much for him, but nonetheless, Hecate is gone, at least until Doomsday comes.
Having lost their queen, the witches use the likeness of Hellboy to summon him to their largest gathering ever. They offer to make him their king, as his father had been lord over the witches of England. He tells them to go screw, and in retaliation, they send him to the Baba Yaga, in the lands beyond the mortal world. There, her forces attack him, seeking his eye to replace the one she lost to him, as well as his life. When he evades her initial attempt, she calls up Koshchei the Deathless, an unkillable warrior who pursues Hellboy relentlessly because the Baba Yaga promises she'll finally let him die if he succeeds. It's truly a desperate situation for Hellboy, although he manages to receive unexpected help from several sources, including a girl named Vasilisa, who escaped the Baba Yaga long ago and points Hellboy to the way back to the mortal world at the apparent cost of her own life. It's a hard fight to get there, though, and in the course of it, the Baba Yaga expends all of her power to keep Koshchei fighting, only to find that Hellboy is equally deathless, unkillable unless he allows it. Once he's back in the world, he tracks down Igor Bromhead in Italy, who asks Hellboy to kill him and says he'll be waiting for him in Hell.
Since he's already in Italy, Hellboy visits and crashes with the Capobianco sisters (more dead friends with excellent stores of booze). While there, he has a dream in which he attends the funeral of the Dagda, king of the Daoine Sidh (more on his murder shortly). When he wakes up, he receives a letter from the Osiris Club. He goes back to England to meet them, and they invite him to join them on a hunt for giants, who have started to reappear and walk the land. It's all a pretense, though, and while they're riding out for the hunt, the others turn on him with their electrified spears, shouting something he didn't quite understand about how "the Devil will never sit on the throne of England." Before they're able to finish him off, the giants who really were nearby come around and kill the huntsmen. Hellboy wakes up, and he lets his temper get the better of him, picking a fight with the giants and killing them in a rage that disturbs him later.
Hellboy then goes to Ireland, where he visits Alice Monaghan, looking a couple of decades younger than she should due to occasional (voluntary, non-kidnapping) play-time with the fae in the years since Hellboy had last stopped by. He had seen her in his dream of the Dagda's funeral, but she tells him that it really happened, and that it ties in to other events going on in the world. She brings him to Mab, once but no longer Queen of the fae. Between them, Hellboy learns that after he turned down kingship of the witches, the Grugach had forged an alliance with them in which he would bring about the return of an old, dead witch who would become their new Queen of Blood. This Queen would then lead them on a great war against humanity to reclaim the world for the creatures of magic. When the Dagda objected to this course of action, one of his other subjects killed him, then killed himself in horror of what he had done. Mab tells Hellboy that if he will not accept his father's crown and end the world, then he must embrace his mother's heritage and raise an army to fight the Queen.
After the meeting with Mab, Hellboy and Alice are caught in an ambush, and Alice is stuck with a poisoned dart. Emissaries of Morgan Le Fay bring them to her castle, where she provides an antidote in time to save Alice's life. She then tells them of the heritage she shares with Hellboy, that a daughter of her son Mordred began a matriarchal line of witches that ended with Sarah Hughes, Hellboy's mother. Hellboy therefore, by descent from Arthur, is rightful King of England, and to bring the point home, Morgan brings him to where Excalibur waits, embedded in a stone, and tells him that the Queen of Blood was once Nimue, who had made contact with and been driven mad by the Ogdru Jahad and was killed by the other witches who had become afraid of her. He initially holds off from claiming the sword, but after a disturbing encounter with Astaroth and a pep talk from Vasilisa (not quite as dead as initially thought), he finally goes ahead and does it.
The year is 2009. Though the secret is known to only very few as yet, Hellboy is the King of England. This is when, at a crossroads in his life, he gets picked up and tossed around the multiverse a little by forces unknown.
While Hellboy was technically born in Hell in 1617, he doesn't remember anything that happened there, such as how the stone-encased right hand of the watcher angel Anum was fused to his arm. As far as he is concerned, his life begins on 23 December 1944, when he appeared in the ruins of a church in East Bromwich, England. While the ritual that summoned him was being performed on Tarmagant Island, off the coast of Scotland, it is likely that he was drawn to the church because of the psychic scar upon the place caused by his father taking his mother's soul from there to take down to Hell.
Having been found by a unit of U.S. Army Rangers, costumed adventurer Torch of Liberty, and three members of the British Paranormal Society (including a young man named Trevor Bruttenholm), there was some debate as to whether the demon baby should be allowed to life. One of the B.P.S. members, Professor Malcolm Frost, insisted that they should kill it, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. Unbeknownst to all, one of the soldiers was actually an alien in disguise, sent with knowledge of the boy's destiny and orders to terminate him. Cooler heads prevailed, insisting that he's just a boy. The alien, in particular, recognizes the spark of free will, and defies his orders in the hope that the boy can find some way to avoid his destiny. Bruttenholm offhandedly describes the demon as a "Hellboy," and that becomes his name.
Bruttenholm takes Hellboy back to America with him. There, with backing from the U.S. and British militaries, he founds the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) as an organization dedicated to studying Hellboy and other supernatural phenomena. In the early days, the BPRD was located in an Air Force base in New Mexico (never explicitly stated, but later hinted to be Roswell Army Air Field). Hellboy grows up at an accelerated rate, walking and talking within his first month, and just as quickly starts charming everyone with how adorable a child he is. Bruttenholm, in particular, starts to treat Hellboy as more than just something to be studied, and in 1946, he officially adopts Hellboy as his son.
There isn't much to be said for the day-to-day life of a demon child on a military base, especially when one's father figure occasionally has to go off on trips. Still, Hellboy manages to get by. Having won over the rank-and-file troops, they buy him comic books and get him into movies -- he especially becomes a fan of the fictional representation of 1930s costumed crime-fighter The Lobster -- and he gets the occasional visit from the scientists of the Manhattan Project. (Richard Feynman teaches Hellboy how to pick locks, and is subsequently banned from the base as a result.) He has a dog named Mac. He gets used to new foods: previously a fan of noodles, one of the Generals on base insists one day that he tries pancakes for breakfast. Hellboy is initially reluctant, but discovers that "pamcakes," as he calls them, are delicious. (The legions of Hell wail in despair when they find out that he'd eaten pancakes, lamenting that he will never return to them after that.)
Hellboy even gets some traveling in, alongside Bruttenholm, after word of his existence leaked to the public in 1947: in India, he meets Mohandas Gandhi, and in Tanzania, he gets lost for a week on the Serengeti, having a vision that he would subsequently forget for many years of a giant rhinoceros spirit appearing before him and calling him, "Anung Un Rama." (While he doesn't remember what happened on the Serengeti, he would retain a subconscious aversion to visiting Africa.) In July of 1947, the Air Force hauls an alien craft on to the base from where it crashed near Roswell. An incident ensues in which Hellboy's dog Mac laps up some residue from the ship and goes on a temporarily mutated rampage, which may or may not have been a contributing factor in the BPRD moving later in the year to new headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Having been subject to much public scrutiny, Hellboy is granted "honorary human" status by the United Nations in 1952. That same year, his speedy growth brings him to the mental and physical equivalent of adulthood. He wasted little time in turning around and joining the BPRD as a field agent. Two years later, he meets with the Osiris Club, with whom Bruttenholm had history. They tell him about a monk who successfully fought off a dragon but whose injuries caused lilies to grow wherever his blood was spilled... then tell him that the dragon has returned and send him off to kill it. The dragon dies, but the circumstances make it dubious to say whether it was actually Hellboy's doing... which means no one really notices the lilies growing where his blood lands.
In 1956, he travels to Mexico with a couple of green BPRD agents, who cut out early on in the face of the massive infestation of monsters they'd encounter. Fortunately, he then encounters three luchador brothers who, having been inspired by the Virgin Mary, had taken up monster hunting. Day after day, the four of them fight monsters all day and then party all night, but one night, they get sloppy and the younger brother gets taken by the monsters. He later turns up, possessed by a bat-demon, but gets a decent death when Hellboy faces him in the ring. Hellboy then crawls into a bottle for a few months, emerging only when BPRD agents find him with no memory of what happened in the meantime. (It's possible, however, that he'd done some wrestling during that blackout period.)
A few years later, Hellboy gets sent to Ireland to help the Monaghan family, who insist that their daughter Alice had been kidnapped, and that the thing in her crib isn't the real her. The occupant of the crib does turn out to be a changeling, a member of the Daoine Sidhe named The Grugach of Lough Leane who was once a powerful shapeshifting warrior but had fallen on hard times over the centuries. Hellboy successfully performs a task for the fae and thus secures Alice's return, but his initial interaction with the Grugach was... less than diplomatic (he used iron, which is poisonous to most fae), and the insult earns him the Grugach's lasting enmity, though he wouldn't feel the impact of that for years to come. He makes another enemy in 1964, when he shoots out the Baba Yaga's left eye in a cemetery in Russia.
It's not all vampires, witches, and attempted manifestations of the Ogdru Hem, of course. In 1974, a girl named Liz Sherman comes into BPRD custody due to her uncontrolled pyrokinetic talent. While the scientists keep her isolated at first so they can study her powers, Hellboy takes the initiative to make contact with her on a personal level, since he doesn't really have a whole lot to fear from fire. That socialization helps her to get used to life at the Bureau. Similarly, four years later, when a fish-man is found unconscious in a tank, brought in, and successfully revived -- and jokingly named "Abe Sapien" based on a note found next to his tank -- it's Hellboy who finally gets the scientists to stop poking and prodding him and let him out. Despite an apparently complete amnesia, Sapien could speak English and was a quick learner, and he takes readily to Hellboy's efforts to acclimatize him to the modern world. Both Sherman and Sapien become BPRD field agents.
In 1979, Hellboy meets archaeologist Anastasia Bransfield, and they fall in love. He quits the BPRD to accompany her on a series of adventures, some of them just as odd as any he could've had with the Bureau. After two years, though, he realizes that being with him has been causing harm to Anastasia's reputation with her colleagues, and reluctantly breaks things off with her to spare her any further social pressure. They would, however, cross paths on multiple occasions in later years. Back on his own, Hellboy returns to work with the Bureau. (While the breakup was Hellboy's decision, Bruttenholm chooses to blame Anastasia, as a father may be expected to do.)
Seeking distraction from love gone awry, Hellboy throws himself into his work. He successfully captures Igor Bromhead, a thief and trafficker in occult artifacts, putting him behind bars for a fifteen year sentence. He and Abe take on a number of strange cases together, having to do with such things as the lost head of the pirate Blackbeard, a wendigo named Daryl, and the lake monster Ogopogo. Late in 1992, Bruttenholm accompanies a family of explorers on a trip north to find the supposed location of Hyperborea; when the expedition goes missing some months later, Hellboy again turns to work for distraction. He fights Anubis manifested as a giant dog monster at an Arizona gas station. He attends a display of an African mummy, which sparks his long-dormant memory of his time on the Serengeti in 1947 and then gives him a vision in which the mummy tells him what might possibly have been intended as a cautionary tale. The mummy then disintegrates. Hellboy is the only one to have this vision, and no time passes for any outside observers. He is thus blamed for the mummy's destruction and banned for life from the New York City Explorer's Club.
In May of 1994, Trevor Bruttenholm turns up alive after having been missing and presumed dead for a year and a half, and immediately calls on Hellboy. He has difficulty recalling what happened on the expedition, and before Hellboy can get far in talking him through what he does remember, a frog monster busts in. The monster kills Bruttenholm, and then is gunned down by Hellboy. Abe Sapien and Liz Sherman accompany him in his investigation, which takes them to Cavendish Hall, the home of the explorers that Bruttenholm had gone with. There, they encounter more frog monsters, and worse: the mad monk Rasputin and one of the Ogdru Hem. Rasputin tells Hellboy that he had been summoned to use the power in his stone right hand to unleash the seven-headed dragon Ogdru Jahad and bring about the end of the world. Hellboy isn't really into that, and when Rasputin tries to force the issue, Abe runs him through with a harpoon, and Hellboy finishes the job, not interested in what Rasputin has to say about his origins and destiny.
The Cavendish Hall case continues to bother him, though, and so for the first time since his "birth," Hellboy finally visits the burned-out East Bromwich church. While there, he has a disturbing dream-vision of the night that his mother died and his father came to claim her soul. Other than a letter to Abe, he resolves to put it behind him. That works for a couple of years, including one case in which he manages to introduce a long time friend, historian Kate Corrigan, to the exciting world of BPRD field work. In 1997, however, the BPRD investigates the possibly imminent return of Romanian vampire Vladimir Giurescu. Not only does Giurescu prove to be there, but so too does the source of his unlife: the witch-goddess Hecate, Who greets Hellboy as Anung Un Rama, the beast who will stand beside her at the end of the world. As with Rasputin, he's not really interested in that plan, and in the ensuing fight, he kills her by knocking her out of a window into the sunlight. She approaches him again, though, after she is resurrected by the ghost of Rasputin, his Nazi disciple Ilsa Haupstein, an iron maiden provided by the Baba Yaga, and the piece of Hecate's spirit she had given to Giurescu. She urges him to "wake his devil heart," as she puts it, but he refuses, snapping off the horns she forced him to grow.
The Giurescu case has repercussions: a mishap at another site causes Liz Sherman to pass her power -- and with it her life force -- into a dormant homunculus. Hellboy and Kate Corrigan track the now-active homunculus down, and after some trouble with his older, more malicious "brother," he gives the power and life back to Liz. Hellboy names him "Roger," and he is later fitted with an internal electrical generator to keep him active and becomes a BPRD agent.
The year after that, Hellboy meets with Father Adrian Frost, son of Malcolm Frost, the man who had insisted that Hellboy should be killed while still a child. Fr. Frost had found one of the only bits of paper that his father hadn't burned before his death, and offers it to Hellboy: it shows a drawing of his stone hand, and a bit of Old Lemurian writing. Hellboy was taught Old Lemurian by Trevor Bruttenholm, and translates it as, "The Right Hand of Doom." With that weighty revelation out of the way, they discuss Hellboy's past and how he'd have to keep the Hand if he wanted to prevent anyone else from using it. The year after that (May 1999), he and Abe investigate an occult robbery that turns out to be the work of Igor Bromhead, not long out of prison. They track him down, but find that he had joined forces with the demon Ualac, that had been trapped in the object he stole. Abe is incapacitated by Bromhead's other accomplices, and Bromhead binds Hellboy using the power of his secret name, provided by Ualac.
With further coaching from Ualac, Bromhead forces Hellboy to grow his horns... and manifest the Crown of the Apocalypse, usually kept hidden from view. Ualac takes the Crown, and prepares to take the Right Hand of Doom as well, but Hellboy has a vision in which the fae talk him through how the name "Anung Un Rama" goes with the Crown. Since he no longer has the Crown, the name has no binding power on him, and uses his freedom to beat down and capture Ualac. Bromhead flees, and foolishly begs Astaroth (one of the greater powers in Hell, who is known for exacting a high price for his favors) for protection. He gets it, but his lower half is turned into that of a lizard. Astaroth then takes custody of Ualac -- bound to be imprisoned again for presuming above his station -- and tells Hellboy that he will keep the Crown in Hell, ready for Hellboy whenever he wants it. (Hellboy tells him to cram it.) Not long after, Hellboy and Kate discuss what happened, and the paper he got from Fr. Frost, and how he tries to avoid confronting the truth about himself. He decides to discard the paper and dodge the question one more time.
"One more time" turns out to be about two years, when a Nazi rocket returns from space to the Austrian castle it was launched from in 1939. Hellboy and Roger are sent to investigate, and find that the rocket has brought back one of the now-formerly-disembodied Ogdru Hem. They also encounter the alien who had observed Hellboy's arrival in the world -- who tells Hellboy what he saw that night, about the lilies he saw grow from Hellboy's blood in 1954, and about the rocket's payload, then dies from having been shot -- and the ghost of 1930s crime-fighter The Lobster, who helps the fight off the giant worm monster. They are successful, but the new information Hellboy's received (including, before the mission started, being told that Roger's generator contained an explosive as a "fail-safe," which damaged his usually strong trust in the Bureau) is finally just too much. He quits the BPRD, telling Kate that he plans to visit Africa, when wander around while he figures things out in his head.
Hellboy spends the next year making his way down to Africa and seeing the sights there. He arrives, finally, at the hut of the witch doctor Mohlomi, who's pretty spry for someone who died two hundred years ago. Mohlomi protects Hellboy while he sleeps from the spirits of Africa (who want him to leave and never to return, as though that might somehow keep their land from being affected by the Apocalypse should it ever occur, which isn't very likely), then escorts him to the ocean, which has been calling his name. A wave from the ocean then swallows Hellboy up, and he is captured by mermaids working for the Bog Roosh, a giant talking fish woman who wishes to destroy him and send the Right Hand of Doom to the bottommost depths of the ocean so it can't be used and the world can survive. One of the mermaids has second thoughts and frees Hellboy, who then kills the Bog Roosh. (It's highly likely that she actually threw herself on her blade, not wanting to live in a world that still has Hellboy in it.)
Over two years later, after drifting out of the ocean onto an island off the coast of Portugal and boozing it up with the dead men in the wrecked ships on the shore, Hellboy encounters a giant creature, who deals him an apparently fatal blow and then throws him into a nearby building. All of Hellboy's blood runs out into the body of a priest who died in the 16th century, who forms himself into the beast Hellboy was meant to be. When Hellboy brings himself back to life (with some help from a vision of Mohlomi), the priest tells him of the Secret History of the World, as he learned it long ago. They fight, and Hellboy defeats him by successfully killing the creature who had killed him earlier (actually Urgo-Hem, one of the Ogdru Hem, reborn from the priest's blood when he died the first time). He then finds an intact boat on the shore, and sails away from the island. He drifts for another two years, this time on the ocean rather than under it.
When he reaches shore once again, it's in England, near the home of Harry Middleton, an old friend of Hellboy's who's a very gracious host for someone who died in 1984. He crashes at Harry's place for a time, spending most of his time in the various bottles of Harry's collection. In the meantime, two things happen: the witches of the world recover Hellboy's discarded horns from Castle Giurescu, fashioning one of them into his likeness; and Igor Bromhead uses the remains of Vladimir Giurescu which he had stolen to learn the secrets of Hecate, and in turn uses those secrets to steal her power. That power, which he would've tried to use to become king of the witches, proves too much for him, but nonetheless, Hecate is gone, at least until Doomsday comes.
Having lost their queen, the witches use the likeness of Hellboy to summon him to their largest gathering ever. They offer to make him their king, as his father had been lord over the witches of England. He tells them to go screw, and in retaliation, they send him to the Baba Yaga, in the lands beyond the mortal world. There, her forces attack him, seeking his eye to replace the one she lost to him, as well as his life. When he evades her initial attempt, she calls up Koshchei the Deathless, an unkillable warrior who pursues Hellboy relentlessly because the Baba Yaga promises she'll finally let him die if he succeeds. It's truly a desperate situation for Hellboy, although he manages to receive unexpected help from several sources, including a girl named Vasilisa, who escaped the Baba Yaga long ago and points Hellboy to the way back to the mortal world at the apparent cost of her own life. It's a hard fight to get there, though, and in the course of it, the Baba Yaga expends all of her power to keep Koshchei fighting, only to find that Hellboy is equally deathless, unkillable unless he allows it. Once he's back in the world, he tracks down Igor Bromhead in Italy, who asks Hellboy to kill him and says he'll be waiting for him in Hell.
Since he's already in Italy, Hellboy visits and crashes with the Capobianco sisters (more dead friends with excellent stores of booze). While there, he has a dream in which he attends the funeral of the Dagda, king of the Daoine Sidh (more on his murder shortly). When he wakes up, he receives a letter from the Osiris Club. He goes back to England to meet them, and they invite him to join them on a hunt for giants, who have started to reappear and walk the land. It's all a pretense, though, and while they're riding out for the hunt, the others turn on him with their electrified spears, shouting something he didn't quite understand about how "the Devil will never sit on the throne of England." Before they're able to finish him off, the giants who really were nearby come around and kill the huntsmen. Hellboy wakes up, and he lets his temper get the better of him, picking a fight with the giants and killing them in a rage that disturbs him later.
Hellboy then goes to Ireland, where he visits Alice Monaghan, looking a couple of decades younger than she should due to occasional (voluntary, non-kidnapping) play-time with the fae in the years since Hellboy had last stopped by. He had seen her in his dream of the Dagda's funeral, but she tells him that it really happened, and that it ties in to other events going on in the world. She brings him to Mab, once but no longer Queen of the fae. Between them, Hellboy learns that after he turned down kingship of the witches, the Grugach had forged an alliance with them in which he would bring about the return of an old, dead witch who would become their new Queen of Blood. This Queen would then lead them on a great war against humanity to reclaim the world for the creatures of magic. When the Dagda objected to this course of action, one of his other subjects killed him, then killed himself in horror of what he had done. Mab tells Hellboy that if he will not accept his father's crown and end the world, then he must embrace his mother's heritage and raise an army to fight the Queen.
After the meeting with Mab, Hellboy and Alice are caught in an ambush, and Alice is stuck with a poisoned dart. Emissaries of Morgan Le Fay bring them to her castle, where she provides an antidote in time to save Alice's life. She then tells them of the heritage she shares with Hellboy, that a daughter of her son Mordred began a matriarchal line of witches that ended with Sarah Hughes, Hellboy's mother. Hellboy therefore, by descent from Arthur, is rightful King of England, and to bring the point home, Morgan brings him to where Excalibur waits, embedded in a stone, and tells him that the Queen of Blood was once Nimue, who had made contact with and been driven mad by the Ogdru Jahad and was killed by the other witches who had become afraid of her. He initially holds off from claiming the sword, but after a disturbing encounter with Astaroth and a pep talk from Vasilisa (not quite as dead as initially thought), he finally goes ahead and does it.
The year is 2009. Though the secret is known to only very few as yet, Hellboy is the King of England. This is when, at a crossroads in his life, he gets picked up and tossed around the multiverse a little by forces unknown.