Just in time for Halloween, Dark Horse Comics is debuting a new series in the Hellboy universe that delves deep into the lore of all things supernatural in Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club. After three films and nearly two decades of adventure on the page, fans have come to know Hellboy and his team of otherworldly investigators with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense. For years, the B.P.R.D. along with the help of the titular hellspawn himself have beaten back hellish creatures while defending the Earth, but now fans will have the opportunity to know how the job was done before Hellboy came around to join the fight.
Behind the scenes of Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club is a team of legendary writers and visually iconic artists. The five issue series will be helmed by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola and iZombie co-creator Chris Roberson. The team responsible for bringing those writer’s words to life on the page consists of Christopher Mitten and Ben Stenbeck with colors by Michelle Madson. The artwork in this new series will reportedly be deliberate and essential in distinguishing between time periods and focal points.
Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club will be an anthology series revealing the many histories of paranormal detectives of times past. Each issue will be a stand-alone story focusing on a different Victorian occult investigator who battled evil years before Hellboy was on the scene. Those stories won’t be presented to the reader without a proper introduction, however, instead they will be presented as stories being told to Hellboy while the hero enjoys some downtown in a tavern, and the man telling these stories is someone who experienced them first hand.
The artwork between the present day aspect of the story where Hellboy will be present, and the past days of pre-B.P.R.D. glory will be drawn by the two headlining artists respectively. Christopher Mitten will draw the adventures that took place in the past, bringing his strikingly surreal and edgy style to Hellboy history. Ben Stenbeck will handle the present day panels, following Hellboy and Professor Trevor Buttenholm during their current supernatural adventure in his classically iconic Hellboy form.
In the first issue of the anthology series, Hellboy and Buttenholm meet with the professor’s uncle Simon Buttenholm amid their own ongoing investigation to learn about the secretive and perilous adventures of one of the Hellboy universe’s most mysterious societies. The first tale is teased as being about an exorcism gone wrong as well as a story of how two familiar Silver Lantern Club members, Sir Edward Grey and Sarah Jewel, go toe-to-toe with technology itself during the dawn of the radio. This new story promises to be an exciting deep-dive into Hellboy’s history, assuredly setting up countless directions in which the creative team can take the series’ future. Hellboy: The Silver Lantern Club #1 will be available October 27 of this year.