Does Exactly What It Says On The Tin. But Little Else.
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This is a kind of odd book when you think about. Being essentially a summation of the story so far in the Hellboy mythos you have to wonder who exactly the target audience is. The existing fans will already know most if not all of the contents, and newer fans would be a lot better off buying the collected volumes and reading the stories first hand.
In many ways the collected character summaries and timeline presented herein read like nothing so much as a collection of wikipedia entries. And whilst it can certainly be useful to have such a summary of facts to hand it seems more practical to publish the information in such a form. Indeed considering the expanding and non sequential nature of the the Hellboy comics this book seems doomed to obsolescence in fairly short order.
It also worth nothing that the contents can become somewhat repeatative. As the events each character is involved in are detailed in their own section, repeated in the other involved characters sections, and finally listed in the timeline you'll be reading of the same events many times in a row.
This not to say that the book is not without it's merits of course. There are some new facts and tidbits about the various characters buried away in there, and the articles and recommended reading list are of some interest.
There is however a distinct feeling that the book could have been a lot more somehow.
If your interested in Hellboy then this book might be of some value to you (for that Lobster Johnson slash fic you've been working on), but if you're not overly familiar with the stories already then I would strongly recommend checking out some of the collected volumes first. This book is after all one giant spoiler for every Hellboy and B.R.P.D. story thus far published.
And nobody likes spoilers.
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