My good buddy Bampf is wrong on two counts: being generally unimpressed with Nirvana is not “blasphemy” and Hellboy was a great movie. It ought to be, in fact, the best comic book movie ever made. If it weren’t for my soft spot for Spider-Man I’d declare it as such right now.
The comics industry may be in a rut right now – leagues away from its heights in the late-80s and early-90s – but it’s a golden age for the comic book movie. Technology is sufficiently advanced that you can create the needed effects nearly seamlessly. X-Men showed that you can stay true to the story and still pull a wide audience. The convergence of the fans and the movie magic needed to bring these fantastical stories to the big screen has made comic art one hot property.
Not that all these flicks have been good. Daredevil and The Hulk were notable failures. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen should have been great but weren’t. X-Men, X2, Blade, Blade II, Spider-Man and now Hellboy have saved the genre from disaster, however, and The Punisher, The Fantastic Four, and Ghost Rider are waiting in the wings.
Get to the point already. What was so great about Hellboy? Mainly it was the absolute precision with which they stuck to the original book. Unlike The League which tinkered with the original story by making Mina Harker more than she was and added in Tom Sawyer for a bit of American color, Hellboy – to my recollection – followed the comics nigh perfectly. Even the costumes and equipment were identical to those pictured in the book – unlike X-Men for instance. The casting was note-perfect, the settings were indistinguishable from the comics page, the humor was spot-on. You just couldn’t ask for more from a film adaptation of anything.
Now, if only we could get Guillermo Del Toro to do adaptations of Arkham Asylum, Gotham by Gaslight, The Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Shade: the Changing Man and Transmetropolitan I think I could die happy.