Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #2

History

The Seed of Destruction miniseries was conceived and illustrated by Mike Mignola and scripted by John Byrne, with colors by Mark Chiarello and edits by Barbara Kesel, published monthly from March through June 1994 as one of the launch titles of Dark Horse's Legend imprint — a creator-owned line inspired by Malibu's Image model and featuring creators like Frank Miller, Dave Gibbons, and Geof Darrow alongside Mignola, Byrne, and Adams. Mignola, who had developed Hellboy's visual style across mainstream work at Marvel and DC through the late 1980s before moving to Dark Horse in 1993, was not yet confident enough to script the miniseries solo, enlisting Byrne to handle the dialogue while Mignola plotted and drew; notably, their respective lettering contributions — Mignola handling balloons and sound effects, Byrne lettering dialogue in a font based on his own handwriting — went uncredited in the original printings. The three-way Legend connection between Hellboy, Byrne's Danger Unlimited, and Adams' Monkeyman and O'Brien — originally envisioned as a shared universe — proved logistically unwieldy and was abandoned by 1998 when the Legend imprint folded, with most reprints quietly excising the cross-promotional elements.

Trivia · 8 facts

• First comic book appearance of Abe Sapien (born Langdon Everett Caul), the amphibious BPRD agent who becomes one of the longest-running central characters in the Hellboy universe — confirmed across multiple databases with cover date April 1994.
• First comic book appearance of Liz Sherman, the pyrokinetic BPRD agent who becomes a co-lead throughout the Hellboy franchise.
• First on-page confrontation between Hellboy and Grigori Rasputin, who reveals himself at the end of the issue as the shadowy architect of Hellboy's summoning and the would-be liberator of the Ogdru Jahad.
• First appearance of Sadu-Hem, the many-tentacled Arctic entity connected to the Ogdru Jahad, though the creature is not named until the following issue (#3).
• Published April 1994 by Dark Horse Comics under the Legend creator-owned imprint; plotted and drawn by Mike Mignola, scripted by John Byrne, colored by Mark Chiarello, edited by Barbara Kesel.
• Contains Part 2 of Arthur Adams' four-chapter 'Who Are Monkeyman and O'Brien?' backup story — introducing Axwell Tiberius (Monkeyman) and Ann O'Brien in their origin arc; these backups have never been included in any reprint or collected edition of Seed of Destruction.
• The Monkeyman and O'Brien backup chapters were later collected separately in the Monkeyman and O'Brien: The Stories trade paperback (1997).
• The entire Seed of Destruction miniseries has been reprinted in numerous formats including the original 1994 trade paperback, a hand-numbered hardcover slipcase edition (1995, limited to 1,000 copies), the Hellboy Library Edition Vol. 1 (2008), and the Hellboy Omnibus Vol. 1 (2018) — none of which include the Adams backup stories.

Cast · 8 characters

Full credits

Full plot ⚠ may contain spoilers