The BPRD Discovers a Startling Secret About Hellboy in ‘BPRD: The Devil You Know’ #5

Major spoilers ahead for B.P.R.D.: The Devil You Know # 5, out today.

This week’s B.P.R.D.: The Devil You Know #5 really came through on its promised surprise resurrection.

In the final pages of the stories, agents for the titular Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense find a coffin deserted at their former headquarters, containing what appears to be the body of Hellboy — and he’s waking up.

“For a very long time we’ve known where this series was going,” Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, who co-writes the series with Dark Horse editor Scott Allie, told The Hollywood Reporter’s Heat Vision. “The reveal at the end of issue 5 was planned years ago and I sincerely hope it catches readers by surprise. The internet being what it is, it’s not easy to keep secrets these days, but I’m hopeful fans will help us out and keep a lid on things for awhile, until more people have had a chance to read the comic.”

The headquarters, where Hellboy served for years, were destroyed in last year’s Cometh The Hour series, so it seems likely whatever force put him there, did so believing that it was where he would have “belonged” and maybe not being totally aware of the implications of leaving him alone in a deserted and destroyed building.

Hellboy himself has been dead since 2011’s Hellboy: The Fury, which continued into Hellboy in Hell. By the end of that tale, it seemed as though Hellboy was finished for good (and remarks by Mignola at the time seemed to confirm as much).

“I was looking at what I had done, and coming off one of the stories I realized, ‘Oh, we’re further along in some way than I thought we were going to be. We got where we were going a lot faster,’” Mignola said at the time. “I had some fun stuff lined up that I was going to do, but if I did it, it was just going to soften the impact, it was just going to ramble more than it needed to ramble. I thought, If we’re going there, let’s just go there now. So, yes, we’re wrapping up Hellboy in Hell.”

Hellboy first appeared in comics in 1993, meaning that 2018 will be the character’s 25th anniversary. It should be no surprise, then, that the Heat Vision report promises more on Hellboy’s potential return in the coming months.