As has been well documented during the time of quarantine, Hellboy creator Mike Mignola is keeping himself occupied while stuck at home during the ongoing pandemic. The Eisner award winning writer and artist has been drawing sketches of all manner during the events and auctioning them off to benefit Chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen. Among the sketches he’s created include characters from The Flintstones, Adventure Time, breakfast cereal mascots, and, naturally, Hellboy. Not just any Hellboy though, one of the variants of the character he drew was what Mignola himself dubbed “Giant Robot Hellboy,” who will be coming to life in a surprising way very soon.
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Speaking in the latest Mantic Games Virtual Open Day video, the company behind the hugely successful Hellboy the Board Game announced that they’ll be releasing a special game piece based on Mignola’s sketch. The new piece will be available for purchase individually at a later date with some proceeds going to charity.
“Mike Mignola has been doing pieces of art each day, different characters, different things, like some of the other wonderful people that work in our industry, and raffling them off for charity,” Mantic Games CEO Ronnie Renton said. “And we saw him do one which was a Hellboy robot, Giant Robo Hellboy, and we got in contact with our chaps over at Dark Horse and said ‘We’d love to sculpt that.’ We’re going to do it as a sculpt and we’re going ot donate some of the money from that one to charity…So they gave us permission to do that. I think James may well write some rules for it so you can even use it in your game.”
Specifics of how the Giant Robot Hellboy will work in the game were teased as well, including with the revelation that Mignola himself wrote a backstory for the sketch. The “narrative” of Giant Robot Hellboy will be that Hellboy has been hypnotized and must control the robot on his own, making the playable character usable only in a single player scenario.
The Hellboy Board Game has drawn countless inspiration from the comics penned and drawn by Mignola, adapting stories from throughout the character’s canon into a playable scenario for fans and players. Award winning comics like Hellboy in Mexico are part of the game along with classics like Seed of Destruction, Wake the Devil, Conqueror Worm, The Wild Hunt, and even the Christmas themed “KRAMPUSNACHT.”
The addition of Giant Robot Hellboy marks the first non-canon element from Hellboy to be added to the board game, though it certainly could be argued that Mignola drawing the idea and then developing a back story for it gives it a certain level of canon despite not appearing in a comic book……yet.
