Prologue

Hellboy … a strange name for an even stranger character.

‘Hellboy’ isn’t really even a name; it’s more of a nickname that he got stuck with as an infant. However, it’s the only name that he ever knew. Hellboy never even learned what his ‘true’ name was supposed to be until he was almost sixty years old. As far as he was concerned, this revelation was not a fortunate one and revealed more mysteries than it solved about his strange and mysterious origins.

Hellboy recalled nothing of any life that he may have had before his sudden appearance as an infant on an island off the coast of Scotland in late December of 1944. He certainly recalled nothing of any parents that could lay claim to him as their child or siblings that could point to him as their brother. But even though his appearance seemed to be that of an infant-sized red devil, there were certain things in his physical makeup pointing toward some sort of human origin.

Basically, regardless of his weird appearance, he was just a boy - a baby boy with a right hand almost as big as the rest of his entire body.

Like most children Hellboy had only the vaguest of recollections of anything before age two, when he found himself living on a secret military base in New Mexico. One of his earliest memories, outside of someone feeding him chocolate bars, was of being terribly frightened of something he saw in a mirror. He recalled squealing in terror and hiding his face in the neck of the person who was holding him up to the mirror.

This searing memory, one that later haunted his dreams, was Hellboy’s first awareness that he looked very, very different from those who surrounded him.

Hellboy as a child was often plagued by dreams and nightmares. He was especially frightened of thunderstorms. He often believed that he could hear terrible voices in these storms even though he could not understand what the voices were saying.

In fact, the first storm that he had encountered, even though he had little memory of this, was the wild, chaotic storm that had heralded his arrival off the coast of Scotland on December 23, 1944. But whatever vague memories Hellboy had of this evening in 1944 were mostly related to someone holding him and feeding him candy bars.

For it was on this evening, his first evening on Earth, that the being who became known as Hellboy encountered the first of an interesting group of characters that he would eventually consider his ‘true’ family.

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