IV. THE TRAGEDY OF RASPUTIN.

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SPOILERS FOLLOW

Hellboy? Ogdru Jahad, the Great Dragon? Wake the Devil? Rasputin? If sweet Nthabi read this, she might lean hard(er) on her concern against the corruption of my immortal soul. My response would not be unlike the band's name: Ma, “I love you, but I've chosen darkness.” I can confidently say that while I agree with Allan Moore who describes Hellboy in his introduction to Hellboy: Wake the Devil (1997) as a “gem, one of considerable size and surprising lustre, [one] that has been mined from that immeasurably rich seam first excavated by the late Jack Kirby”, what he omits is how skillfully writer-artist Mike Mignola infuses every page with a subtly robust poetic storytelling; a foundation on which he deftly develops complex and humours characters who might, at first blush, be misjudged as two dimensional (Moore 1997). Mignola's aesthetic and narratological decisions are filled with “moments of quiet, almost elegiac horror juxtaposed with a kinetic energy only hinted at by the best of Kirby” (Del Toro 2002). Mignola's characterisation of Rasputin is a true example of this. The character first appears alongside Hellboy (hereafter HB) in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction (1994), fictional superhero created by Mignola for San Diego Comic-Con Comics No. 2 in August, 1993. HB has since appeared in numerous and varied texts, ranging from eponymous miniseries, one-shots and inter-company crossovers. There's also Guillermo Del Toro's duo of too often slept on (and, now I know to be, wildly faithful and accurate) live-action feature adaptations, 2004's Hellboy and 2008's Hellboy II: The Golden Army, both starring Ron Perlman in the titular role. There's also two straight-to-DVD animated films, Hellboy: Sword of Storms (2006) and Hellboy: Blood and Iron (2007) both directed by Darkwing Duck creator Tad Stones. Interesting.

Like many, I was first introduced to the character through Del Toro's 2004 film adaptation (I was warmed by encountering a not small portion of things I enjoy: Craft, shadows, unrequited love, a blue flame Selma Blair). However, my exposure to HB in print, I must confess, occurred painfully, inexcusably late. I owe the correction to my friend Axel who told me to take Hellboy: The Midnight Circus (2013) home with me after a meeting of the Elijah Price Society of Gutter Grimoires and Neon Hieroglyphs – not unlike The Osiris Club, just allot more laid back, younger, and slightly less white – of which I once was a part. But before this, when I'd have my attention drawn toward the yellow-eyed, shorn-horned demon detective, always set in a striking frame of ornate gloom, as I crawled about the walls of Legends Comics on Johnson St., downtown Victoria – most likely looking for the vapors of them old Buffyverse feelings in Freak Angels, o.d'ing on that gumshoe good with Fell, or learning about the remarkable engineering feat the shallow draft is in Northlanders – I was always drawn to the character, his design, what seemed to me to be, even at a cursory glance, his gruff sympathy, the thick black line that cast him. It all appealed to the same aesthetic sensibility in me enamoured of the work of Pete Hawley, George Petty, Gil Elvgren, Alberto Vargas, Matt Maker, Paul Pope, and Darwin Cooke. But unlike them, Mignola's aesthetic eschews Deco sci-fi glamour-noir in favour of a mix between Calligarian gothico-expressionism and Hammer horror-noir, indebted to masters of line and shadow from Doré, Ditko, Eichenberg, Frazetta, Booth, Bayard, Adkins, Mazzucchelli, Schultz, to Geiger and yet, at once, utterly its own. Del Toro sees it too. In his introduction to Hellboy: Conqueror Worm (2002), he confesses to having “aspired to imitate Mignola's mysterious style in the design of [his] films, especially the cold velvet backdrop of darkness from which [Mignola's] characters emerge, [only to find that Mignola's] hyper expressionistic lighting is almost impossible to reproduce in a 3-D world” (Del Toro 2002). Despite Mignola's proclivity for historicity, both of the Orphic and the esoteric, I have to agree with Moore again in saying that "to label Hellboy as a 'retro' work would be to drastically misunderstand it: [it] is a clear and modern voice, not merely some ventriloquial seance-echo from beyond the grave. Mignola [...] has accurately understood Jack Kirby as a living force that did not perish with the mortal body. As with any notable creator, the sheer electricity inside the work lives on, is a resource that later artists would be foolish to ignore just because times have changed and trends have fluctuated." (Moore 1997) I eventually moved on from simply admiring the covers of Hellboy, B.P.R.D, Baltimore, the overwhelming flair and sheer mastery of visual storytelling and black humor in the zany shorts comprising a shamefully unaired pilot for an animated The Amazing Screw on Head (2006) series, and Mignola's brilliant concept art and steam-punk production design for my favourite Disney film Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001). And now, naturally, after having read up to Hellboy: The Storm and the Fury (2012), I can't help but be haunted by the nagging feeling that I wish I had begun reading Hellboy sooner. But how would I describe it? Its figures cast in deep chiaroscuro, solidly supple, its humour dry, its characters Attically tragic, its handle on folklore and mythology both broad and nuanced, as broad, in fact, as its presentation of the awe and absurdity of the Occult, its storytelling as refined and tersely poetic as a Haiku – an “irritating simplicity” that produces, effortlessly, a “fascinating, comforting immutability” (Del Toro 2002). Whatever else it might be, Hellboy is a beautifully dark thing. So, how would I describe it? I'd refer to Aes and say that with Hellboy, Mignola really “lets the manticores out, makes the sorcery bark”.

Amongst other things, Hellboy is also a brilliant team book, featuring a dynamic central cast, with rich well-rounded relationships. There's Abraham "Abe" Sapien (born Langdon Everett Caul), the B.P.R.D's dignified resident humanoid amphibious fishman, discovered in a Washington, D.C basement in November of 1978. There's Elizabeth “Liz” Sherman, the melancholic pyrokinetic field agent who at age 11 destroyed an entire city block, incinerating thirty-two men, women, and children including her mother, father, and younger brother. There's also my secret favourite character “Roger”, the brooding, Milto-Shelleyean homunculus, brought to life by Liz's fire, conflicted by his origins and searching for an identity and purpose in life. Great villains too. From the beginning in Seed of Destruction, the reader is introduced to Team Ragna-Rok comprising of the sadistic, violent, intelligent, dedicated, beautiful Nazi scientist Femme Fatale Ilse Haupstein; Karl Ruprecht Kroenen, Rasputine acolyte, covered in a distinguishing bodysuit and specialised gas-mask. Del Toro added not only a more thorough character back-story for Kroenen in his film adaptation, but significant aesthetic re-interpretations, including beautifully ornate masks and breastplates, not to mention the inclusion of a pair of devastatingly elegant tonfa-swords as his signature weapons; Leopold Kurtz, a young Nazi occultist who throws his lot in with Rasputin and Project Ragna-Rok. Other lauded (feared) characters of myth and legend also feature: Morgan Le Fay, Merfolk, all the witches of England, even my personal patron goddess Hecate shows up later, as does Merlin's seductress Nimue.

One of the things I admire most about Mignola's work throughout the series is how, despite drawing from them broad waters of quintessence, his portrayal of HB stands quite apart from what one might conjure to be a quintessential portrait of a demon. While gruff, Mignola depicts HB as stoic, dryly humours, and somehow genuinely unmarred by any of the expected intrinsic malevolence. His true name, which is as important as are all true names in the hermetic occult in granting the speaker of the name power over the named thing, is Anung Un Rama. He has numerous epithets that evoke a similar sense of holy dread one might encounter when staring at any of Blake's The Great Red Dragon Paintings (1805-1810), such as “upon his brow is set a crown of flame”, “The Right Hand of Doom”, Red Key to ope the prison-house of the Ogdru Jahad, the enemy – “he who is seven but also one”, and “chaos made flesh in the dragon”. HB's story begins on the night of December 23, 1944 during which he is summoned from Hell to Earth as an infant demon by Nazi occultists. He is subsequently discovered by the Allied Forces, among their number his adoptive father, Professor Trevor Bruttenholm, founder of the United States Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence (B.P.R.D), an organisation HB later works for as a capable, if not hot-headed, field operative. After youth and young demonhood as an army brat, HB grows up to become a robust, red, cloven-hoofed, trench-coat wearing, cigarette-smoking adult, replete with a tail, horns (which he files down to two circular stumps on his forehead), and, most importantly, an over-sized right hand made of stone. In Odd Jobs (1999), B.P.R.D: 1947 – 2009, B.P.R.D: 1948 – 2012, Hellboy: Bones of Giants (1997), and Hellboy Animated: The Menagerie (2007), HB is described as smelling like dry-roasted peanuts. Interesting.

However, the three panels I chose are not about HB. They're about the man who brought him to Earth. Grigori. Efimovich. Rasputin. I should say that when picking three panels from the first eight volumes of the entire HB catalogue to represent what I find most interesting, tragic, and surprisingly beautiful about Mignola's re-interpretation of Rasputin (and there are far too many such panels to count), I wanted to baulk at my own rules, maybe cheat, and prepare a triskelic glory-collage culled from the shiniest, most dazzling moments in which the character appears. But this blog is as much an exercise in restraint as it is in gushing appreciation. Less Romeo-misshapen-chaos-of-well-seeming-forms, more Han Solo-I-know. For Rasputin, it is certainly Khan-cum-Melville-to-the-last-I-will-grapple-with-thee. The Russian mystic and self-proclaimed holy man, appears as HB's recurring archenemy beginning in Seed of Destruction. Mignola bases his Rasputin quite closely on well-known accounts of the extradiegetic historical figure. Rasputin, born on January 21, 1869, frequently had visions as a young man. Less ostensibly than HB, but perhaps just as powerfully, Rasputin always knew himself to be unique, always aware of a great power inside him, one that afforded him the abilities of both thaumaturgist and augur. In Francis Lawrence's eponymous 2005 adaptation, Keanu's Constantine cautions that if “you think you're crazy long enough, you find a way out.” In the wake of his powers, for Rasputin, it is more like if you think yourself divine, you find a way to the summit of the holy mountain. This is the kernel of the tragedy of Rasputin: the incongruities between power and greatness, ability and destiny, mortality and immortality – all substantiating and deconstructing the various placebos of purpose that the convictions of fear and powerlessness would have one pursue.

Fig. i. Grandmother Arch-Witch: The Baba Yaga.

When reading Wake the Devil, I couldn't help thinking about what Baelish said, that “the climb is all there is” (S7E4, 2017). For Rasputin, one way up the mountain was to use his abilities to secure a place in the court of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and gain favour therein by curing Prince Alexi of his hemophilia. He didn't enjoy the rarefied air at the summit and the shade of the high throne back for long. Not unlike Voldemort, Rasputin has his grandmother the Baba Yaga, great witch of Russian folklore, hide half his soul in the roots of Yggdrasil, the World Tree of Norse Myth, to ensure his survival in the event of the death of his mortal body. But after his friend Felix Yusupov and his quartet of cohorts shot him in the back on December 16, 1916, instead of finding an end or self-reunion, he climbed out of death, out of the frozen Neva River and found the Dragon, and answers to questions harboured unresolved his whole life-long. This is the first instance of the leitmotif of rebirth found in all Mignola's recurring characters, from Abe to Roger. For Rasputin, it is being reborn o become the herald of the Ogdru Jahad, multiform serpentine/crustacean entities that once ruled over Earth, based largely on H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, to become “the destroyer of mankind, to dwell forever in blood, riot and fire” (Mignola 69). This entire resurrection is predicated on The Ogdru Jahad enlisting Rasputin as their high-priest and terrestrial mortal agent. Soon after, Rasputin is contacted by the Nazis and tasked with developing an occult solution to bring about the resolution of the Second World War and ensuring a Nazi victory therein. Thus, Project Ragna-Rok is born. While the Nazi's believe themselves puppeteers controlling the monk-mage, Rasputin's ability to scry out the future leads him to conclude that the Nazi war-machine is destined to fail. And so Pinocchio was Geppetto all along, one that used the Nazi's resources for as long as they lasted in order to execute his own clandestine plans and achieve his own ambitions: to catalyse the apocalypse and the subsequent emergence of a sort of dark Genosha-cum-New Eden for all those that survive the fire and bloodshed. Using a combination of science and magic, Rasputin attempts to summon the Beast of the Apocalypse, which brings forth the creature later known as 'Hellboy'. After losing HB to Allied forces, Rasputin retreats to the Arctic Circle, where he remains in a secret meditative stasis.

Rasputin returns to the world in 1994, accompanied by Sadu-Hem, one of the Ogdru Jahad's monstrous spawn. After manipulating events and individuals into an epic conflagration at a cursed American manor called Cavendish Hall, it is revealed that Rasputin's goal is to use the Right Hand of Doom, the literal stone right hand grafted onto HB's right arm, as a key to liberate the Ogdru Jahad from their crystalline space-suspended prison, and thereby bring chaos, destruction, and death to the Earth. In this way, Rasputin not only sees himself as HB's terrestrial father, but also as much a servant of the return of chaos as he does Hellboy. He sees himself as chosen, elevated from “the crude Siberian peasant, stinking of drink and sexual excess, crying out to God: give me answers! What is this power inside me? Where does it come from? Whom does it serve?” confused, and self-misunderstood, to being a self-made “agent of change” (Mignola 68). Be it Kal-El, Spock, Othello, Donnie Darko, Leeloo Dallas, Jean Gray or Rasputin, I have a real soft spot for characters marked by radical Otherness, whether born or acquired, who have no idea what their abilities 'mean', where they come from, what purpose to which to direct them, or how they are to be mastered. This often answerless and only temporarily resolvable onto-existential conflict between power /powerlessness and identity/purpose is not only the most meaningful to me personally, but, being so clearly and poetically expressed as the foundation of Mignola's Rasputin, a pleasant surprise in Wake the Devil. Like the aforementioned, Rasputin also has his psychopomp in the form of his grand-mother, the Baba Yaga, “the great witch whose chicken-leg house [he] had seen so often in [his] boyhood dreams” (Mignola 68). She explains to Rasputin that he has been chosen to be the father of a new millennium. He fails in reifying this Abrahamic destiny. So near victory, Rasputin's plan is foiled by the timely intercession of HB's partners from the B.P.R.D, Sherman and Sapien, the latter of which takes up a harpoon given him by a ghost and throws it through the monk-mage's chest, killing him and razing Sadu-Hem to slag. The climb is really all there is for this guy as Rasputin again re-appears as a ghost, a form he takes for the duration of the remainder of the series. In this form, Rasputin manipulates his corporeal underlings, which include the Elon Musk-esque billionaire Roderick Zinco, into attempting to resurrect the infamous vampire Vladimir Giurescu. In the process, Rasputin compels Haupstein to abandon her efforts to revive Giurescu whom she loves and, instead, place herself in an enchanted/cursed iron maiden acquired from the inter-dimensional Koku, familiar of the Baba Yaga. Haupstein does and dies as a result. However, her blood allows the goddess Hecate to use the iron maiden as an indestructible body after her previous mortal serpentine form was destroyed by HB. After suffering defeat again at the hands of HB and the concerted efforts of the B.P.R.D, Rasputin retreats to the roots of Yggdrasil where he meets and speaks with the Baba Yaga. She tells him that the climb is all there is, more or less, and that he has, from the very beginning, despite the tenacity and conviction of his upward reach, been nothing but a pawn of the Ogdru Jahad.

Fig. ii. The Seduction of Ilse Haupstein.

Love. I heard a kid say “love is like a lollipop with a scorpion in the middle.” What does Rasputin know about love? Not unlike his historical counterpart's manipulation of the last of the Romanovs, playing their love for their ill children against their duties, powers, and offices, Mignola's Rasputin is able to seduce Haupstein, lover of the text's preeminent vampire nobleman Giurescu, a Bela Lugosi-cum-Vlad the Impaler type, by using her love and desire to be reunited with the vanquished Count against her. She had fallen in love with him in 1944 after being dispatched as head of a special delegation by Heinrich Himmler to recruit Giurescu and his 'brides' for a secret Nazi war programme called 'Vampir Strum'. After meeting Hitler on December 3, 1944 at Wewelsburg, the following day, orders were issued for the arrest of Giurescu and his vampire brides. The text's Gestapo records indicate the arrival of one V. Giurescu and six other 'special prisoners' at Dachau on December 16, including a work order calling for the extermination of the Giurescu family signed by Hitler, ordering their heads be cut off, stakes driven through their hearts, the works. Later in Chapter 1, Ilse, speaking to Giurescu's emaciated corpse, laments how she was betrayed by Hitler, deceived into delivering the life placed in her hands into his. But the real deception is of Rasputine design. As a megalomaniacal narcissist, Rasputin does exactly the same thing to Haupstein he did to Nicholas II and, in fact, to anyone else in a position of power or wielding it he could manipulate and use. While ostensibly having more supernatural power than Haupstein, Rasputin always-already needed her as a cornerstone of his church. And while his manipulation of Haupstein is psycho-emotionally successful in engendering her eternal submission, Rasputin succeeds in totalising his power over her by physically transforming her as well, using a promise of power and immortality and therefore a chance to be reunited with Giurescu as a lure. In Chapter 4, this promise is shown to come at an exceedingly high price. After HB destroys Giurescu's castle, and with it (seemingly) any chance of his resurrection, Haupstein and Rasputin gaze at the smoke and cinder staining the sky with its wreckage and ruin. Ilse says to her master, “I love him” to which Rasputin responds, “love the Dragon. Love chaos. Love me. [want this on a shirt] I told you that you would see the vampire restored to his power and you will, but now this is your hour. Yours and mine. I see a thing in you...” (Mignola 94). Like him, Haupstein is trapped between two worlds; one governed by dreams of an eternal love and the other, dreams of an eternal Reich. But as a megalomaniacal narcissist, Rasputin, recognising that Ilse's heart serves two masters, the vampire and the wizard-monk, understands that in order to secure her unending fidelity and obedience, he has to, in a very real sense, kill her heart and blind her mind's eye to all else save the end of the world, and keep her desirous of the strength and the immortality needed to both see it done and rejoice in the afterlife of the afterfires. He knows he has succeeded when she asks him “make me strong. Make me live forever” (Mignola 94). Rasputin draws a interesting parallel of surpassing between Ilse, the enchanted iron maiden, and its originator the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, who put countless young women into the apparatus, punctured their bodies and drained their blood into warm iron pots and a tub in which the Countess bathed. While the Countess's use of the contraption was stayed on the vanity of one “who, in the end, was beautiful only for rats and spiders”, for Haupstein, the iron maiden itself is re-imagined as a sort of chaos engine or apocalyptic armour. Rasputin says to Ilse that the “times that are coming will be too harsh for flesh and you will need to stand beside me in the teeth of the Ragna-Rok storm. This iron body need only your great heart and mind to make it live” (Mignola 96). Ilse protests, saying she will surely die. Calmly, Rasputin responds saying “you have to die a little...like I died in the Neva River. The Dragon waits for us just out-side the threshold of human life. Go. Embrace him there. Then, as your mortal strength fails you, his great chaos power fills you up...almost to bursting” (Mignola 97-7). In convincing Haupstein that death and deathlessness are superstrung in the dark pricking innards of a torture sarcophagus, I feel that what Fig. ii really shows is that despite any ontological angst or existential trepidation he may be experiencing, or the fact that he is technically dead at this point in the Hellboy diegesis, the dark malignity of Rasputin's own conviction in his own purpose can lead anyone to act against their own interests, be they Tsar of SS Nazi Occult division special forces. In essence, the seduction of Ilse Haupstein is, for good or ill, really about the pathological virulence of conviction. One that allows Rasputin the ability to not only psycho-emotionally but also physically re-shape and control his targets, superiors, and acolytes alike.

Fig. iii. The Tragedy of Grigori Efimovich Rasputin.

In his introduction to Hellboy: Strange Places (2006), renowned illustrator Gary Gianni, known for his work on Fantagraphics' Prince Valiant: Far From Camelot (2008), states that “as entertaining as the Hellboy series is, I find an underlying sense of melancholy and pathos at the heart of it all” (Gianni 2006). Like my favourite villains, the underlying sense of melancholy and pathos at the heart of Mignola's characterisation of Rasputin is born of that same congenital characteristic that makes the villain at least unwilling and at most unable to reconcile power/lessness and im/mortality. The tragedy of Rasputin is most clearly expressed in the epilogue of Wake the Devil and, after everything preceding it, works so well because Rasputin and HB are perfect foils of one another. As the highpriest of the end of days and the Right Hand of Doom respectively, Rasputin wants what HB has but does not want. If I were to Zizek it, I'd say that HB spends all his time destroying demons as a fantasy of destroying that which he cannot escape in himself, namely his status as not only a demon, but the arch-demon, the switch to dim the sun. Inversely, despite Rasputin's conviction, there is nothing guaranteeing the supernaturally special status he has interpolated into the very fabric of his identity. In essence, he spends so much of his time trying to be or become the very thing HB is but does not want to be.

The pathos generated by my final panel inheres in the fact that it shows the opposite of the epic wizard, keeper of the secret knowledge, wielder of the Dragon's power, or the anticipated apotheosis of a ghost grandee encountered in Seed of Destruction. In fact, Mignola goes so far as to frame Rasputin's defeated despondency as a surreal, supernatural domestic scene, a grand-mother arch-witch consoling the literal and figurative broken spirit of her spectral, undead grandson-mage. While the Baba Yaga acknowledges Grigori's tenacity, conviction, and intelligence in using the Nazi's to bring HB to Earth, luring him, manipulating events in his milieu, steering him toward Cavendish Hall and his 'destiny' as the Right Hand of Doom, this comfort is somewhat pale and wan in face of facts; the facts being that despite how close he comes to victory at the climax of Seed of Destruction, despite his finest hour coming when he “shook the dragon in his hole, [something] no other human has ever done”, despite being torn between being a loyal servant of the Dragon and resisting the idea he is only a pawn in that service, the Baba Yaga reminds him: “like it or not, you are what you have allowed yourself to become...nothing” and as nothing, he cannot have anything for himself, be it disciples, Armageddon, or even his life (Mignola 134-5). What I didn't expect to find in Mignola's portrait of Rasputin was a heartbreaking tonic of not only poetic onto-existential meditations, but the Shakespearean tragedy at their core, the irreconcilability between Rasputin's internecine Will and the unfathomable grandeur of the forces he, despite his posturing, is ultimately subordinate to. Such is the brilliant economy of Mignola's writing that the tragedy of Rasputin can be summed up in the following exchange, devoid of the hubris witnessed in the character heretofore in the series, which Mignola replaces with exceedingly human self-doubt and the incisive tough love of a grandmother heartsore and disappointed in her grandson's pain, failure, frustration, and unrelenting desire for something she is wise enough to know is simply beyond him:

R: “I R: “I was able to transform Ilse Haupstein”
B.Y: “Into what? Whose purpose does she serve now? Yours?”
R: “I don't know...”
B.Y: “Grigori, whose purpose do you serve now?”
R: “I can't have something for myself!”
B.Y: “How? You're a dead man, Grigori. Not a god. Not a king. Not even a witch. In the end you are only a man...and maybe this is the end [...] stay with us. Your journey to this place has been too long. You're tired. Sleep”
R: “No. I will go on a while longer, and who knows...maybe a man can make himself a god.” (Mignola 135-7)

In less than 9 panels, Mignola concludes the primary part of Rasputin's arc in HB with a masterful revelation: the text's villain, as all great villains before, is an expression of a tragic three-dimensionality. For Rasputin, it is the fact that despite being able to seduce men and woman into his service, to die for him, endure damnation and the curse of psycho-physical and spiritual denaturing, in the end, Grigori Efimovich Rasputin is nothing but a man. This realisation concludes an adventure abounding in artistry on all levels, featuring everything – ghouls and goblins, talking vampire skeleton butlers, the goddess Hecate – not with the narrative's hero, but its villain limbo'd, like his masters, in a still and sombre moment. A moment suspended in a dreamtime of gloaming blue hues and Nyx-deep shadows, one in which Rasputin bobs adrift between states, of mind and matter, an undead interstice given shape, a torn raft beating against an insuperable current, with a literal hole in his chest flaming and empty even of a wreck of spirit. It moved me to think that though the climb may indeed be all there is, it is a climb that goes nowhere.

D.K.V-B.