It’s all fun and games till somebody’s ribcage cracks open, releasing a shedload of synchronised giant wasps from Hell.

Actually, in Hellboy: A Plague of Wasps from GraphicAudio, the absolute reverse is true. The fun and games don’t really get started until somebody’s ribcage cracks open, releasing a shedload of synchronised giant wasps from Hell.

Until then, there’s quite a good deal of cumbersome scene-setting to be done. This is Hellboy in his “mortal girlfriend” era, and English archaeologist Anastasia Bransfield fits the bill, Jasmine Hyde playing the sort of role that, in a movie version, would undoubtedly be offered to Kate Beckinsale. Clever, self-reliant, but deeply in love with what might be thought to be a challenging man.

When we join them, they’ve been busy thankfully not making Hellspawn, but Bransfield ropes Big Red into a trip into the Amazon rainforest – as ya do – to help with an archaeological dig of some deeply concealed temple, and to investigate the disappearance of, and hopefully find alive and well, an old colleague of them both.

That goes…

Well, you know how well optimistic plans usually go in a Hellboy graphic novel?

Yyyyeah, it goes about that well.

The good thing about that is that it starts the whole “somebody’s ribcage cracking open, releasing a shedload of synchronised giant wasps from Hell” scenario that really makes this story worth the price of admission.

In terms of what you want from a Hellboy story, it delivers everything you could possibly have come to expect – 7 feet tall very dead but still moving Nazis, vile bio-mythic experiments, unfriendly goddesses buried in jungles, at least one violent cryptid who can and does snap spines as soon as look at you, all that good happy stuff. But it does have an extra dimension of creeping body horror, because people are being stung by wasps in the rainforest. 

And these are no ordinary wasps. If the Borg, the Alien movies or zombies in general are your kind of bag, these wasps are in your wheelhouse of a good time. One sting and they inject their eggs into you, which over time, grow, hatch, multiply annnnd eventually do that whole chestburster impression.

Bodycount on this story – high as hell.

Moral dimension in this story – choose between a vile Nazi scientist and an ancient goddess of wasps with a whole parasitoid, “I’m-gonna-eat-you-now-and-not-in-a-good-way” vibe.

What makes this story particularly grim and popcorn-chomping are two horrific elements. Number 1 – we know from quite early on that this is how the wasps behave – they sting you, eventually you die as they break their way out of your consumed innards to live their best waspy life in the outside world. We hear it happen to several people we either grow to like or at the very least grow to think reasonably of from across a room. It neither sounds nor instinctively feels like a good way to die, because there’s something so ultimately pointless and levelling about it in human terms – you die simply to feed and grow more wasps, and everything you’ve done, thought, believed in adds up to a hill of beans precisely one wasp-sting high.

And secondly, as Anastasia Bransfield has the lion’s share of actual narration duty in this story, she gives us a whole different context on Hellboy to any to which we’ve had time to grow accustomed. 

She loves him, he loves her. 

Her view of her boyfriend, his history, his gentleness, his bravado, his buzz-saw snoring, is a whole new way to look at the comic-book hero, and it’s worth exploring, because the central dilemma of Hellboy has always been the conflict or the synthesis between the humanising instincts of his upbringing and life and the supernatural origins and strength of his body.

As Anastasia clearly puts it at one point, the sentence of a wasp-sting is almost equivalent to a rapid-acting cancer diagnosis, that brings everything we take for granted into a horrific sharp focus – “I couldn’t remember the last meal we’d eaten, never imagining it would be the last meal we’d eaten.” In fact, Anastasia goes further, giving us just enough detail to colour their lives without delving into prurient depth – “The last time we made love was an easier memory to conjure. Oh god. It would be the last time we made love…”

That ticking, buzzing timebomb is a sense of living death that walks with our explorers deep into the jungle, killing off several of them along the way. That’s deeply disturbing in its own right, in terms of both graphic novel body horror and metaphor for those who know they have something growing inside them whose life cycle involved their utter destruction. The only way for our travellers to possibly survive this journey is to go right to the heart of the evil and fight it on its own turf. Again, as a kind of lightly-delivered cancer metaphor, it works to sobering effect.

But the simplicity of the wasp-sting factor is also interesting because Hellboy’s unique physiognomy would normally let him at least stride through the adventure, relatively immune to such small things as wasp-stings. But here, our horn-headed hero is repeatedly wasp-stung on this journey, and suffers badly, Scott McCormick giving great bronchitic, phlegm-flavoured acting to the cause of making us worry about the big red lug. 

It would be inadequate to say that things get very touch and go in this story. There are great heaping handfuls of body horror and death and if you happen to hate having your picnics disturbed by buzzing legions of winged hell-minions, this is not the story for you, because the sense of constant, nerve-sawing tension delivered by McCormick as director is enough to leave you slapping imaginary wasps off your body for hours after you finish the tale.

Hellboy: A Plague of Wasps is a right, taut, ridiculously tense and occasionally snappy tale that delivers all the things you know you want from a Hellboy story, plus a whole new angle on the conflicted hero at the heart of the franchise, that helps even long-term fans like him more, and potentially for new reasons. Tony Fyler

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