My journey with Hellboy.
To anyone else, this might just look like another random post on the internet, a personal story nobody really cares about. But to me, it's everything.
I was born in 1993, almost at the exact same moment this wonderful comic first came to life.
My fascination with the dark and the macabre started early, thanks to my aunt. By the early 2000s, she had introduced me to horror films and sagas like The Mummy, even though I was definitely too young to be watching them.
I turned eleven, and my world fractured. That same aunt passed away, and around the same time, my own health began to deteriorate from an undiagnosed illness. School became a nightmare—I had no friends, and the bullying was relentless. I felt completely isolated. But one day, while flipping through TV channels, I stumbled upon a movie about a red demon who, despite his terrifying looks, just wanted to rescue and love cats.
During my next doctor's appointment, I noticed a comic book featuring that very same demon sitting at a stand in the waiting room. I begged my mother to get it for me. Going to the doctor became a routine I actually looked forward to, because every visit meant the possibility of discovering a new volume.
In a world where I felt entirely invisible and out of place, those characters saved me. I stopped feeling so miserable about my own isolation because they didn't fit in anywhere either. They became my quiet sanctuary during the darkest, heaviest years of my life.
Just recently, I finally found the courage to read the ending of B.P.R.D. Closing that final page felt like a profound grief—like losing a lifelong friend who had walked alongside me, helping me grow up.
