This was a moment of true surrealism.
In 1993 Mike Mignola concocted a team book inspired in part by Jack Kirby's Challengers of the Unknown. At the time, the closest Mignola had come to writing a comic was co-plotting an issue of Batman, but within a couple years he'd be winning Eisners and Harveys as Best Writer/Artist. His team book had gained a more narrow focus due to the development of one character who overshadowed everything else the artist had created. Before long, Hellboy was one of the most talked about new characters, a favorite among comics professionals and fans.
The Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense -- I remember discussing the pros and cons of a 'for' or an 'of' in the name -- maintained an important presence in the Hellboy comic, until 2001's Conqueror Worm series, when Hellboy quit the team. This was necessary for Mignola to take Hellboy, as a character and a book, in the new directions he had in mind, but it left the BPRD somewhat up for grabs. A miniseries and a quartet of one-shots have followed, by various writers and artists.
In the meantime, Mignola has been laying the groundwork for a new BPRD series-we call it "nearly ongoing," in that it will come out a lot more frequently than Hellboy, but still in novel-shaped arcs with short, one- or two-month breaks between. There was only one artist Mignola thought could realize the monsters and insanity that would be unleashed in these pages. Guy Davis of Nevermen, The Marquis, and Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules fame lends his outlandish vision (and monster designs unsurpassed in all the lands of comicdom) to Mignola's creation, in a story drawn from the very root of Hellboy mythology. Borne of an unstoppable fungus growing in a New Jersey lab, the frog creatures first seen in Hellboy: Seed of Destruction spread like a plague across the United States, their epicenter in the ghost town of Crab Point, Michigan. The attention that Mignola has long focused on Hellboy and his own bizarre origins will finally be turned on agents Liz Sherman, the enigmatic Abe Sapien, and the homunculus and the dome-head to boot.
While the Hellboy film promotion splashes the BPRD on billboards and TV screens and print ads, the most bizarre team book of all launches on comics shops across the country, with the world's strangest paranormal detectives taking center stage.