It looks like Hellboy-verse books have continued to appear - and several audio dramas, just to make things even more confusing - but that they are all flashbacks or sidebars these days, and they all have series creator Mike Mignola involved to some degree but not doing more than co-writing. (Which Your Cynical Host takes to mean "approving the scripts and cashing the checks," possibly because the ongoing movie-reboot drama is taking most of his time.)
However the work gets divvied up, we got this book last year: Hellboy in Love, collecting five issues and three short series, all set in 1979 and featuring Hellboy's previously never-mentioned great love, the archeologist Anastasia Bransfield. (I say "never-mentioned," but the Hellboy universe is so continuity-besotted that she probably did get a footnote or two somewhere that I'm forgetting.) It's written by Mignola with long-time collaborator Christopher Golden, drawn by Matt Smith, and colored, as usual for this universe, by Dave Stewart.
And...they're pretty standard Hellboy stories, with an added flavor of "the girlfriend is along for the ride." Anastasia is smart and knowledgeable, though without any supernatural abilities or monster-fighting prowess of her own, so Hellboy has to keep her safe during the inevitable punch-the-monsters sequences, and I have to guess that her story eventually ends, however many years later, when Hellboy isn't able to punch one particular monster in time. (The monsters in the Hellboy universe are typically pretty nasty things, and the body counts, even in these somewhat more love-oriented stories, are quite high.)
So Helly and Ana meet cute on a British train when a band of goblins steal something valuable she's transporting, and they chase the goblins across hill and dale to the inevitable secret auction of supernatural materials organized by Shadowy Forces, where they retrieve the goods.
They enjoy each other's company, and so stick together in London afterward to do boyfriend/girlfriend stuff for a few pages before jetting off to Turkey to deal with murderous shadow puppets at a dig: that makes up the second story.
Anastasia's particular area of study is a semi-conspiracy theory - which, in this world, is clearly absolutely true - about an early-medieval global network of magicians and their methods of long-range communication. This theory has very little evidence, has been pooh-poohed by the finest minds of her time, and the reader is morally sure that not only is it completely accurate, but the organization still exists, is active, and probably at least mildly malevolent.
In the third, shortest story, there's another potential breakthrough - an ancient gigantic skull inscribed with mysterious messages in multiple wildly distant languages, which would prove that Anastasia's theory is true. And, of course, there's some kind of supernatural entity - Delilah, who was at the auction in the first story, and has some kind of demonic/vampiric thing going on - who wants the skull even more so, and is able to take it away.
My sense is that Anastasia's theorized ancient society of magicians is yet another still-extant, vaguely apocalyptic cult that threatens the whole world, and that we'll get subsequent stories to show how Hellboy thwarted and possibly destroyed them, though Anastasia nobly sacrificed her life in the process. I may be overly cynical here.
These particular stories are just fine, though the relationship stuff feels a bit shoehorned in, as if Mignola decided thirty years in that Hellboy really should have had a personal life at some point, and is now making up for lost time. And we all know the rules of flashbacks, especially long flashbacks about The Love of My Life. So expectations are definitely set, but this is fun and diverting for now, and a pleasant corner of this universe that isn't too burdened by the weight of apocalypse at the moment.
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