Talking to MTV, the incredibly busy del Toro said that it'll be some time before we see a third Hellboy movie:

We’re three, four years away from anything happening—so I don’t think anyone is, you know, in a big hurry.

However, he did reveal that he'll happily step aside for another director helming a BPRD movie, focusing on the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense that (spoilers) Hellboy, Liz and Abe all quit at the end of The Golden Army. Whether or not Universal Studios think there's enough profit in a spin-off from the franchise without del Toro's involvement is open to question - they had to be convinced to make Hellboy II, after all - but I'd love to see what a BPRD movie could be like... as long as we get some Ben Daimio out of the whole deal.

‘Hellboy 3′ Three Or Four Years Away, Says Guillermo Del Toro [MTV Splash Page]

The comic book series - which gets released in the U.S. at the start of next year — started life in France's Metal Hurlant, despite being created by two Americans: Jerry Frissen and BPRD's Guy Davis. Set in the Los Angeles of 2064, the series highlights those Angelenos whose lives have been affected by a controversial new governmental policy that sees zombies reintegrated into everyday society and trying to peacefully co-exist with the living. Of course, things go wrong, but if you don't want to take my word for it, why not check out this piece of test animation for a (since-scuttled) cartoon version of the story:

The first issue of The Zombies That Ate The World hits stories in February from Devil's Due Publishing.

[Devil's Due]

So by now, I'm sure that you've all rushed out to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army and become enamored with Guillermo Del Toro's imagery (if not his writing). But you may have left the theater wondering, what's the story with Hellboy anyway? That's where we come in. Under the jump, a brief history of Hellboy in comics and the real world.

Depending on who you listen to - us or the "real" world - Hellboy is either a demon summoned to Earth by Nazis towards the end of World War II, or the creation of comic artist Mike Mignola, drawing upon the twin influences of H.P. Lovecraft and Jack Kirby. Either way, when he first appeared in a special preview comic published for 1993's San Diego Comic-Con (co-written at the time by X-Men and Fantastic Four artist John Byrne; Byrne also co-wrote the first series, 1994's Seed of Destruction, before leaving the character to Mignola), he was already fighting demons and working for the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), a covert agency (but, unlike the movie version, not a Government agency) keeping the world safe from all manner of beasts and monsters most people don't know about.

The various Hellboy mini-series - Seed of Destruction, Wake The Devil, The Right Hand of Doom (a title taken from a Robert E. Howard story, and just one of the stories centering on the prophecies about Hellboy's role in the end of the world), Box of Evil and Conqueror Worm - were successful enough for Mignola to spin other comics off exploring the Hellboy Universe without its eponymous hero; to date, there have been BPRD, Abe Sapien and Lobster Johnston series, each of which became more important when Mignola decided to switch up Hellboy's status quo in 2002.

Concerned that Hellboy's personal mythology - that, as "Anung un Rama," he was destined to be responsible for an oncoming apocalypse whether a willing participant or otherwise (explained at the climax from the first movie, which pulls plot points from the first three mini-series) - was overwhelming both the character and the stories, Mignola finished Conqueror Worm by having Hellboy resign from BPRD and try to find out more about his origins - something that, according to Mignola, will bring him back to his creative origins:

Hellboy is going in a radically different direction... [T]he character of Hellboy is changing so radically now that—well, I shouldn’t say that his character is changing so much—in that, he’s becoming more involved in the folklore world and because he is in that folklore world, he has less to do, day in and day out, with human affairs all the time. He’s pretty much slipping off the face of the Earth... Hellboy doesn’t really know that much more about ‘where he’s from’ but I think the big change is that he’s stopped the denial; he’s no longer denying what he is—his head isn’t in the sand anymore. He’s not really actively pursuing questions like ‘where do I come from’ but he’s more open to seeing what’s going to happen. Darkness Calls starts Hellboy onto a path where he is literally walking to a crossroads and kind of standing their saying, “Okay, which way do I go?” Once he puts himself in that position—forces kind of take over and he begins this whole new cycle of his life which will go through English and Russian folklore; it’s going to be unlike anything I’ve done in Hellboy so far.

Around this time, Mignola also made the decision to stop drawing the Hellboy series - something done as much through necessity as choice, to hear him describe the reasons:

I’ve gotten slower as I’ve gotten older. I’ve gotten a lot more obsessive about my design—I ran into a lot of trouble with the last two mini-series because I had become so obsessive and I was re-drawing pages; plus, with all the things going on, trying to run the other comics, dealing with the films and stuff like that—it became very clear that I wouldn’t be able to do a Hellboy story of any length and I wanted to do this gigantic arc of a Hellboy story.

It became a question of “do I do this with another artist” or “is this story just never going to get told”—it literally never would’ve gotten done. There was no way I could do a story this size and I didn’t want to compromise; I didn’t want to do a smaller story. I wanted to do this story the way it needed to be done.

The new "regular" artist for the character (Other artists will come and go as needed; Richard Corben and P. Craig Russell have both worked on the character since Mignola left the artist chair) is Englishman Duncan Fegredo (whose earlier work includes the wonderful Enigma for DC Comics), who was relatively happy to be asked:

So Scott [Allie, Hellboy editor] called, said “…Hellboy” and I freaked out a little… quite a lot actually.

Fegredo's first series was Darkness Calls, the start of Mignola's English/Russian folklore sequence which is expected to last four series and answer, once and for all, what Hellboy's place on Earth really is. Possibly.

Me, I think it's enough just to be a giant red joe with a massive right hand, big gun and pretty good sense of humor about all of this stuff.

Marvel Comics leads the movie tie-ins with a couple of Hulk-related books. The wonderfully-named Hulk: Raging Thunder brings back Thundra (A superstrong Amazon who hated anything with a penis but had a crush on the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm, making you wonder about his particularly rocky manhood, and no, I promise I’m not making this up) and gives her a large green specimen of the less fair sex to beat up on. Gender issues have rarely been this violent, true believer! Luckily, the second gamma-irradiated launch this week deals with much more traditional superhero fare, like absent fathers and aliens having stupid names: Skaar, Son of Hulk spins out of the year-long “Planet Hulk” storyline and stars the half-alien bastard son of Bruce Banner’s alter ego, a teenager with green skin and smashing on his adolescent mind as he deals with life in outer space. How can you resist?

(Marvel’s really concentrating on the SF this week – They’re also putting out an anthology of Secret Invasion-related shorts called Who Do You Trust?, the first issue of a new series based on Jack Kirby’s awesome Eternals, a trade of the first half of Kirby’s run on that title, and a collection of the recent, zen, Silver Surfer series, In Thy Name. There’s also a hardback collection of the last Marvel Zombies series, as well. Yes, they are trying to bankrupt you.)

Dark Horse are also concentrating on the tie-in dollar, with a raft of Hellboy product. If the first issue of a new series starring Hellboy’s (former) employers, the BPRD, isn’t enough for you (It’s called War on Frogs, which should really be all you need to know), then there’s also a set of three miniature plastic figures of characters from the series. There's also the Hellboy Book and Figure Set, putting together a Hellboy action figure and hardback digest version of Hellboy's first adventure to make the perfect gift for the Guillermo Del Toro fan in your life.

DC, meanwhile, are throwing their weight behind The Joker: The Greatest Stories Ever Told (a collection of stories from the history of Heath Ledger’s favorite Bat-villain.) Plus the first issue of the comic book version of NBC’s Chuck, proving that… well, they’re not really all about the multimedia this week after all. Much more interesting from Superman’s home team is the hardcover collection The Question: The Five Books of Blood, bringing Greg Rucka’s lesbian noir hero into her own for all of you faceless fetishists out there. She used to be on the Batman cartoon, do you think that counts…?

As ever, the full list of this week’s releases can be found here, with your very own low-tech comic store GPS being found here. Just remember, make sure that you're only buying something that has at least an option taken out on it.