This Hellboy Heroine Is A Homage To A Classic Stephen King Story

Liz Sherman is one of the original three heroes of the “Mignolaverse,” introduced alongside Hellboy himself and the fishman Abe Sapien in the 1994 comic “Seed of Destruction.” The only one of the trio who can pass as a normal human, Liz has hair as red as her flames and an on-off smoking habit (since she doesn’t even need a match to light up). She often wears a cross necklace too, a sign of her enduring Catholic faith even as she meets supernatural beings never mentioned in the Bible. Mignola has not to my knowledge cited King’s book as an inspiration for Liz, but she’s literally called a “fire starter” in the comics.

Liz’s backstory, established from the beginning, has her born in Kansas City with inexplicable and near-uncontrollable pyrokinesis. At age 11, while feeling angry from a neighbor’s name-calling, she accidentally started a fire that killed 32 people, including her parents and her brother. Like Charlie, Liz was taken in by a government agency (thankfully, the Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.) is more benevolent than the Shop). Hellboy, used to feeling like an outsider, was the first to approach Liz without fear in his eyes, beginning their friendship.

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Liz becomes a damsel in distress during “Seed of Destruction” thanks to the villain Grigori Rasputin (not the only time the “Mad Monk” has been reimagined as an immortal super-villain, from Don Bluth’s Disney-ish animated epic “Anastiasia” to “The King’s Man”). The sorceror steals and channels her powers to summon his masters the Ogdru Jahad, the seven-headed beast of the apocalypse. 

In the second “Hellboy” miniseries, “Wake The Devil,” the team is again fighting Rasputin, this time in Romania. While investigating an abandoned castle, Liz and other B.P.R.D. agents come across an inert homunculus that needs a spark to come alive. Liz offers it her own pyrokinesis abilities when her self-loathing takes over. She understandably sees her powers as a curse, one given by God to punish her for some unknown sin — the fire did kill her family  — so any chance to be rid of them, no matter how reckless, she takes. It works and the homunculus comes to life, but in the follow-up story “Almost Colossus,” it turns out that without the fire, Liz’s own soul will be snuffed out. To save her, Hellboy has to find the homunculus (named Roger).

Mignola had plans to kill Liz in “Almost Colossus,” writing he “never had any real idea of what to do with her, so I thought I’d get rid of her. Lazy me.” A talk with animator Glen Murakami convinced Mignola to spare her (in “Almost Colossus,” Liz briefly dies but when Roger returns the fire, it restarts her heart). Liz has remained one of the “Hellboy” series’ main heroes since.