Creature Commandos Owes A Huge Debt To This Horror Superhero Comic

Spoilers for "Creature Commandos" to follow.

"Creature Commandos," and the new DC Universe with it, is here. This animated show has a plot in the same vein as creator James Gunn's 2021 film "The Suicide Squad": U.S. black ops bigwig Amanda Waller (Viola Davis) recruits an eccentric cast of superpowered convicts from across the DC Universe and remakes them into (creature) commandos.

So, government-employed superheroes who are modeled on classic horror movie monsters. Are we talking about the Creature Commandos or the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (B.P.R.D.)? That organization originates from Mike Mignola's "Hellboy" comics, the best take on the "monsters as superheroes" idea also found in "Creature Commandos."

During the first batch of "Hellboy" stories, from 1994 to 2001, Hellboy was employed by the B.P.R.D. as a monster investigator/hunter. A young demon summoned to incite the apocalypse, Hellboy was discovered by Bureau founder Trevor Bruttenholm in 1944 and raised as his son. The first "Hellboy" comic mini-series — "Seed of Destruction" — is set in 1994, but Hellboy has spent his whole life on Earth at the Bureau and been monster hunting since the 1950s. This has left (and continues to leave) lots of room for prequel comics.

At the end of the "Conqueror Worm" mini-series in 2001, Hellboy decides he needs to find his own path and quits the Bureau. While Hellboy walks the Earth, the continuing adventures of the B.P.R.D. and its other agents are chronicled in their eponymous spin-off comic. (Most, but not all, of "B.P.R.D." was written by John Arcudi and drawn by Guy Davis, with Mignola supervising.) 

Now, granted, the Creature Commandos go back to 1980, long before Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. debuted. However, the original Creature Commandos (created by J.M. DeMatteis and Pat Broderick) were an army unit, not a secret agent team. The high concept of the characters was that it was a boilerplate World War II comic except the soldiers were also literal monsters.

2011 series "Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E." (which the animated version is pulling from) remade the Commandos to be more like the B.P.R.D. Watching Gunn's "Creature Commandos," my mind sometimes drifted to the "Hellboy" and "B.P.R.D" comics— and not just because "Creature Commandos" features ex-Hellboy David Harbour playing Frankenstein's Monster.

Mike Mignola loves monsters. In his biographical documentary (titled, what else, "Mike Mignola: Drawing Monsters"), he said how he prefers drawing creepy creatures, transforming monsters, and skeletons more than he does superheroes. That's why Mignola came up with his own paranormal detective character in Hellboy, instead of keeping up with drawing Batman. Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. function like pulp heroes, but despite being the good guys, each one is modeled after a classic monster. 

(Not to say that it's all Mignola. Indeed, Davis' art has a very different style from Mignola's dark shading and minimalist compositions, which helps "B.P.R.D." stand on its own.)

Hellboy himself looks like typical drawings of Satan and demons (because he is one): red skin, clove feet, a tail, etc. One of the more innovative parts of Hellboy's design is how he shaves his forehead horns down to the root, making them look almost like goggles. 

Then there's Hellboy's initial two B.P.R.D. companions. Abe Sapien is a blue-skinned, water-breathing man and an obvious riff on Gill-man from the classic black-and-white monster movie "Creature of the Black Lagoon." (As is Nina Mazursky in "Creature Commandos.")

The pyrokinetic Liz Sherman invites comparisons to Charlie from Stephen King's "Firestarter," but her gloominess and "normal-looking human conjuring magic" visage also pins her as a witch. After all, witches do have a long (and not friendly) relationship with fire, but Liz is one witch who can't be burned at the stake.

Later B.P.R.D. recruits continue this theme. Roger the Homunculus is a more docile version of Frankenstein's Monster. (In Mary Shelley's original "Frankenstein," Victor Frankenstein is a student of ancient alchemists; the creature is him walking in their footsteps to create a homunculus.) In "Hellboy: Wake The Devil," the B.P.R.D. discovers Roger in an ancient castle laboratory right out of James Whale's "Frankenstein," and he's brought to life by Liz's fire the way Boris Karloff's Creature was by lightning.

Johann Kraus, introduced in "B.P.R.D." itself, is a medium who was transformed into ectoplasm and now must inhabit a suit to continue existing corporeally. Basically, the line between man and ghost in him has faded. The B.P.R.D.'s newly recruited field leader — Major Ben Daimio — debuts with a mysterious backstory; he was seemingly KIA in Indonesia, but awoke three days later. It's eventually revealed he was attacked by an ancient jaguar god and is now its host. Daimio is also another classic monster archetype, the werewolf (werecat, technically, but same difference).

The "B.P.R.D." comics are semi-episodic, and broken up into three major arcs: "Plague of Frogs," then "Hell on Earth," and finally "The Devil You Know." As you can probably guess from those titles, things don't often look up for our heroes. Greater and greater monsters rear their heads, laying waste to more and more of the world, and the B.P.R.D. can only do so much to hold it back. It's a story that captures the feeling of living in a slowly-imploding world, and trying to grasp onto a small sense of normalcy. The apocalypse doesn't happen at once, it escalates, and along the way, many of the heroes meet grisly ends. (The definitive endings in "B.P.R.D." is another point in its favor next to most superhero books.)

The last two "Hellboy" movies didn't knock it out of the park, and even the earlier Guillermo del Toro directed ones were loose adaptations. "Creature Commandos" reaffirms my belief that the best path forward for accuracy and quality is a "Hellboy and the B.P.R.D." animated series, one that emulates either Mignola or Davis' art-style. This show could be an "X-Files" style supernatural procedural or a dark fantasy epic and both approaches would be true to the comics. Done well, it could give "Creature Commandos" a run for its money.

New episodes of "Creature Commandos" drop Thursdays on Max.