B.P.R.D. Classified

Biography Booklet - Layout Design

One of my beloved movies of all time is Guillermo Del Toro’s 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy series, published by Dark Horse Comics.

Hellboy (2004)'s special edition 2-disc DVD release is a fantastic showcase of the film in terms quality and quantity. Produced by Javier Soto, it is filled and designed to the brim with so much special features you could spend the whole day just going through everything. One of the features that truly captured my attention here was the Character Biographies (found in Disc 2) written by director Guillermo Del Toro himself.

Screenshots of the original special feature from the 2004 special edition DVD.

It contains pages upon pages of highly detailed backstories and tidbits of the live-action incarnations of the Hellboy cast. Not only that, there were also summarized comic strip adaptations of said written biographies. I was truly amazed at how this wealth of content was just tucked hidden inside a disc. It was like reading a book with your DVD player!

After discovering that this rather vital information was nowhere to be found on the internet, I took it upon myself to turn this special feature into a publication to make it more accessible. This required a lot of screenshots, text from image extractions, and editing to give me workable text and images.

I decided to take inspiration from pulp magazines (such as True Detective Mysteries, and even The Strand, which is actually mentioned in one of the biographies) and novel layouts to bring the Character Biographies a renewed life. It was important keep a balance between the old-style direction and a clean case-file look to bring out Del Toro’s written vision of the B.P.R.D. and Rasputin.

Biographies for Liz, Dr. Broom, Agent Myers, Tom Manning, and Rasputin.

Including the comic strips, now restored with higher legibility, adds an element of fun that fulfills the ethos of the 2004 superhero film.

Comic strip version of Hellboy's biography. If anyone has any knowledge on who the original artist was, feel free to contact me!

The result is a 60-page booklet that will give any HB enthusiast a deeper insight of Hellboy in the eyes of Guillermo Del Toro, as well as a nod to the literature that Mike Mignola reimagined for the unwilling Harbinger of the Apocalypse.

You can download and/or read a copy of B.P.R.D. Classified here.