Fun Ways to Improve Your Spanish: Graphic Novels, Anime, Picture Books...

Hellboy is a creature summoned (or perhaps born) in the final months of World War II by Grigori Rasputin, on Tarmagant Island, a small isle just off the coast of Scotland, having been commissioned by the Nazis to change the tide of war ("Project Ragna Rok").

He appeared in a fireball in a ruined church in East Bromwich, England, on December 23, 1944. Hellboy proved not to be a devil, but a little devil-like creature with red skin, horns, a tail, and a large stone right hand - hence the name given by Professor Trevor Bruttenholm.

Taken by the U.S. forces to an Air Force base somewhere in New Mexico, Hellboy was raised by the United States Army and by the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD), a U.S. government agency dedicated to combating occult threats.

In the comics, Hellboy is at least semi-famous, having been granted "honorary human" status by the United Nations in 1952 and being known as the "world's greatest paranormal investigator." As such, he interacts regularly with normal humans, most of whom are not presented as overtly reacting to his strange appearance (though his primary interactions in the comics are with law enforcement officials from different organizations, the military, and various "scholars of the weird").

In the film version, however, Hellboy is kept under lock and key, and considered simply an "urban legend" by the general populace.

Hellboy's adventures in the comics span the 1940s to the present day, and involve elements such as sorcerers, Nazis, the Thule Society, hollow earth explorers, werewolves, vampires, ghosts, and other oddities, such as the Ogdru Jahad. Several of the storylines deal with Hellboy's Right Hand of Doom and its purpose in initiating the Apocalypse.

Hellboy's superhuman abilities would seem to stem from his demonic nature. While his specific powers and abilities have never been explicitly described in the comics, Hellboy is much stronger and significantly more physically durable than an ordinary human being. The movie makes much of the idea that Hellboy is fireproof. However, in the comics and subsequent novels Hellboy is not actually fireproof. He can be burned and damaged like any living thing but he is possessed of a "healing factor" (much like Marvel characters Wolverine or Hulk) that allows him to recover from wounds at an incredible rate.

In "The Lost Army" Hellboy was noted to be able to see farther than the normal human, and quickly heal from wounds that would be almost instantly fatal to humans, one example being he once took a sword thrust through his chest and out his back. He also has the innate ability to comprehend ancient and magical languages.

He has been savagely beaten by large monsters on several occasions and survived, often with relatively minor injuries. On one occasion, Hellboy directly charged an MG-42 machine gun and took numerous bullets to the chest before destroying the gun. For a more complete rendering of Hellboy's publication history, past and present look at the rest of the excellent Hellboy entry in Wikipedia.

New Single Panel Condorito Panels

Condorito Panels and Videos with more to come.

Mafalda in Spanish and Mafalda in Spanish with English subtitles.

Condorito was created by the Chilean cartoonist René Rios, known as Pepo. In spite of his Chilean origin, Condorito is very popular throughout Latin America, where the character is considered part of the general popular culture, and has a growing readership in the United States as well. Condorito and his friends are featured monthly in a magazine that carries the name of the main character, as well as a deluxe "best of" magazine entitled Condorito de Oro.

My bed at home is not as comfy as this chair

PANEL 1.
Condorito! This is the last time I catch you sleeping during work hours. I'm firing you today.

PANEL 2.
No, No, please don't fire me.

PANEL 3.
Because my bed at home isn't as comfy as the chair. MMMM!

The structure in Condorito is a very simplistic one: each page is an independent joke, without any continuity on the others (though some jokes are larger or shorter than one page). The jokes are often sexual or chauvinistic in nature, and some of the details included in the artwork are gender-dependent, but the humor is usually couched in double-entendres that children would be unlikely to understand.

One peculiar characteristic of Condorito is that the character that goes through the embarrassing moment and/or serves as the butt of the joke in a given strip almost always falls backwards to the floor (legs visible or out of frame) in the final panel, although new comic strips have now put the victim of the joke looking at the reader instead. This classic comic strip "flop take" is accompanied by the ¡PLOP! sound effect. From time to time, this is replaced by the victim of the joke saying ¡Exijo una explicación! ("I demand an explanation!"), usually as a twist or downbeat ending.

Intermediate to advanced readers might be interested in reading Manga in Spanish. This is a Japanese graphic novel format found literally by the millions everywhere in Japan including sidewalk vending machines. They have become hugely successful in the rest of the world and are available in Spanish. Manga are not everyone's cup of green tea but when you get into them, they are quite absorbing and you can often forget you are learning Spanish.

Seeing an illustration of a situation helps you understand what you are reading by giving lots of nonverbal cues and clues. A great way to improve your Spanish mastery is to read stories with pictures, such as comic books and graphic novels. These media are written as much for adults as for younger readers especially the graphic novels and Manga.

Intermediate level students will find them challenging and even advanced students who studied in Spain or Mexico will scratch their heads at some of the vocabulary in Argentinian comics.

A further plus is that comic books are written in informal language. In this, they are more like movies or podcasts. They use conversational Spanish not the formal language structures of a novel.

For beginning and intermediate students, comics such as Gaturro , Garfield , and Dilbert are good. They are written at a fairly easy reading level but provide familiar situations and plenty of everyday words and phrases.

More advanced readers might like to tackle picture books such as Mafalda, Asterix and Tintin.

Hellboy: Blood and Iron is the second in the Hellboy Animated series (the first being Hellboy: Sword of Storms--More on this coming up), written by Tad Stones and Mike Mignola. It first aired on March 17, 2007 on Cartoon Network and was scheduled on DVD by Anchor Bay Entertainment in 10 March, 2007. The film's storyline is based in part upon the Wake the Devil storyline from the original comics.

Asterix the Gaul