Leopold Kurtz

From the very first pages of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction #1 in 1994, Leopold Kurtz stepped into Mike Mignola and John Byrne's gloriously dark mythology at Dark Horse Comics, rubbing shoulders with some of the most unforgettable figures in modern horror comics — Grigori Rasputin, Karl Ruprect Kroenen, Ilsa Haupstein, Hellboy himself, and Trevor Bruttenholm. That's rarefied, dangerous company, and it tells you everything about the shadowy world Kurtz inhabits. Across nearly three decades of publication, his presence threads through the Hellboy universe and into B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth, making him one of those quietly essential figures whose appearances reward the dedicated reader hunting for connective tissue in Mignola's sprawling occult tapestry.