Here’s a comics crossover you can drink to: Rogue Ales is bottling a birthday brew for Hellboy.
Rogue’s Right Hand of Doom Red Ale pays tribute to the demon-spawn character created by Mike Mignola. A Mignola drawing of the wisecracking, cigar-chomping, supernatural badass adorns the label, just as the comics franchise reaches legal drinking age in the United States.
“When Dark Horse Comics published the first Hellboy story 21 years ago, I never thought there’d be a Hellboy beer,” said Mignola in a statement. “But I really can’t imagine a better time for Rogue to introduce the Right Hand of Doom beer. If Hellboy was real I guess he’d finally be able to buy me a beer.”
Like Apple, Rogue clearly concentrates as much effort into how its products look as it does on how they work (or, in Rogue’s case, how they taste). The brewery’s vivid, instantly recognizable label designs have been toasted as some of the industry’s best.
Dark Horse is similarly acclaimed. While big comics shops like Marvel and DC currently rule the cultural roost thanks to movies like The Avengers and The Dark Knight, Hellboy is a rare indie comics breakthrough. The character appears in Dark Horse Comics titles Hellboy and B.P.R.D. as well as a pair of successful feature films directed by Guillermo del Toro, in which Ron Perlman portrayed the horned, acerbic superhero.
Hellboy was summoned from the netherworld by Nazis when he was just a baby demon, but his beer is a match made in indie heaven — aka Oregon. Rogue, based in Newport, Oregon, is one of the nation’s pioneering microbreweries; Dark Horse, based in Portland suburb Milwaukie, is a publishing house built around creator-owned comics.
Right Hand of Doom Red Ale will make its public debut at Things From Another World comics in Portland on February 20. Mignola and fellow Dark Horse creators Eric Powell (The Goon), Matt Kindt (MIND MGMT) and Brian Wood (Rebels) will be signing.
Right Hand of Doom Red Ale is available for preorder now with an unholy price tag of $6.75 for a 22-ounce bottle.
