Dark Horse has announced Ghost of a Ghost, a four-part Hellboy Universe series written by Mike Mignola and Chris Roberson, with art by Michael Avon Oeming, colors by Taki Soma, and lettering by Clem Robins. Starting this September, the book follows Agent Jian, a spy introduced in Giant Robot Hellboy, on a series of “psychedelic” adventures in the 1960s.
Ghost of a Ghost #1 cover by Michael Avon Oeming
The synopsis elaborates, “Fans first met superspy Agent Jian in Mike Mignola and Duncan Fegredo’s 2023 [series] Giant Robot Hellboy, where she was exposed to enkeladite – the radiated substance known to cause sometimes monstrous mutations. Now, she’s working with a mysterious spy ring and using her newfound powers to keep enkeladite from falling into the wrong hands – but just whose hands are the wrong ones is harder to determine than she thought.”
Roberson shares, “This [comic] was a fully formed Mike Mignola idea from the beginning. At a convention a couple of years ago he sat down with me, Mike Oeming, and Taki Soma and explained to us what he had in mind for this character that he’d introduced in Giant Robot Hellboy, and then we got to work on realizing it. But from the very beginning we were all totally in sync with the vision that Mignola had for the character of Jian and her story, a jet-setting spy-fi thriller in the swinging Sixties, but approached in a way that we had never really seen used in a Hellboy Universe story before.”
Oeming adds, “I’m excited to be working on another Mignola project with writer Chris Roberson and colorist Taki Soma. We’re bringing a fun 1960s retro spy vibe into the Hellboy world, and if you have half as much fun reading it as we did making it, you’re going to love it.” The artist last worked with Mignola and Roberson on 2025’s Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. spin-off Shadow of the Golden Crane, which similarly followed Agent Susan Xiang in the 1960s.
Ghost of a Ghost #1 will be released on September 23, with a main cover by Oeming, and a variant by Dave Johnson. Subsequent issues will feature variants by Kevin Nowlan, Elsa Charretier, and Michael Cho. In the meantime, Mignola and Fegredo’s long-delayed Giant Robot Hellboy Returns #1 (of 2) is set to be released on July 22. You can follow along with The Beat‘s coverage of all of Mignola’s books here, and keep an eye on Dark Horse’s website for further information.
Issue #1 variant by Dave Johnson
