This trade answers one of the long-standing mysteries of the Mignola-verse. What where those aliens doing, those ones who appeared in like two pages of the first Hellboy trade and then completely disappeared? What was up with the one who showed up dead on Earth in a later Hellboy mission? The visitor, it turns out, was present at the moment of Hellboy's appearance- and his mission was to assassinate the young half-demon. But he didn't. He waited and watched instead.