"I'm Already Dead," asks a pallid, gray-skinned Hellboy, arising from a gorgeously rendered watercolored fever dream. "How Much Worse Can I Get?"

"Worse," answers a bearded bedside attendant.

"Much worse," echoes his mustachioed friend.

It's a predictably answer, really. Here in Hell, thing can always get worse. Though, so far as visions of the underworld go, Hellboy doesn't really have it so bad. Mike Mignola's vision of Hell isn't comic strip fiery pit or the arctic fields that engulf Dante's Satan. It's something more akin to an infinitely sprawling ghost town.

The streets are largely deserted and the buildings mostly dilapidated. Here, Hellboy isn't an agent on a top secret mission so much as a drifter, wandering from town to town like a 6'11 demonic David Carradine, helping damned denizens of the underworld with their eternal problems.

Issue #7 is the first installment of the series since last May. Tasked with both writing and drawing the book, the ever-busy Mignola is clearly taking his time with the on-going series, but thankfully, each issue thus far has been worth the wait.

Mignola is a master fabulist, and his comics play out accordingly, each issue wrapping stories within stories as bewildered residents relate their woes to the deceased superhero. In this, the first of the two-part "The Hounds of Pluto" story arc, a man on trial for a specified crime recounts a tale of a golem run amok before addressing the carnivorous parasite at the center of Hellboy's woes.

Between the golems, the dragons, the mummified cats, and the talking Dia De Los Muertos skeleton people, Mingola clearly had a blast drawing the issue, transforming his dark aesthetic obsessions into a compelling storyline that culminates with a huge, fiery cliffhanger.

The complexities of Mignola's storytelling are off-set by his increasingly minimalistic approach to the artwork, as though the cartoonist has taken it upon himself to convey each panel in as few abstract shapes as possible, an approach that lends itself perfect to dark sense of foreboding he builds with every subsequent page.

If there's a complaint to be waged, it's Mignola's tendency toward over exposition, as his characters build the foundation for the two-part series - though if past books are any indication, the next installment of "The Hounds of Pluto" will no doubt pay off. But here's hoping we won't have to wait another 15 months to find out.