There is no explicit mention of when the story takes place.
The story ends back with Abe Sapien asleep, dreaming of fish. The demon looks towards Hellboy while saying, "My favorite son." The demon takes the woman down to hell forever. The demon reveals that the woman's "real child" is still unborn, conceived at Walpurgis-Nacht many years ago. A demon enters the Church, and after a brief confrontation, he kills the priest and nun. Hellboy awakes to see a vision of the priest and nun standing over a chained coffin. She instructs them to chain up her coffin and guard it from the devil for three nights. The woman asks her children, a priest and a nun, to save her soul. The woman admits to having been a witch, but now she renounces her past and asks for God's forgiveness. Hellboy falls asleep in the church and dreams of a dying woman. Hellboy recounts that the psychic Cynthia Eden-Jones thought Hellboy's appearance was related to two spirits in the church and not a Nazi experiment. The story is framed by Abe Sapien reading a letter from Hellboy about his travels back to the church in East Bromwich, the place of his "birth". John Arcudi wrote a sequel, Subconscious, twenty years later. One month earlier, a three-page preview had been published in Dark Horse Presents #100-0, an exclusive included with Hero Illustrated #26. The Chained Coffin was originally published in black and white in Dark Horse Presents #100–2 (Aug 1995). 4 Changes from Black and White to Color.
The preview starts with the third page, although that may just be to get readers to check out the full material. Three pages were featured in a Hero magazine special which previewed Dark Horse Comics Presents #100, which itself seemed to be a five issue mini series, so the Hellboy story seems to come from there. It does seem it had an unusual publication. The art is stunning, although I'm trying to figure out how it originally worked in black & white, since the night scenes, the appearance of the bad guy and Hellboy's contrast with everything else benefit from color. It's essentially the origin of Hellboy, so it's really important to the mythos but the flashbacks work so well. The art is so gorgeous panel after panel, you take it for granted.It seems effortlessly brilliant as a ten page story from an anthology. It is the Thing! Anyways, I just read the Chained Coffin and that gave me the creeps. Maybe with an invulnerable character, the harm has to be emotional and the world around them has to feel more vulnerable? To me, Hellboy is a demon but he loves and wants to be human.
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