"The Chained Coffin and Others" is a collection of short stories from Mike Mignola's Hellboy series. A great book to pick up whether you're utterly new to the series and just want a flavor of things to come, or a big fan who wants more glimpses of how Mignola takes known faerie tales and turns them into something more.
"The Chained Coffin..." contains:
- "The Corpse", regarding the recovery of a kidnapped child, and the burial of a strangely resistant body,
- "The Iron Shoes", a story of experts and redcaps and expediency,
- "The Baba Yaga", about how Hellboy shoots out her eye,
- "A Christmas Underground", which is sort of a Hellboy rendition of The Twelve Dancing Princesses,
- "The Chained Coffin", a story of Hellboy's background,
- "The Wolves of Saint August", a very cool werewolf story,
- and "Almost Colossus", which you really have to see to understand, but which rather integral to the ongoing Hellboy storyline.