The folks behind Hellboy II: The Golden Army know they are making a movie for a devoted group of fans. Despite being pretty good, the first Hellboy was a toss-up when it came to profit (at least, until DVD sales were factored in) and some of us were amazed a sequel was green lit.

Since the movie needs to appeal to its base fans, Universal has been pretty good about keeping fans appetites whetted with updates and images via the sequel’s official production site. Up to now most of those images were characters we had seen in the first film, but now we’ve gotten a look at Johann Krauss, an ectoplasmic character. How’s that for something new?

I’m not a huge Hellboy fan, so I’m not familiar with previous versions of Krauss, which means it’s kind of difficult to make out what this close up shot is showing, but it looks cool. Make sure you give it a good look, because there’s a ton of details to be shown here.

Check out a small version of the Krauss image to the right or click over to the Hellboy production site for a larger look.