Abe Sapien's History
Sapien began life as Langdon Everett Caul, a Victorian scientist and businessman who became involved with the Oannes Society, an occult organization who believed in life and all knowledge having come from the sea. After retrieving a strange jellyfish-like deity from an underwater ruin, Caul and the other members performed an arcane ritual that inadvertently ended with the creature's release and Caul being turned into an icthyo sapien. Believing him to be Oannes reborn, the society sealed the developing icthyo sapien's body in a tube of water in the hidden laboratory beneath a Washington, D.C. hospital until such time as he was fully formed. Forced to abandon the site by the outbreak of the Civil War, the Society never found occasion to return for Caul, and there he stayed until he was found by workmen in November 1978.
With no memory of his life before, the icthyo sapien received a new name from a piece of paper attached to the tube, dated the day of Abraham Lincoln's assassination (April 14, 1865). Abe Sapien was taken to the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense (BPRD) for a gruelling round of research by curious BPRD scientists, and was saved from vivisection by an empathetic Hellboy. Thereafter Abe entered the ranks of the BPRD as a valued field agent, embarking on his first mission with Hellboy in 1981.
At Cavendish Hall, during the climax of Seed of Destruction, Sapien was possessed by the spirit of long-dead whaler Elihu Cavendish, a contemporary of Langdon Caul who killed the mad monk Rasputin, foiling his plans to unleash the Ogdru Jahad to destroy the world. During the subsequent 'Girescu affair' during Wake the Devil, Abe and a fellow agent were led into a trap which left the agent dead and Abe with a broken arm. Rasputin's vengeful spirit appeared before him and prophesied that Sapien will one day be speared to death, just as he was.
In Plague of Frogs, Rasputin's prediction came true when Sapien was impaled by a spear and apparently killed by one of the Ogdru Jahad's followers. Sapien appeared to die and had an out of body experience that brought him to his former life in antebellum America. Witnessing his past self's actions, Abe entered Caul's body prior to his transformation, creating a spiritual/mystical time loop before Abe returned to life in the present, making a fast recovery and began to do research into his past life. As a result, Abe learns of Edith Howard, Langdon Caul's wife, who drowned herself out of madness, becoming a spectre that was forced to be exorcised after she attempts to have Sapien resume his life as Caul, leaving Sapien with the memory of a wife he could never know.
In Garden of Souls, Sapien was contacted by Panya, an ageless mummy trapped by the Oannes Society, Sapien's compatriots from his former life as Langdon Caul, who were sequestered away on a hidden island in Indonesia, their now-withered psychic forms contained in cyborg bodies. Aware of the imminent apocalypse, the society was determined to save at least some of mankind's spiritual essence, and were poised to use bombs to cause massive tidal waves which would devastate the southern hemisphere, the souls of whose population could then be harvested by the Society in vat-grown bodies made expressly for the purpose, granting them god-like powers.
Horrified, Abe managed to single-handedly destroy the society and escape with Panya, and in so doing finally came to terms with the ghosts of his past; he was truly a separate identity from Langdon Caul, who would likely have agreed willingly to the society's plan. Abe has since fully returned to the B.P.R.D. and continues to be one of the most trustworthy agents.
However, in King of Fear, Abe led a return mission into the Hyperborean underworld and was confronted by the supervillain the Black Flame, who had gathered a vast army of frogs and Hyperboreans to usher in the apocalypse. The Flame revealed that Abe was going to be the epicentre of this new Earth, and that he was a fully evolved version of the frog monsters: one of the New Men first mentioned in Hellboy: Conqueror Worm by Rasputin. While Abe rejected the idea, many of the BPRD field agents are now wary of him; a vision of the future by Liz Sherman showed that, by that time, Abe will have a more monstrous form.
Most recently in Gods, Abe was shoot by a psychic girl named F�nix, in which the BPRD has shown interest. According to Professor O'Donnell, F�nix is the equal to the ancient hyperborean shamans who keep the Ogdru Hem for entering in Earth after Hyperborea's fall using the Vril energy. F�nix say, before shooting Abe, that she knows who he is, impliying that she figured Abe's condition as a evolved form of the frog monsters. Abe is last seen in a helicopter, being treated by his bullet wounds.
