Mike Mignola’s Amazing Screw-On Head

The one story I had done before, “Abu Gung and the Beanstalk,” there was a version of that that I was never happy with so I’ve completely redrawn it. But yeah, other than that, it’s all new.

I’ve said a trillion times, as I’m sure you’ve read, the reason I never wanted to do more is because unlike almost everything else I’ve done, I felt like I did everything I wanted to do with the character. I got it right the first time. He was never a character who was built, for me, to have more stories. Some characters take on a life of their own. He didn’t. He just existed for that number of pages. Originally there was supposed to be a feature at the end of that original story that was his origin. I realized I had no interest in what his origin was, which is why we ended up with this goofy thing of three old women and a monkey. The origin that I had come up with for him wasn’t that interesting. It was okay. It would have been fun to draw, but it was kind of making more of this character than he really was.

Sort of. It takes place in a non-world. That was one of the biggest problems when they approached me about doing “The Amazing Screw-on Head” cartoon way back when. They couldn’t let go of the idea that it must take place while Abraham Lincoln was President. I kept saying, no, it doesn’t take place any time. It’s entirely my made up goofy world where it all kind of looks sort of late 19th Century Victorian, but there’s no real geography. It’s my little toy world. It’s not meant to be a real world.

That was part of the fun. Once we started talking about doing this book and I knew the stories I was going to do, I was looking for a way to connect the stories without really making it too logical. Because I love “The Magician and the Snake,” I reference “The Magician and the Snake” visually here. I’m going to establish this particular place and go into one panel of Screw-on head, pull this building out and put it here, so this story takes place inside this building that we saw in one panel of “The Amazing Screw-on Head.” It became a game of connecting these things together without a story thread that connects them together.

The problem with collecting was that there was only thirty-five pages of material. All I had that I wanted published was “The Amazing Screw-on Head” and “The Magician and the Snake.” The “Abu Gung and the Beanstalk” story, like I said, wasn’t very good. It was always going to be a weird book. I knew the title of the book was going to be “The Amazing Screw-on Head and Other Curious Objects,” but I didn’t have the other curious objects. So I did start making up these stories with the sense that I would wrap them around “The Amazing Screw-on Head.”

I had done the story “Abu Gung and the Beanstalk” first. The original version of that story. I had the name Gung banging around and I just liked the name Gung, so I used it again in Screw-on Head. Again, there was no logic. I just thought it was a fun name. When I redid “Abu Gung and the Beanstalk” for this book I added this Victorian framing device to the story alluding to the character growing up to become Gung the Magnificent. That was one small concession to tying into the Screw-on Head world, but I don’t have more stories about that character either.

This really is a book about dead end characters. I did, when I did the original “Abu Gung and Beanstalk” think, I want to come up with more stories about this character because he was fun to draw. Again, everything felt forced. I find certain characters like Hellboy, I make up the character and stories just keep coming. Other characters, if the stories don’t keep coming, I can manufacture a story but it’s not going to have whatever that first story had. My feeling is, if I did it right, let’s just do something else. And the beauty of a book like this, because I knew I had Screw-on Head in there and I knew that was strong, it gave me the freedom to do really odd things because they didn’t have to carry the book.

Well there’s benefits to both. It’s actually really easy to keep adding to a big ongoing storyline because you don’t have a beginning and an end. These things I think are trickier to do, but they are really fun. They are really satisfying. I love to do self contained stories. So much of what I’m doing all fits into this Hellboy continuity, it was really fun to do stories that couldn’t fit into that world at all.

You know, I don’t. If I because I think right now I’m programmed to make up stories because the Hellboy machine is so big, I’m programmed to make up Hellboy stories. I was doing this Victorian occult detective character and I made the decision that I didn’t want to keep making up stories about that guy because we have too many books going on. If I were still doing that character, as I’m reading things and hearing things, part of my brain would be thinking new stories about that character. If I was doing another volume of “The Amazing Screw-on Head,” part of my brain would be trying to come up with more short stuff like this. Usually I need to have something on the horizon I’m making stuff up for.

There’s a second volume which John Arcudi wrote, but right now we’ve got so many books going on, I’m just spread too thin. I want to get back to drawing comics. Every book I make up, even if I’m not drawing it, seems like I have to draw the cover or I have to co-write it. I want to put all my energies back into drawing comics, so I’m kind of putting a lid on some of these things right now.

I’ve told Duncan the door’s open for him to do whatever he wants to do. He won’t be continuing as the major artist of Hellboy. There’s always a place for people to do shorter Hellboy stories, like what Richard Corben’s been doing. Basically if Duncan wants to do a story that’s set in 1975 that takes place in New Guinea, we’ll do that. But where “The Storm and The Fury” ends, I will be picking up that Hellboy and continuing that storyline.

Yeah. Well, it won’t be where it was. It ends in a pretty weird place, but yeah, I will be doing the main ongoing storyline. It doesn’t mean I’ll be doing it eight issues a year, but the current continuity of Hellboy will be done by me.

We talked about short stories. They’re self contained stories and they’re not burdened with, I’m the King of England, I’m the beast of the apocalypse. They’re fun to write because Hellboy was just a guy. The story is about Hellboy doing something and it’s not about who Hellboy is and it’s really fortunately the way this thing was structured there’s forty some odd years of Hellboy wandering around the world and it’s a big world so there’s no end of stories to do with Hellboy when he was just a regular guy.

There is that element. Again I can’t say anything really about what I’m doing because I also can’t tell what happens, but The Storm and The Fury has really shaped up to be not just the climax of the three books that Duncan and I have done, but it’s the climax of everything that’s been done with Hellboy since I started the comic. We’re looking at a major restart when I come back to the book.

Um. It’s a little early to say. That would be my goal. It’s possible that it will end up being 2012 when my book actually comes out. I think The Fury is supposed to come out next year. As soon as I can get them out I’ll be getting them out.

Most of the time these days my involvement is phone conversations. John [Arcudi] and I talk about where we’re going. We come up with the broad strokes of where things will go. I’m very involved in all that stuff, but the day in day out, the personalities of the characters, that’s where John really elevates that book into something else. I’m steering it from afar and John is on the ground really doing the character stuff. I’m the broad strokes guy. I’ll come up with specific bits, but more and more, these characters are his characters. It’s my world, but they’re his characters.

He’s the greatest. With BPRD we’ve wrapped up what we’ve been doing. With "The King of Fear," that ends this first cycle of stories and now we’re in a different place as far as the condition of the world. It’s exciting because we’re making changes as I’ve done with Hellboy that can never be unmade. It’s not like the Marvel or DC universes where you blow up a city and then the next time we see that city it’s all rebuilt and everything’s fine. If we blow up a city, it’s probably going to stay a big hole. We’re going to be making bigger and bigger changes to the world, so that’s exciting to really have this blank canvas to remake things.

We’ve planned BPRD: 1948 and I think that’s as far as we’re going to go with that. John Arcudi will be writing BPRD: 1948 and we haven’t settled on an artist for that book, although we’re talking to some people. I wanted John to do that so he could make whatever connections he wanted to make between that BPRD and the structure of the ongoing BPRD. I wanted to give him a chance to put his stamp on the past since he’s dealing with the current BPRD.

Lobster Johnson we’re trying to get it up and running. It’s just we want Guy to do Lobster Johnson and we’re just trying to find a place where Guy has enough room in his schedule to do it. John Arcudi has written a Lobster Johnson series that is sitting on Guy’s desk it’s just a matter of Guy finding the time to do it.

Don’t I have enough?

Well actually I do. I am doing another novel with Chris Golden who co-wrote Baltimore with me. We’re another project that was originally conceived as a comic that I’m never going to get around to doing as a comic so we’re doing that as a novel. Similar to the Baltimore novel it’ll be massively illustrated and co-written by Chris and I. I don’t know when the hell I’m going to do because I seem to have my hands full but yeah my main goal is just to back off the writing as much as a I can and get back to the drawing table.

I was wondering if we were going to get through this without asking that.

I would think if Hellboy 3 were high on his list of things to do, I think he would have called me by now. But I haven’t heard from him since he got off the Hobbit. It’d be great if it happened, but again, I never thought they were going to make the first two, so I’m sitting here going well, I’m not holding my breath. It’d be great but there’s point to me spending any time thinking about it because it’s entirely up to other people whether that happens or not.

Not quickly at all. I’m not fast. I can actually draw kinda fast, but I erase everything I draw nine or ten times. I’m amazingly picky. I’m my harshest critic. I’m amazed actually that Screw-on Head went as smoothly as it did because I’ve become such a perfectionist. Good enough isn’t a phrase I’m real comfortable with because there have been a lot of horrible stuff in the past. As I do less and less drawing, I want it to really be great every time I do it. I was really nervous to do the Screw-on Head stuff because I thought here’s new stories that are going to wrap around two of my favorite things I’ve ever done. Is it going to be a nightmare where every panel I’m second guessing and changing stuff and drawing pages and throwing pages out and redoing things? I did the cover twice, which is not bad for me. I’ve done books where I’ve done the cover five different times. For the most part, the stories went really smoothly and I had nothing but fun doing them. But no I’m not terribly fast.

Still my favorite thing I’ve done.

An editor at Dark Horse had called and asked if I would do a story for an anthology, a six page story, and all she said was, if you could do something that isn’t Hellboy that’d be great. I said sure, it would be great to do something that wasn’t Hellboy. I had no idea what I was going to do. I went and picked up my daughter from school and she started telling me about this picture she drew at school, about a snake on a rooftop being furious at these floating objects and I said, what the hell are you talking about? [laughs] She told me the story behind that picture and I can point out the place on Seventh avenue in New York where she was when she told me that story and where I said well I don’t know what the hell that thing is but that’s better than anything I was going to do as a story for that anthology.

The story had that Little Prince quality to it, where it’s so odd it must be symbolic of something, and there were actually two or three directions I could see going with the story. Not changing her story but just saying when I write it, I can lean it this way this way or this way. I was spending a lot of time away from home at the time so I think it was post-9/11, so there was a gloom and sadness about things. It became this story about not spending enough time with your family and enjoy the time you’ve got together. That was the spin I put on it in the script, but the actual plot of the story is exactly what she told me. I added the monkey at the beginning. I would have made it a victorian era stage magician, but she art directed that part. She was seven. He’s got to have a pointed hat with stars on it. And she was right, it works better that way. It was just one of those things it took no time to draw. It took no time to write and I just sat back when I was done and said, wow, I don’t know that I could do that again. It helps that it’s only six pages, but it just worked perfect for me.

I tell you, it does make your life a lot simpler when you’ve got something like that. When you do a story like that once, even if you only do it once, and just sit back and go, even if I don’t do anything else, I did that one and that might be as good as it ever gets. Again one of the motivators for getting this Screw-on Head book done was this story which is my favorite has just been in this little odd anthology that very few people have seen. I wanted to make sure this thing got back into print and of course it was originally published in black and white. My daughter has been very insistent over the years that the snake is green and she wants the thing in color.

Yes, she approved the colored version.

Yeah I think she’s sensing that she’s gotten skunked once or twice on foreign reprint money. We did discuss her credit on the book. She relinquished having her name on the cover of the book. She gave in on that, but yes, she will be expecting book royalties.

That hasn’t been amended. I was like, can I just have my name by myself on the cover? She gave in on that.