With the creation of his character, Hellboy, Mike Mignola has spawned a world of projects including animated and live action movies, as well as a wealth of brilliant merchandising. Mignola first broke into the business over 20 years ago doing comic books, which will always be his first love. He has been crafting Hellboy stories for over ten years and is just now reaching the middle part of Hellboys life. Hellboy continually evolves into a more complex and interesting character, and Mignola's infinite ideas are highlighted in the new trade paperback that offers the collection of the Hellboy miniseries "The Third Wish" and "The Island."
*This interview was conducted before the announcement that Hellboy 2 had moved to Universal Studios.*
Buy Hellboy: Strange Places
Daniel Robert Epstein: How was San Diego for you?
Mike Mignola: Exhausting. Im not getting any younger and that convention isnt getting any smaller.
DRE: [laughs] You looked exhausted when I saw you.
Mike: Yeah once that thing starts it doesnt let up until the very end.
DRE: You got yourself a good table though.
Mike: Yeah, its a good spot. Weve had the spot for several years now.
DRE: Do you ever get tired of talking about Hellboy?
Mike: You know what I get tired of? I have to keep answering the exact same question every 30 seconds. Im really happy talking about this stuff but I never get the chance to talk about it. Im just answering the same three questions over and over and over again. That gets old fast.
DRE: It seems like the stories in Hellboy: Strange Places are going to have long repercussions in the Hellboy world.
Mike: Yeah, both those stories basically have Hellboy step off the face of the earth and end the first phase of Hellboys career and set up where things are going and really change him into a different character.
DRE: Like a more contemplative character?
Mike: Maybe a little bit. The way Ive been playing Hellboy up until Strange Places is a guy who just didnt want to know, didnt want to ask questions and didnt want to deal with what he is. Youd have characters show up and say, Youre this or youre the beast of the apocalypse or youre that. My deal is that you can only bury your head in the sand so long.You get to a certain point where the weight of what you are is going to get heavy enough where he cant delude himself that hes just one of the regular guys anymore. But I wont want to turn Hellboy into a character who says, Ok Im going to go out and find out who I am. So the whole way its set up in The Third Wish was that idea of just Im just going to roam around. Im going to go back to maybe my carefree days of not working for the Bureau. Im just going to walk through Africa and Im going to hang out with lions or whatever the hell he did there. Then fate catches up to you and you get drawn down to the bottom of the ocean and then eventually onto this island where its just an intermission between the first part of Hellboys career and this new phase where hes not a regular guy anymore but hes not a demon. Hes trying to figure out what he is or find out what his place in the world is.
DRE: Do you see him becoming more like a Jim Starlin type character?
Mike: I suspect he will become more philosophical. I dont think hes ever going to be as eloquent and well spoken as a Jim Starlin character but certainly theres more and more stuff hes got to confront. Whether he looks for it or whether it falls into his lap, hes positioned himself in a place now where he is dealing with more supernatural characters than hes dealing with human beings. Up until now hes been essentially treated as one of the human beings who is against the supernatural stuff. Now hes dealing with his peers who are the supernatural characters. Little by little, hes just disappearing off the face of the earth and dealing with what goes on in the shadows.
DRE: Whats funny is that little by little with a big leap called the Hellboy movie you are dealing with the higher echelon of the entertainment industry. Did that influence where Hellboy is going?
Mike: Maybe. Certainly you do deal less with the guy that works at the counter of the comic book store and more with movie producers and stuff. Not to elevate one above the other but youre in a much more secretive world. The world where guys sit around at dinner and decide what movies are going to get made as opposed to the guy whos wondering if hes going to get the latest shipment of Conan comics. I do find myself in much weirder places than I ever thought I would be, so maybe on some unconscious level thats showing up in Hellboy. But part of the plan I always had with Hellboy was that he would move further and further away from being a person. I love Jim Starlins stuff like Warlock and Captain Marvel. He and I are both very influenced by the same guy, Michael Moorcock who created Elric. I read a lot of Moorcock in high school. He often had this doomed hero whos got a gigantic role to play in cosmic events but all the character wants is to be left alone to be a regular person. But thats just not his fate in life and I think those ideas were in my head when I created Hellboy.
DRE: How much can you relate to Hellboy at this point?
Mike: As much as I ever could. Hellboy still has the working stiff attitude guy. He still says the same things but as I get older and you think about career and your life and your children and all that stuff, its natural to write a character whos going to think about stuff more. I never intended Hellboy to be the beast of the apocalypse. When I created Hellboy he was just going to be a good guy and it was just going to be like a joke that he looked like the devil or that he was the devil. But as things progressed and I figured out more and more about where he came from and who his mother is and who his father is, these other supernatural characters popped up and said things about him. Then I realized that he was such an interesting character and if he is in fact the beast of the apocalypse, how do you get a guy out of that problem. Thats what took over my thinking with Hellboy which is why I had to get him out of the whole BPRD thing because Hellboys situation is so interesting to me that it deserves its own book.
DRE: Since the Third Wish was the one of the first Hellboy stories to be released after the movie, how did the movie change things?
Mike: Third Wish is interesting because its my post 9/11 Hellboy story. I was going to do a non-Hellboy book set in New York. But I was in New York when 9/11 happened and the last thing on earth I wanted to do was a book about a partially ruined New York City. I was just a couple of weeks away from starting on this other book and I just scrapped it. Ive had this other idea since I first started in the business of a mermaid fairy tale story and once I created Hellboy I thought, Well, someday Ill do that with Hellboy. It was going to be a light, fantasy, underwater adventure thing. So after 9/11 I thought if Im going to scrap this other project nows a good time to do a light, fluffy, fun little underwater mermaid story. The story turned out much grimmer than I originally intended probably because of the whole 9/11 thing and partly because of where I was going with Hellboy. Then I was working on The Island while I was working on the movie. I kept starting and stopping it, starting and stopping it.
DRE: How was fan reaction to it?
Mike: The Island is one not too many people have commented on. Its a very odd one and its real heavy on history and talking. It isnt a big, fun, punch the monster story. There are a lot of different reasons why it was that. I ended up being much more interested in the backstory of various characters and the creation of the universe basically. Maybe thats because in the movie there are these cocoons coming out and all this stuff which I hadnt done in the comic. I thought, Well if were going to do them in the movie, let me address them also in the comic. My take on the stuff is a little bit different than the way it was in the movie so I wanted to have my version of events out to stand alongside the movie version of events.
DRE: I read that Duncan Fegredo is going to draw the next Hellboy miniseries.
Mike: He just finished the second issue of the next miniseries and Im thrilled with it. Duncan is supposed to do at least three miniseries and those will basically make one giant story. The first ten years of Hellboy were act one of Hellboys life. This three part story that Duncan is doing is the middle arc of Hellboys life. Its his first full grown dealing with the supernatural world as opposed to dealing with the human world and dealing with his mothers side of the family so it is all folklore and witchcraft. No mad scientists, no Nazis, just weird supernatural things.
DRE: Will this be the first time someone else has drawn so much Hellboy?
Mike: Yeah because it is just too big of a story. Im trying to do so many different things. I would have never done it without somebody else drawing it. Its too long, Id never finish it, Id never survive it. Duncan is better at drawing so many things than I am. It was beyond my wildest dreams that we could get him to do this, so Im thrilled to have him.
DRE: Of course Duncans fantastic, but what made you think of him specifically?
Mike: Unlike BPRD where Guy Davis draws nothing like me, but is perfect for the book, I needed somebody that was not going to imitate me but had a similar art style. Duncan spots blacks the way I spot blacks. Also because this book takes place so much in real locations, theres a lot of English countryside and there are a lot of old churches and things like that and Duncans great with reference. When he draws a church it looks like a church. Regular comic book guys fake everything so I needed a guy that when he would draw a forest it would feel like an English forest and when he was drawing an old Russian house it would feel like an old Russian house.
DRE: Do you do full script when youre working with another writer?
Mike: Ive always worked plot style but I also do a lot of thumbnails. Thats actually how Jim Starlin worked with me Cosmic Odyssey. He might not thumbnail where the people are in the particular panels but he would break things down and say, Here are four little panels, one big panel and one medium sized panel on the page. When I work with somebody Im thinking in sequences not dialogue. So its really important to me if we go from a close up to this guy to cutaway to this guy, cutaway to this, cut back to this, come in closer to this and then we pull back to see a big landscape. So I will indicate that in my plot. Sometimes Ill almost draw the page in a thumbnail form. Originally the miniseries was going to be drawn by a different artist so I thumbnailed it a lot more than I would have had I known Duncan was going to be the artist on the book. I trust Duncan a lot more than I trust the artist who was originally going to do the book as far as the storytelling goes. I should write something closer to full script but as I write more for other people Im little by little figuring it out.
DRE: Have you considered not doing the books serialized anymore and just go straight to graphic novels?
Mike: It has never been seriously discussed. I think the numbers make more sense for Dark Horse to do it as a comic rather than do it as a graphic novel. I like the miniseries format because then people dont have to wait a year for a comic. I like dropping it out in those one issue installments to let the audience see what Im working on. Financially, at this point, it makes more sense to basically earn back your money doing the monthly comic and then collect it as a trade paperback.
DRE: Bryan Fuller, who wrote and produced the Screw On Head pilot, said this to me [Mikes] whole edict was make it look like the comic book. But he said that when they gave you the pilot to watch, he said that you said, I started to watch it but it looked too much like my comic book so I didnt want to watch it.
Mike: I dont remember ever saying to make it look like the comic. I dont think that came from me. My suggestion wouldnt have been to make it look like the comic. I think story wise I wanted it to be in the same ballpark as the comic but design wise Im always more comfortable when people redesign my work for another form. Then I dont run into a situation where people are second guessing what I would do. Apparently Screw On Head worked really well with their second guessing my art style. But, like with the Hellboy animated thing, I was very happy that they wanted to do it in a completely different style. I said, Ive done it my way, let them do it a different way. Ive never insisted that stuff look like my stuff. If somebody imitates my style, no matter how good they do it Im always going to be looking at it going, yeah, but you didnt do this right and you didnt do that right. Whereas if its a completely different style I can be a little more objective.
DRE: Did you watch the whole pilot?
Mike: No, I watched about a second of it. There was nothing bad about it but it was too close to my stuff so it gave me the creeps. It was great listening to the guys do the voices. I went to the voice recording and listened to them do the voices but when it came to the visuals of it, it was too close to what I did for me to be an objective observer. Whereas with the Hellboy movie its easy to look at it because its live action which makes it immediately different than what I did.
DRE: Would you want there to be more episodes of Screw On Head?
Mike: Yeah, because people seem to really like it and Bryan seems to understand the material. He seemed to understand the gags I was going for and the genre I was trying to do. Certainly hes the right guy to be doing it.
DRE: Do you want to direct films?
Mike: No, Im so happy doing what Im doing. I love comics and I understand them. Now that Im working more and more as a writer and not an artist, it frees me up to do more stuff in comics, as far as Hellboy and Hellboy related books. Ive also got a bunch of non-Hellboy stories that I want to do in comics. Some of them I will draw, some of them I wont draw. Im very excited about just being an artist and just drawing weird little stories of whatever I want and also keeping the whole Hellboy world going. This year Im writing an Abe Sapien miniseries. I should be writing a Lobster Johnson miniseries before too long and then writing the stuff for Duncan Fegredo for Hellboy. Im also co-writing and illustrating a novel.
DRE: Whats the novel?
Mike: Its a gothic horror vampire epic that at one point I was going to do as a comic and it just got so big I knew Id never finish it. Im so slow these days. If I start plotting something that gets to be a 100 or 200 pages, its just not going to be something Im ever going to be able to do. So I took it to a friend of mine Chris Golden who had written a couple of Hellboy novels. He fleshed out my notes and turned it into this novel. Now Im just doing what will probably end up being close to 200 illustrations for it. Itll come out next fall.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
*This interview was conducted before the announcement that Hellboy 2 had moved to Universal Studios.*
Buy Hellboy: Strange Places
Daniel Robert Epstein: How was San Diego for you?
Mike Mignola: Exhausting. Im not getting any younger and that convention isnt getting any smaller.
DRE: [laughs] You looked exhausted when I saw you.
Mike: Yeah once that thing starts it doesnt let up until the very end.
DRE: You got yourself a good table though.
Mike: Yeah, its a good spot. Weve had the spot for several years now.
DRE: Do you ever get tired of talking about Hellboy?
Mike: You know what I get tired of? I have to keep answering the exact same question every 30 seconds. Im really happy talking about this stuff but I never get the chance to talk about it. Im just answering the same three questions over and over and over again. That gets old fast.
DRE: It seems like the stories in Hellboy: Strange Places are going to have long repercussions in the Hellboy world.
Mike: Yeah, both those stories basically have Hellboy step off the face of the earth and end the first phase of Hellboys career and set up where things are going and really change him into a different character.
DRE: Like a more contemplative character?
Mike: Maybe a little bit. The way Ive been playing Hellboy up until Strange Places is a guy who just didnt want to know, didnt want to ask questions and didnt want to deal with what he is. Youd have characters show up and say, Youre this or youre the beast of the apocalypse or youre that. My deal is that you can only bury your head in the sand so long.You get to a certain point where the weight of what you are is going to get heavy enough where he cant delude himself that hes just one of the regular guys anymore. But I wont want to turn Hellboy into a character who says, Ok Im going to go out and find out who I am. So the whole way its set up in The Third Wish was that idea of just Im just going to roam around. Im going to go back to maybe my carefree days of not working for the Bureau. Im just going to walk through Africa and Im going to hang out with lions or whatever the hell he did there. Then fate catches up to you and you get drawn down to the bottom of the ocean and then eventually onto this island where its just an intermission between the first part of Hellboys career and this new phase where hes not a regular guy anymore but hes not a demon. Hes trying to figure out what he is or find out what his place in the world is.
DRE: Do you see him becoming more like a Jim Starlin type character?
Mike: I suspect he will become more philosophical. I dont think hes ever going to be as eloquent and well spoken as a Jim Starlin character but certainly theres more and more stuff hes got to confront. Whether he looks for it or whether it falls into his lap, hes positioned himself in a place now where he is dealing with more supernatural characters than hes dealing with human beings. Up until now hes been essentially treated as one of the human beings who is against the supernatural stuff. Now hes dealing with his peers who are the supernatural characters. Little by little, hes just disappearing off the face of the earth and dealing with what goes on in the shadows.
DRE: Whats funny is that little by little with a big leap called the Hellboy movie you are dealing with the higher echelon of the entertainment industry. Did that influence where Hellboy is going?
Mike: Maybe. Certainly you do deal less with the guy that works at the counter of the comic book store and more with movie producers and stuff. Not to elevate one above the other but youre in a much more secretive world. The world where guys sit around at dinner and decide what movies are going to get made as opposed to the guy whos wondering if hes going to get the latest shipment of Conan comics. I do find myself in much weirder places than I ever thought I would be, so maybe on some unconscious level thats showing up in Hellboy. But part of the plan I always had with Hellboy was that he would move further and further away from being a person. I love Jim Starlins stuff like Warlock and Captain Marvel. He and I are both very influenced by the same guy, Michael Moorcock who created Elric. I read a lot of Moorcock in high school. He often had this doomed hero whos got a gigantic role to play in cosmic events but all the character wants is to be left alone to be a regular person. But thats just not his fate in life and I think those ideas were in my head when I created Hellboy.
DRE: How much can you relate to Hellboy at this point?
Mike: As much as I ever could. Hellboy still has the working stiff attitude guy. He still says the same things but as I get older and you think about career and your life and your children and all that stuff, its natural to write a character whos going to think about stuff more. I never intended Hellboy to be the beast of the apocalypse. When I created Hellboy he was just going to be a good guy and it was just going to be like a joke that he looked like the devil or that he was the devil. But as things progressed and I figured out more and more about where he came from and who his mother is and who his father is, these other supernatural characters popped up and said things about him. Then I realized that he was such an interesting character and if he is in fact the beast of the apocalypse, how do you get a guy out of that problem. Thats what took over my thinking with Hellboy which is why I had to get him out of the whole BPRD thing because Hellboys situation is so interesting to me that it deserves its own book.
DRE: Since the Third Wish was the one of the first Hellboy stories to be released after the movie, how did the movie change things?
Mike: Third Wish is interesting because its my post 9/11 Hellboy story. I was going to do a non-Hellboy book set in New York. But I was in New York when 9/11 happened and the last thing on earth I wanted to do was a book about a partially ruined New York City. I was just a couple of weeks away from starting on this other book and I just scrapped it. Ive had this other idea since I first started in the business of a mermaid fairy tale story and once I created Hellboy I thought, Well, someday Ill do that with Hellboy. It was going to be a light, fantasy, underwater adventure thing. So after 9/11 I thought if Im going to scrap this other project nows a good time to do a light, fluffy, fun little underwater mermaid story. The story turned out much grimmer than I originally intended probably because of the whole 9/11 thing and partly because of where I was going with Hellboy. Then I was working on The Island while I was working on the movie. I kept starting and stopping it, starting and stopping it.
DRE: How was fan reaction to it?
Mike: The Island is one not too many people have commented on. Its a very odd one and its real heavy on history and talking. It isnt a big, fun, punch the monster story. There are a lot of different reasons why it was that. I ended up being much more interested in the backstory of various characters and the creation of the universe basically. Maybe thats because in the movie there are these cocoons coming out and all this stuff which I hadnt done in the comic. I thought, Well if were going to do them in the movie, let me address them also in the comic. My take on the stuff is a little bit different than the way it was in the movie so I wanted to have my version of events out to stand alongside the movie version of events.
DRE: I read that Duncan Fegredo is going to draw the next Hellboy miniseries.
Mike: He just finished the second issue of the next miniseries and Im thrilled with it. Duncan is supposed to do at least three miniseries and those will basically make one giant story. The first ten years of Hellboy were act one of Hellboys life. This three part story that Duncan is doing is the middle arc of Hellboys life. Its his first full grown dealing with the supernatural world as opposed to dealing with the human world and dealing with his mothers side of the family so it is all folklore and witchcraft. No mad scientists, no Nazis, just weird supernatural things.
DRE: Will this be the first time someone else has drawn so much Hellboy?
Mike: Yeah because it is just too big of a story. Im trying to do so many different things. I would have never done it without somebody else drawing it. Its too long, Id never finish it, Id never survive it. Duncan is better at drawing so many things than I am. It was beyond my wildest dreams that we could get him to do this, so Im thrilled to have him.
DRE: Of course Duncans fantastic, but what made you think of him specifically?
Mike: Unlike BPRD where Guy Davis draws nothing like me, but is perfect for the book, I needed somebody that was not going to imitate me but had a similar art style. Duncan spots blacks the way I spot blacks. Also because this book takes place so much in real locations, theres a lot of English countryside and there are a lot of old churches and things like that and Duncans great with reference. When he draws a church it looks like a church. Regular comic book guys fake everything so I needed a guy that when he would draw a forest it would feel like an English forest and when he was drawing an old Russian house it would feel like an old Russian house.
DRE: Do you do full script when youre working with another writer?
Mike: Ive always worked plot style but I also do a lot of thumbnails. Thats actually how Jim Starlin worked with me Cosmic Odyssey. He might not thumbnail where the people are in the particular panels but he would break things down and say, Here are four little panels, one big panel and one medium sized panel on the page. When I work with somebody Im thinking in sequences not dialogue. So its really important to me if we go from a close up to this guy to cutaway to this guy, cutaway to this, cut back to this, come in closer to this and then we pull back to see a big landscape. So I will indicate that in my plot. Sometimes Ill almost draw the page in a thumbnail form. Originally the miniseries was going to be drawn by a different artist so I thumbnailed it a lot more than I would have had I known Duncan was going to be the artist on the book. I trust Duncan a lot more than I trust the artist who was originally going to do the book as far as the storytelling goes. I should write something closer to full script but as I write more for other people Im little by little figuring it out.
DRE: Have you considered not doing the books serialized anymore and just go straight to graphic novels?
Mike: It has never been seriously discussed. I think the numbers make more sense for Dark Horse to do it as a comic rather than do it as a graphic novel. I like the miniseries format because then people dont have to wait a year for a comic. I like dropping it out in those one issue installments to let the audience see what Im working on. Financially, at this point, it makes more sense to basically earn back your money doing the monthly comic and then collect it as a trade paperback.
DRE: Bryan Fuller, who wrote and produced the Screw On Head pilot, said this to me [Mikes] whole edict was make it look like the comic book. But he said that when they gave you the pilot to watch, he said that you said, I started to watch it but it looked too much like my comic book so I didnt want to watch it.
Mike: I dont remember ever saying to make it look like the comic. I dont think that came from me. My suggestion wouldnt have been to make it look like the comic. I think story wise I wanted it to be in the same ballpark as the comic but design wise Im always more comfortable when people redesign my work for another form. Then I dont run into a situation where people are second guessing what I would do. Apparently Screw On Head worked really well with their second guessing my art style. But, like with the Hellboy animated thing, I was very happy that they wanted to do it in a completely different style. I said, Ive done it my way, let them do it a different way. Ive never insisted that stuff look like my stuff. If somebody imitates my style, no matter how good they do it Im always going to be looking at it going, yeah, but you didnt do this right and you didnt do that right. Whereas if its a completely different style I can be a little more objective.
DRE: Did you watch the whole pilot?
Mike: No, I watched about a second of it. There was nothing bad about it but it was too close to my stuff so it gave me the creeps. It was great listening to the guys do the voices. I went to the voice recording and listened to them do the voices but when it came to the visuals of it, it was too close to what I did for me to be an objective observer. Whereas with the Hellboy movie its easy to look at it because its live action which makes it immediately different than what I did.
DRE: Would you want there to be more episodes of Screw On Head?
Mike: Yeah, because people seem to really like it and Bryan seems to understand the material. He seemed to understand the gags I was going for and the genre I was trying to do. Certainly hes the right guy to be doing it.
DRE: Do you want to direct films?
Mike: No, Im so happy doing what Im doing. I love comics and I understand them. Now that Im working more and more as a writer and not an artist, it frees me up to do more stuff in comics, as far as Hellboy and Hellboy related books. Ive also got a bunch of non-Hellboy stories that I want to do in comics. Some of them I will draw, some of them I wont draw. Im very excited about just being an artist and just drawing weird little stories of whatever I want and also keeping the whole Hellboy world going. This year Im writing an Abe Sapien miniseries. I should be writing a Lobster Johnson miniseries before too long and then writing the stuff for Duncan Fegredo for Hellboy. Im also co-writing and illustrating a novel.
DRE: Whats the novel?
Mike: Its a gothic horror vampire epic that at one point I was going to do as a comic and it just got so big I knew Id never finish it. Im so slow these days. If I start plotting something that gets to be a 100 or 200 pages, its just not going to be something Im ever going to be able to do. So I took it to a friend of mine Chris Golden who had written a couple of Hellboy novels. He fleshed out my notes and turned it into this novel. Now Im just doing what will probably end up being close to 200 illustrations for it. Itll come out next fall.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
VIEW 7 of 7 COMMENTS
Jynee said:
is it true they are making a Hellboy 2?
Set to begin April 2007, it would seem.
The only thing I cant stand are the hellboy books drawn by some other artist, I really cant stand anyone elses rendition of hellboy.
Ill be honest though, the movie was a real disapointement and while I think the hellboy character was pretty spot-on, the rest felt like it was thrown together in half an hour. Id much rather see a small animation series then a cgi movie...