Today, June 1, marks the release of Hellboy in Hell #10. For those who don’t know, the comic marks what Mike Mignola has said is his last Hellboy in Hell comic. The character will continue in the series “Hellboy and the BPRD” which is set in the 1950’s and written by Chris Roberson and Mignola, but Mignola wanted to bring the saga of his character to a close. Last month Mignola was also named a Spectrum Grand Master, an award given to one visual artist each year.
I've spoken with Mignola a few times over the years. He remains one of the most talented people in comics, and an incredibly nice guy. He announced that he was taking a year off to get away from comics and paint, though he admits in our conversation, that it's really a year of trying to figure out what he's going to do for the rest of his life.
Alex Dueben: First of all, congratulations on being named a Spectrum Grand Master.
Mike Mignola: Thanks
AD: Just looking at the list of previous winners is amazing - Frank Frazetta, Al Williamson, James Bama, H.R. Giger and the list goes on.
MM: I thought I had my head wrapped around it and then they showed a slideshow. They start out with Frazetta and then when you get to Moebius you’re like, what the hell am I doing here? [laughs] It was very cool. It’s probably the biggest honor I’ve ever gotten. I’m very humbled by it.
AD: And now the final issue of Hellboy is coming out.
MM: I kind of feel like I’m done now. What more is there for me to do? I just have to figure out how to spend the rest of my life. [laughs]
AD: Obviously you finished months ago. How does it feel?
MM: It’s a lot of different things on a lot of different days. Drawing the last page was really difficult. I had in mind what I was going to do and when it came right down to doing it I thought, can I really get away with this? That was the most angst I had on the entire series, doing the last page. Then it was just amazingly liberating once it was done. Now after a couple months I’m going, what am I doing with the rest of my life?
I’ve learned in the last few weeks that my brain needs projects. Whether I do them or not, I’ve had to start throwing stuff into the back of my head and say, okay, little man who lives in the back of my head who needs to stitch shit together, here’s a bunch of ideas. Maybe we’ll do them, maybe we won’t do them, but I’ll give you this stuff to chew on. Already my brain is trying to come up with future projects. The idea of the great unknown was just too much for me.
AD: You want to make a completely unrelated comic or character?
MM: At least right now, that’s what I imagine doing. This could change, but right now I feel like as an artist I’ve kind of done what I can with Hellboy. As a writer there’s still a lot of stuff that I’d like to do and I have a lot of ideas. I love the character, but I think I might have done it as well as I can see doing it. At least for now. I’m sure I’ll always draw the character. There will always be pinups or covers or things like that. But as far as drawing Hellboy stories, I think my brain wants to try some different things.
AD: Did you have a sense when you started that Hellboy in Hell would be finite and would conclude Hellboy’s story?
MM: That’s a tough one to answer. When I started, I didn’t think it would be finite. I’m sure there are many interviews where I said, this is what I’m going to draw for the rest of my life. Just these stand alone stories of Hellboy rambling around in hell doing whatever I want him to do. Then it turned into one big story. At one point it was a much bigger story and then really when I got to the end of issue #8 and Hellboy is sitting under a tree smoking a cigarette, my brain just said, we’re done. There was something about that page where my brain just said, we’ve now got him to a place where we’ve done everything that we need to do, except of course I hadn’t done the real ending. I always knew what the ending was going to be. Which is weird considering I just said that it was going to go on forever, but I’d come up with a gag where we would see this big ending. Whether the series would end or not, I was going to show the ultimate conclusion of Hellboy in Hell. I knew what the last issue was going to be.
I had plotted a lot more material, but I realized a lot of what I had plotted didn’t really add to the story. There was some fun stuff, but it was a lot of spinning my wheels. Here I was at the end of issue #8 thinking I feel like I’m done except I haven’t done the climax–which is issue #10–so really I had to just go through all the material I had planned to do and come up with an issue #9. Once I re-figured things I had to come up with a brand new idea for that one issue. I think that answers the question.
AD: You had these two issues back to back, one where he meets a soldier who sold his soul to a devil and Hellboy tries to help him, and another where Hellboy encounters the Vampire of Prague, who he killed. I remember thinking, okay, this is what the series is going to be.
MM: That’s what it was going to be. Issue #5, which is the three gold whips which is the one with the solider, and then issue #6 is the Vampire of Prague. That’s really what I thought the series was going to be. But I did that silly thing where Hellboy killed Satan and when I did that I thought, this could be a fun little gag, but I’ll never get back to doing anything about it. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed like that’s kind of a big deal. As much as I never wanted this thing to turn into a big epic story, it did. A lot of those fun rambling, roaming around the different neighborhoods of hell stories went out the window.
AD: Rereading the first issue, Hellboy is watching a puppet show of A Christmas Carol and that scene is presented so ominously and it takes on a different meaning now with the series ending.
MM: I have had people say when you go back and reread, there are certain bits that have more impact when you see the whole thing. Some of that stuff was planned and some of it is just happy accident. Or it’s just the tone I was feeling. The Christmas Carol gag, I really wish I could say that scene was there to foreshadow something. Really, that puppet show sequence is just my favorite sequence from the Christmas Carol. I’ve always wanted to do something with it and I thought, I will throw it into the first issue of Hellboy in Hell as a warning to readers that this book is going to be me doing whatever the hell I want. If A Christmas Carol puppet show is not what you’re looking for, you might as well stop now. The fact that it then spun into a Christmas Carol-like sequence of Hellboy getting a tour around hell was just something I was going to do anyway and I thought, it’s nice that those things work together. But really, I just wanted to do that exchange between Scrooge and Marley.
AD: You mentioned that the idea was Hellboy ambling around hell and this approach is something you’ve done a lot over the years.
MM: I’ve always been slow as an artist. I knew I was never going to do anything like a monthly book, so if I was going to do something that was episodic then doing small self-contained stories seemed the way to do it. I guess in the comics world that is pretty unusual that not the bulk of the series, but certainly a significant portion of the series, are these short stories. I think that’s because as a reader, I’m a short story guy. I draw comics, but I’m trying to create a body of work that reflects more the literature I’m interested in, rather than to try to create a traditional comic book series. If this was running in Weird Tales magazine, the old pulp magazine, it would run as a series of short stories, the way Conan or any of those series characters ran. That was the model more than any kind of comic book series model.
AD: Those stories had an order and a mythology, but that wasn’t the order in which they were published.
MM: Robert E. Howard wrote the Conan stories and other people put them in chronological order, but he didn’t write them in chronological order. You would have stories about him as an older guy and him as a younger guy. I don’t know that he had a sketch for this guy’s life. Most of the Hellboy short stories I did, it was just a roll of the dice when I would put a date on the story. Most of them didn’t need to take place in any particular year. I wasn’t really conscious of, oh this is Hellboy as young man. It was just, what year haven’t I used? Not much of this stuff was really planned out from the beginning.
AD: I think you mentioned once that “Right Hand of Doom” was a cool title you thought of.
MM: I think that was just because I needed a title. There was a short story I believe called The Right Hand of Doom and it’s just a guy talking to Hellboy about Hellboy and about his hand. I think, well, I know that was a reaction to the fact that I’d given Hellboy this funky hand and he’d had this funky hand for X number of years and no readers were saying, what’s the deal with the hand? I thought, maybe I will draw attention to the fact that he’s got this big weird hand since nobody else is commenting on it. Of course you trot something like that out and it has big implications that you eventually deal with. Some of the hand stuff I probably wouldn’t have ever gotten into had the hand not featured so prominently in the movie. There are a couple things that happened in the movie that I definitely wanted to make sure that I got my version–not the movie version–out there. If something was spelled out in a way in the film that didn’t jive with my way, I wanted to make sure that I presented my version–the real version–in the comic.
AD: I can understand that. What I’ve found interesting is that even people who only know the movies, they know that it’s a comic.
MM: It’s a funny thing. Even people who are fans of the comic will confuse certain details with the movie. Film is such a powerful medium that once you get certain images stuck in your head and certain phrases stuck in your head, you can’t remember where they came from. The image of Hellboy in a room full of cats sticks in their head or the fact that Hellboy’s gun has a name sticks in their head. I’m constantly going, no that’s the movie, the comic this. No that’s the movie, the comic is this. I’m very happy that in the comic Hellboy had a dog and in the movie he has a bunch of cats. It’s a very clear difference. I wanted to make to make sure that we didn’t pick up anything from the film. I don’t want to bash the film too much, but I feel like I’m in competition with the film and the film’s going to win. The film is just always going to reach a wider audience. It’s going to make a certain impression on people. I’m doing everything I can to make sure the comic stands on its own and doesn’t just become this thing that is entirely swallowed by this cinematic monster.
AD: When most people picture Superman, they think of Christopher Reeve with John Williams’ music in the background.
MM: It’s inevitable. There was a day when I on was on the movie set and for whatever reason I said to del Toro, I realize now that you win. Because if I get run over by a bus–and it’s a very slow day–they’ll say, Mike Mignola creator of Hellboy run over by bus and they’ll show a photo of Ron Perlman. That’s what happens and you’ve got to make your peace with that. It doesn’t mean I’m not going to spend the rest of my life kind of fighting to make sure the image that you see is the comic book image, but I know how things work. You see it with Jack Kirby. You see it with Stan Lee. When they talk about these guys they’re showing something from the movies.
AD: You mentioned Weird Tales, this old pulp magazine, as a big influence. You and Howard Chaykin adapted some of Fritz Leiber’s stories to comics, which was about these two adventurers, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, getting into adventures. Was Leiber or Manly Wade Wellman, who wrote other rambling stories, a big influence?
MM: Not at all, I don’t think. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was one of my favorite things that I’ve done as an artist because I got to create this world, but Lieber was never my favorite writer. He was a little bit too intellectual for me. I liked the nuts and bolts fantasy guys a little bit more. Drawing the comic was huge for me because I do love guys just rambling around through this world. Again, my idea of Hellboy in Hell was originally going to something much closer to Fafhrd and Gray Mouser series where these guys go here’s a boat, let’s sail this way and then get off on this island and we’ll do this. Oh here’s the Asian corner of hell, let’s go find a place to have a drink there. That’s what I imagined that book being.
You mentioned Manly Wade Wellman. He had this John character with his guitar who wandered through the Appalachian Mountains and stumbled in and out of trouble. That was probably one of the biggest influences on all those Hellboy short stories. The idea that you have a Hellboy in Japan story. He’s not sent there on a mission, he’s just wandering around Japan and stumbles across this palace where heads try to eat him.
AD: I always had this idea of Hellboy just getting off an airplane and just walking until he gets tired and wants to come home, and that’s how he ends up on a lot of these adventures.
MM: It’s something I’ve talked to Chris Roberson about. I just did a short story and in there I make a reference to how I think this works. I figure in the early stories he’s going with the team on a mission and when he would be done, he would just wander off. It’s time to get back on the plane, wait, where did Hellboy go? The short story I just did starts with one of the agents calling back and saying, we don’t know where Hellboy is. We wrapped this thing up, we got a good night sleep and when we woke up, he’s taken off to look for a haunted mirror. That I think is a really important element to the Hellboy stories that now that we’re doing this Hellboy and the BPRD series I’ve got to work with Chris Roberson and see if we can work that in. Maybe there are years at a time where he says, don’t call me, I’m going to Asia.
AD: You mentioned that one of the things you liked most about drawing Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser was getting to create a world. So how do you create hell?
MM: I had done this book The Amazing Screw-On Head, this one issue comic where it was done entirely for myself. I didn’t expect anybody to like it or even see it. It was just a collection of stuff I wanted to draw. The kinds of buildings I like to draw. The kinds of machinery I like to draw. Everything in it was just a complete fantasy world made up of old Victorian-looking stuff. I loved doing that and eventually I figured out, that’s the stuff I like to draw. I took a six year break where Duncan Fegredo was drawing Hellboy. When I got the itch to come back, I no longer had any interest in drawing the real world. I never had that much interest in drawing the real world to begin with, but if I was going to go back to Hellboy, I wanted to go back to drawing this world made up of all the stuff I like to draw.
At some point you’re not really thinking commercially. You’re almost thinking, what can I get away with? I’ve gotten away with doing Hellboy for X number of years, but can I get away with drawing Hellboy wandering through a world made up of stuff that I would just draw for fun anyway? It’s that weird blur–is this a job, or is this me just drawing for fun and people keep giving me money for it? I am the most fortunate guy in comics. I’ve been able to make this thing more and more just exactly what I would want to draw for fun and continue to make a living doing it.
AD: You mentioned Chris Roberson earlier, who’s writing Hellboy and the BPRD and the new Witchfinder miniseries. For so many years you were working with your editor Scott Allie, and John Arcudi, who was writing BPRD. What’s it been like working with Chris?
MM: It’s great. It’s a little different because I knew John before we worked together. John working on this stuff was a natural outgrowth of John and I having lunch together. I knew John well, I knew the kind of stuff he liked, I knew the kind of stuff he did. When John started saying, I don’t want to do this book anymore, it was clear that I wasn’t going to pick up the slack. To bring in that late in the game someone else was pretty daunting. I just couldn’t see how we could bring in somebody out of left field and keep the vision that was running through the book. Chris’ name came up for the Witchfinder series. When he pitched an idea for the Witchfinder book, it drew on so many different things that were sprinkled through the rest of the Hellboy universe.
There was stuff that was mentioned in Hellboy, stuff that was mentioned in BPRD, and he just did a wonderful job with the Victorian-era Witchfinder. What I saw instantly was this guy loves this world and he wants to play with this world. He doesn’t need to go and dot every I that I left undotted through my run, but he gets what I’m doing and he wants to play with the toys I created. So I said, anything he wants to do is great. He is different from me just as John and I are radically different in our interests. We have certain shared interests, but Chris and I have a lot of differences, which is great. We’re able to bring a new flavor to that stuff, but still play with the toys that I established.
AD: One new book that Chris is writing is a new Witchfinder miniseries. One of those comes out every few years. Are we going to keep seeing more?
MM: I’m such a fan of that period and those old Victorian occult detectives. I knew Chris was familiar with that kind of material. One of the first things that we did was sketch out an outline for the Witchfinder’s whole career. Some of it was in the Hellboy Companion, but we broke it down into books. Once we actually get into that stuff maybe it’ll expand. I certainly don’t want to micromanage. I want Chris to do what Chris wants to do. My job with guys like Chris is to just rough out a general plan. We need five stories that take place during this period and it would be nice if one is this kind of story, but I’m not giving him plots. Maybe I’ll suggest, it would fun to do something like this. If he likes that idea, great, and if not, then that’s fine. It’s his book with my input. I always find that guys do their best work if you get out of their way. Certainly John [Arcudi] on B.P.R.D. at some point that was 98-99% his book. We discussed a general direction and this has to happen to the world, but how you get there, how long you want to take to get there, how many side trips you want to make before we get there, John, that’s you.
AD: I think you said in one interview that you keep a light hand on the rudder.
MM: It sounds like somebody would have said that. It doesn’t sound like me. I don’t generally make rudder references. [laughs] I know where the boat is going but if it takes a lot of different turns to get there, that’s fine by me.
AD: This week besides reading a lot of Hellboy comics I read Scott Bukatman’s new book Hellboy’s World, which is published by the University of California Press. Obviously you never thought years ago that you were making work that would be the subject of an academic text.
MM: Obviously not. [laughs] When you make up something that’s called Hellboy first off you don’t expect anybody to say, “yes, we’ll give you money to draw that comic.” You certainly don’t expect movies or anything else. My favorite question I get from young artists is, how did you go about creating this transmedia franchise or whatever they call it. First off, if I thought in any way I was trying to do that, I wouldn’t have called it Hellboy. It’s the stupidest name you could come up with. It’s one of the things I’m most proud of: I made up a weird thing, I gave it an amazingly stupid name, and despite all that, it has succeeded so far beyond anything I could have ever imagined.
AD: Comics are filled with attempts at transmedia properties, which tend to fail miserably because they were crass attempts to make a transmedia property.
MM: I see it all the time. It’s the saddest trend to me in comics these days. I see so much stuff where I go, this is just your pitch for a movie, this is just your pitch for a TV series. I see guys writing and drawing comics with movie budgets in mind. We’re not going to do Galactus because that’s too expensive, so we’ll do a whole comic about guys getting in and out of cars. I grew up reading Marvel Comics and nobody was thinking, gee, if we do a Thor movie we can’t do this or that. Just do the comic. We’re just doing a comic. Again I got lucky. I worked my ass off to get in a position where I could get lucky, but still, I got lucky. My advice to young guys is always, unless you really love the current trend in comics–and that’s fine–but if there’s something you’re just dying to do, do it. It doesn’t have to be Dune. It doesn’t have to be 60,000 pages. Do a 10 page short story of the thing that you really want to do. Because heaven forbid it’s successful or people like it, then you’re stuck doing the thing you really want to do. And worst comes worst, you did a story and you put something out there that really reflects what you like to do. Maybe it’s the only time you’ll ever get to do that if you’re trying to make a living in comics.
I understand the realities. Most stuff doesn’t work. Most independent stuff doesn’t necessarily work. But you’ll never know if you don’t try it. I saw a couple of older cartoonists who had their dream projects and they never did them. Or when they did do them, they had gotten so in the habit of grinding stuff out under deadline pressures that when they finally did their dream project it looked like any other comic they did. That was really scary to me. I didn’t want to be that guy. I wanted to at least have one thing out there that reflects what I do. Hellboy was that. I thought, I’ll do four issues of Hellboy–Dark Horse is foolish enough to give money to do that–it won’t succeed and then I’ll crawl back to doing Batman or whatever I can get a job doing. But at least I will have this one thing out there where I can say, once upon a time I did the book I wanted to do. Then Hellboy became my full time job, my day job, a commercial job–even though it was still my dream job. It was like, well if I can get away with Hellboy, maybe I can get away with this other thing, The Amazing Screw-On Head. Nobody’s going to want that. Again, an amazingly stupid title. It’s me doing humor–which good bad or otherwise–I don’t really know what I’m doing. I’ll just make up this funky thing that’s just something I would think is funny. What happens? Immediately people say, it’s the best thing I ever did. My whole career is me saying, well then I’ll just keep pushing. If I can get away that, maybe I can get away with this. At this point it’s just trying me trying to take the stuff that’s in my head, that’s entirely me, and put it out there.
AD: You announced that you wanted to take a year off to paint. What do your paintings look like?
MM: When I figure that out, I’ll let you know. The whole year of painting is a whole other subject. I realized in the last couple weeks that the year of painting might really be the year of trying to figure out what I want to do for the next phase of my career. I’ve done a couple paintings. I’m not really sure what I’m trying to do. I would like to figure something out and do something that isn’t a story. What it really is is a year away from drawing comics.
