Mike Mignola created the demonic, cigar-chomping
paranormal investigator Hellboy in 1993, and the character quickly became a hit
in the comic-book world. A lot of that had to do with Mignola's angular, shadowy
art, a style Alan Moore once called "German Expressionism meets Jack Kirby."
But there was also some honest-to-gosh pathos to Hellboy—an angle that
filmmaker Guillermo del Toro has played on in his two adaptations, 2004's Hellboy and the
new Hellboy II: The Golden Army. The sequel didn't have an easy birth: Its
predecessor performed unremarkably at the box office, and the dissolution of
Sony-backed Revolution Studios last year left the project homeless until
Universal scooped it up. Mignola—who, besides being credited as del Toro's
writing partner on Hellboy II, manages a mini-empire of Hellboy comics and spin-offs
published by Dark Horse—spoke with The A.V. Club about what it was like, sending
his big, red baby off into the world.
The A.V. Club: How does it feel to open at
number one?
Mike Mignola: It feels good. [Laughs.]
It was a tight one, you know. It's hard to beat Will Smith, but we did. It was
touch-and-go there for a while, getting this made. Hellboy is such an odd film. But
I'm really happy, and the studio's happy. We did what they wanted us to do for
opening weekend. Yay! Hopefully that means we'll get to do more of these.
AVC: How was Hellboy II touch-and-go?
MM: There were a lot of ups and downs. We pitched the
movie to Revolution, and they said yeah. But then, of course, Revolution went
away. I'm blurry on this stuff, 'cause I'm not in most of those kinds of
meetings, but somewhere along the way a couple other producers talking about
doing the movie. Then Pan's Labyrinth came out, and I was so excited for Guillermo.
But at the same time, I was like, "Oh, crap. Now we're not going to get to do Hellboy
II." The
way I seem to remember it, Universal came almost out of nowhere at the last
minute and said, "We'll do it." Universal is not a name I had heard associated
with Hellboy since
way back before we did the first movie. They swooped in at the 11th hour. So
opening weekend was good: We wanted the movie to perform so we could say to the
studio, "Thanks, and you made the right decision."
AVC: Why did the sequel get juggled around so
much?
MM: Part of the problem was, the first film didn't do
the magic number that immediately makes people say, "It's a hit, let's do
another one." The more time that went by, the more people said, "Hellboy, that's a weird thing."
It's never going to be a regular superhero film, so when you see Spider-Man and X-Men making all this money,
you have to realize that Hellboy isn't quite one of those. It's an odd, quirky,
weird little thing. It doesn't have the name recognition of all the other big
comic-book films. It always felt kind of like a gamble. But Universal certainly
seems to see the potential of a Hellboy franchise. There are so many superheroes
out there in the movies—quite frankly, it's nice to have one that's no so…
regular.
AVC: How much of an effect did Pan's
Labyrinth have
on Hellboy II?
MM: I think it had a huge effect. It certainly
redefined Guillermo. But at the same time, we needed Hellboy II to be a more commercial
film than Pan's Labyrinth. Certainly Pan's Labyrinth elevated everyone's
perception of Guillermo, and that helped. It was just a riot when I saw the
first trailer for Hellboy II, and it started with a fairy skittering across
the screen. It was clear they were building Hellboy II on Pan's Labyrinth. So yeah, it worked out
real nice. It's an interesting progression through Guillermo's career: Blade
II was
the commercial film he needed to make to get to do Hellboy, and after Hellboy he got a little more
freedom to run off and do his personal film. Then when he comes back to Hellboy, he's building off that
personal film. It's a really nice chain of events.
AVC: What did you want to accomplish with Hellboy
II,
especially compared to the first film?
MM: This one was interesting. I went in to Guillermo
and basically said, "What do you want to do?" It was his call. I put these
characters so much in his hands. He started out wanting to do an adaptation of
one of my comic-book stories, like the first movie was. After a couple hours of
talking, though, we hit a snag with this one story, so we both said, "Let's go
do a fairy tale instead." He was writing Pan, and my stories for the Hellboy comic at
the time were all folklore- and fairy-tale-based. That's just where both our
heads happened to be. The first film focused more on this H.P. Lovecraft stuff,
but what we didn't get at all in the first picture was the whole folklore
thing, which is such a big part of what I put in the Hellboy comics. Rather than mixing
all those things together in the second film, though, we decided to focus
totally on the folklore. Between those two pictures, you really get a sense of
the range of Hellboy's supernatural world.
AVC: It seems that folklore
aspect—Russian, Irish, even Appalachian—keeps getting larger in the Hellboy comics.
MM: Yeah. The first 10 years
of the comic was
just trying out different things. My goal when I created Hellboy was to do a little bit of
everything I like: ghost stories, folktales, mad scientists. Little by little,
those pieces start dictating where the main storyline was going. This wasn't a
big plan at the beginning, but the comic has definitely started leaning in one
direction. Hellboy
has basically been swallowed up by the whole folklore world at this point.
AVC: What's drawn you
in that direction?
MM: It's such a spectacular
cast of characters. I look at all of world mythology and folklore as my toy to
play with. There are just so many characters and creatures there I want to put
on paper. It's something that my readers are mostly unaware of. It's a really
exciting thing for me to take material that I really love and put a new coat of
paint on it and present it to this audience. And I don't have to make up any of
the characters. [Laughs.] I can just pull a book of mythology off the shelf and
say, "I'll use this guy." I also hate making up names for fantasy characters.
I'll just flip through these books and say, "Wow, this is way crazier than
anything I could make up." A crab with the head of a lion? Yeah, I want to draw
that. It's what I responded to as a little kid, reading this stuff.
AVC: Other comics
creators like Neil Gaiman and Bill Willingham have gotten a lot of mileage out
of recontextualizing myths and fairy tales, too.
MM: There's so much beautiful
stuff there. I'll never be Neil Gaiman, but it makes me look smart when I pull
this old stuff out of books. There are so many wonderful bits and pieces to
play with.
AVC: Then you're having
your own Hellboy mythos interact with established, even ancient ones.
MM: It is a bit strange. I
can't think about that too much. It puts a bit of pressure on you. When Neil
and Bill and I play with these established myths, it winds up being many of our
readers' only exposure to them. So if I'm doing a story in the Hellboy comic that uses Russian
folklore characters like Baba Yaga or Koschei The Deathless, I'm bending them
to my purpose. But most people aren't going to know that, so I feel okay taking
it further away from the source material. I will always try to direct people back
to the original myths, though. But that's the nature of folklore: It changes with
time.
AVC: Do you think that
process is similar to Hellboy being reinterpreted by del Toro or the writers
and artists working on your comics?
MM: I think so. Where I'm
altering the Baba Yaga character from Russian folklore, I'm also sending
Hellboy out to be altered. And just as most people reading my comics will only
know my version of Baba Yaga, most people in a global sense will only know
Guillermo's version of Hellboy. It's one of those things you have to make your
peace with when a moderately successful film franchise is made out of your
work. That's the public face of your creation. Many people who see the Hellboy movies will not
be aware that it was a comic first. And most of them will never read the comic.
You're going to live in the shadow of this thing that someone else made.
Fortunately for me, the Hellboy movies are pretty true to the source material. I
could make myself crazy correcting people who talk to me and refer to Hellboy
drinking beer, which we've never seen in the comic, or other things like that.
You can't compete. You just have to say "It's over there, and I'm over here."
I'm going to stick to what I've always done with the comics.
AVC: Does the fact that
you reinterpret mythological characters make it easier for you to relinquish
control of your own characters?
MM: I've never really thought
about it, but yeah, I guess so. Fair's fair. The difference is, whoever made up
Baba Yaga is long gone. I'm still here. [Laughs.] At the same time, I did turn
these characters over to Guillermo, and I knew I was giving him license to make
these changes. It's one thing to know these things intellectually, and it's
another to deal with the reality of the situation. And it's fine. I've made my
peace with it. The tradeoff is, a lot more people know about this character I
made up. If you look at all the articles about this year's summer movies, people
are writing about superhero films and mention Iron Man, The Dark Knight, and Hellboy II in the same breath. And
that's cool. It's certainly putting me on the map. I can't complain. Plus, you
have to look at it this way: One guy created Batman, but a million people have
worked on the character over the years. It's kind of hard to say, "Oh, that's
Bob Kane's Batman." But with Hellboy, it's still very clearly my Hellboy. It hasn't gone
through a million hands before making it onto film.
AVC: At the same time,
you've been handing over an increasing amount of work on the Hellboy comics to other creators.
MM: It's the only way the
comics were ever going to get done. [Laughs.] Still, almost all of the actual Hellboy stories
come from me. My thumbprint is on every single thing that happens with Hellboy. It was
the hardest thing I ever had to do professionally, letting someone else draw
the main Hellboy comic.
He's so much mine.
But I still have no intention of ever handing over the writing of the main Hellboy comic to
someone else. That character is my baby.
AVC: When you started Hellboy, though, weren't you
more interested in drawing it than writing it?
MM: Exactly; it's totally
switched around. Hellboy started out as just a list of things I wanted to
draw, and the original idea was to give that list to [legendary comics creator]
John Byrne and have him write the stories. But once I came up with that list,
all those things started bumping into each other and cobbling themselves
together into a story. So when I finally did the first Hellboy story, I wrote up a plot to
give to John to finish. What I didn't realize was, I had pretty much written
the whole thing. That's the only way I would've been able to get into writing: accidently.
The process of writing and drawing my own comics at first was just too
daunting. I needed the safety net of a professional like John.
AVC: Duncan Fegredo
took over drawing Hellboy from you last year, but recently you printed a
long, angry letter from a reader begging you to come back and draw it again.
MM: Some people want me to do
everything. There would be such a small output of work if I did it all. Believe
me, I wish I could do it. I wish I was Jack Kirby and could draw six pages a
day. But I can't. At this point, there are so many different books involved in
the Hellboy franchise.
My main goal is to get back and be able to draw comics again. I've just been so
busy with writing and keeping everything up and running. The problem is, I've
just got too many ideas. Every character I create in Hellboy, I say, "Ooh, I want to
do an entire book about that guy." I'll introduce a little hedgehog, and there
are 16 stories I want to write about that guy. It's fun, but my cast of
characters is getting dramatically bigger all the time. And all of them are
saying, "What about me! Tell my story!"
AVC: Why did you wind
up going with Fegredo?
MM: I didn't just want to pick
a guy off the street. I wanted a guy I knew, a guy whose work I really liked.
Or, like, Duncan, who's 10 times of a better artist than I am. And I need a
certain level of communication: I'll tell the plot of a story 600 different
ways to an artist a year before we even get to doing that story. Finding
someone who will put up with me is a big thing. [Laughs.] In the case of Hellboy, I also needed somebody
who had a similar graphic sensibility. Not a guy who would imitate me, but a
guy who would do enough of the same things I do.
AVC: In the commentary
you and del Toro provide for the DVD of the first Hellboy movie, del Toro
continually uses the word "Mignola-esque." How does it feel to be an adjective?
MM: What's weird is when I refer to something as
Mignola-esque. [Laughs.] Which I don't do very often. My art style really comes
from my own influences, guys like Frank Frazetta and Bernie Wrightson. I
learned so much about what I wanted to do from them. But over the years you
combine all your influences into your own. Still, sometimes the easiest thing I
can reference is my own work: I have created this certain kind of atmosphere
and this certain kind of pacing in the comics I do. It's not for me to say if it's
particularly unique or anything, but sometimes I do wind up becoming
self-referential. I remember in a plot for a comic I read once, the writer was
telling the artist, "I need a Mike Mignola cemetery in this scene." Of course,
when I was coming up, they would have said, "I need a Bernie Wrightson
cemetery." That's kind of cool. And of course it's gigantically flattering when
someone like Guillermo uses a term like that.
AVC: Have there been
any points where your vision and del Toro's clashed?
MM: After having done the
first film, and with the success of Pan's Labyrinth, I think Guillermo really
felt he owned these characters this time. He wanted my blessing on everything
he did, but he wasn't really asking me. He wasn't asking, "Should I do this?"
or "Would Hellboy do this?", which he did a lot on the first picture. He did
ask those things sometimes on this picture, but there were scenes where I was
like, "Are you really sure?" And he was like, "No, trust me, this will work."
AVC: There's substantially
more humor in the sequel than in the original. Was that your call?
MM: No. Guillermo's sense of
humor is lot broader than mine. Mine is much more dry. I did not have any
influence on that. If anything, my tendency is always to go darker and more
serious. The humor that I put into stuff—other than Hellboy's dialogue,
which always has a bit of that to it—is absurdist humor, things like
Johann having no head. The fact that that character came off as kind of funny
in the film was surprising to me when I first saw it. I always think of these
characters I've created as being perfectly straight. But he's ectoplasmic gas
in a bag with a clear plastic head; that to me is absurdly funny, so you just
play the character straight. The real broad humor was Guillermo.
AVC: Are there anything
about Hellboy II you have trouble with?
MM: It's hard to have trouble
with it, because this is a del Toro picture. The first picture was a bit more
of a collaboration. But even though we came up with the original story for the
new film together, I felt like I should let him do what he's going to do. There
were scenes I tried to get him to modify or take out altogether, but at the end
of the day, I realized I was fighting a losing battle. Guillermo is married to
this scene, therefore he must have in his head how it's going to work. I'll
just back off.
AVC: What scenes did
you want changed or removed?
MM: The whole troll market
scene is so not my sensibility. I tried like hell to make that scene go away. I
wanted it to be more of a Western, High Noon kind of thing, where we
just glimpse a couple characters disappearing into doorways and all these
shadowy faces looking out between shutters at Hellboy. Of course, the scene as
it is wound up being one that everybody loves. If I had gotten to make the
exact movie I wanted to, it wouldn't have opened at number one. [Laughs.] I
like stuff that's spookier. I would have used a lot less colors, like maybe
four. Guillermo uses all the colors; he has the big-ass crayon box. My movie
would have been very dark and very gloomy and very sober and very quiet.
AVC: And no Barry
Manilow.
MM: Yeah, that. I don't know
if I argued to have that scene of Hellboy and Abe singing Barry Manilow
together taken out, but I certainly did have a "You're kidding, right?" kind of
reaction. Eventually I was like, "Oh, um, okay." [Laughs.] "You're having so
much fun, just go with it." I had to trust Guillermo. Even with the first
picture, there were scenes that I was so worried about. Especially the
emotional stuff. I'd be like, "Really? Hellboy's really going to come out and
say this and say that?" Guillermo's much more unapologetically romantic about
stuff than I am. Those are the things that made me nervous. I remember one
scene in particular, Guillermo told me, "Just wait. People are going to cry
when they see that." And he was right: My wife's favorite parts of the first
movie are things that I tried desperately to get Guillermo to take out.
[Laughs.] So at this point, I just have to trust him.