Hellboy creator Mike Mignola has seen his big red demon hero turned into a feature-film star by director Guillermo del Toro in Hellboy and its sequel, Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
But Mignola never left the comics world where he began, most recently publishing Hellboy: Chapel of Moloch, the first the first Hellboy comic he's provided the script and art for since "The Island" in 2005. He also collaborated with author Christopher Golden on an illustrated supernatural novel called Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, which is in the process of getting its own film adaptation.
Mignola spoke exclusively with SCI FI Wire about his projects; the following is an edited version of that interview. (Hellboy II: The Golden Army is now available on DVD and Blu-ray disc.)
Overall, how would you assess how Hellboy II captures the spirit and feeling of Hellboy as you envisioned it?
Mignola: It's still very true to the spirit. We've veered pretty far at this point away from the story I'm writing. The first film was very much taking my character and translating it into the del Toro world, making it del Toro's Hellboy. And the second film is a continuation of the del Toro Hellboy universe. ... He and I have very different sensibilities about certain things. I think you see a lot more of del Toro's personality in the second film. The humor is much broader. It's different than my sensibilities, but at the root, Hellboy's personality is still very much the personality I created.
Talk about going back to comics with Hellboy?
Mignola: Never left. No, I, I've always done the comics. I mean, comics is what I do. It's my first love. Working on the film and stuff has always been kind of a fun little distraction, but other than those chunks of time doing preproduction, I've never left comics for ... any length of time. I believe, actually, even when I was doing preproduction on Hellboy, I was writing the comics. The difference is, because of the films and things like that, I had to stop drawing the comic. Hopefully, I will go back to it one of these days, but I still write the comic. I write some of the spinoff books and the spinoff books that I don't write, I co-write.
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Tell us about the new one, Hellboy: Chapel of Moloch.
Mignola: Yeah, I hadn't drawn a full-length Hellboy comic in a very long time, and ... I got ahead enough in my schedule that I said, "You know, let me see if I can still do this." I hadn't drawn a comic of any kind in a couple years, so I made up the story one day, and a couple days later I sat down and started drawing it, and it really was so much fun. But I was nervous, because I just thought the last story I had drawn years earlier, I had a real hard time with, because I'm such a perfectionist, and I thought if I can just get in there and just let go some of that perfectionism and just enjoy it, you know? And that's what happened. So coming off of that, I'm just going, "Well, that's great. That's what I want to do." ...
The new one, ... I made up something that I thought would actually be fun and easy to draw, so it takes place mostly in a dark room. So my emphasis in this new one was just about the pacing. It was taking something that another artist could do as an eight-page story, and I did it as a 24-page story, because I just wanted to see if I could: if the pacing and the mood and the atmosphere [would work]. ... Mood and atmosphere became much more important than, you know, telling a big, clever story. It's one thing I really like to do is take something that is a very simple story and just milk it for all it's weird moments and atmosphere. ...
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You also cowrote a book with Christopher Golden?
Mignola: Baltimore, or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire.
How did that come together and is this different for you, a departure?
Mignola: Yeah, it started out the way everything starts out: as a comic I was going to do. But because the Hellboy stuff was taking so much time, and this thing just got to be a bigger and bigger story, I didn't see any way I was ever going to have the time to sit down and do this thing as a graphic novel. ... I had told Chris about it over the years that I was going to do this thing, and he wanted to see it, and everybody was waiting for this thing, and it becomes something of "Is it never going to happen, or do we find a way to do it in an altered form?" So one day I called up Chris and said, "Hey, what if we do this as a novel? But I really want to draw certain images, so why don't we do it as a profusely illustrated novel?" Much to my amazement, we found a couple different publishers who wanted it, so we did it.
Is it headed for adaptation as a movie?
Mignola: It is banging around. Chris and I have co-written a screenplay, and it's sort of in development, and we're kind of going in to do another rewrite on the screenplay. It's an interesting process. I've never been involved in this kind of thing. This is much different than adapting Hellboy to the film, because del Toro adapted Hellboy to the film. It's a very different process adapting your own work to the film. Also because Hellboy was ... drawing on a lot of stories, you could say, "Well, what are we going to do for the film?" Whereas with Baltimore, this one specific story, how do you adapt and stay true--as true as you can--to the initial story? So I'm having conversations on Baltimore that fortunately I never had on Hellboy, because del Toro had those conversations. Del Toro fought with the studio. And, unfortunately, with Baltimore, I'm in those meetings. [It] makes you want to stay and draw comics.
Who are your partners?
Mignola: Well, Chris and I. ... He's a real writer, so he does the bulk of the real writing. And at this point, [producer/director] David Goyer is developing it with us, so we will see what happens. ...
Will there be any more animated Hellboy films?
Mignola: Yeah, it would be nice. I mean, we wrote a third one, but that thing kind of came to a screeching halt. So one of my hopes is, you know, with the success of the film, though we got nuked out of existence by Batman, with the DVD, which I assume will do very well, it can kind of light a fire under some things like animation or something else. ...
The third animated film was actually a retelling of Hellboy's origin and connecting him to my World War II era pulp character, Lobster Johnson. So it's one that the fans were super-excited about. It, of course, was the best of the scripts that we wrote, and, of course, it's in a drawer someplace.
What about Hellboy III? Have you talked with del Toro?
Mignola: Yeah, I mean, Guillermo has been talking about Hellboy III, I think, ever since the first film and certainly on the second film, anything that he came up with that didn't fit into the second film, all that stuff's obviously going to go into the third film, including Lobster Johnson's supposed to be in the third film. If he puts everything into the third film that he says he's going to put in the third film, the third film's going to be about 67 hours long. The truth is, by the end of Hellboy II, the character's veered so far away from the character in the comic that I have no idea what Hellboy III would be. It's completely, ... 100 percent now in del Toro territory. It doesn't relate to what I do at all, so I'd be very curious to see what Hellboy III would be.
