Creator is taking a break from ‘Hellboy’ to paint
Every bit of Mike Mignola’s success has come from the tip of his pen. The artist and writer has shaped the cape and cowl of Batman; his sketches transformed Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula.” Praised by critics for his light touch on gigantic monsters, Mignola has collected a dozen Eisner Awards and a passionate fan base. But he’s putting down the pen on his biggest creation, “Hellboy.” At least for a little while. “I can’t say for sure this is the last ‘Hellboy’ thing I’ll ever be involved in. I don’t want to put that final of a note on it,” Mignola warns from behind his studio drafting desk in Manhattan Beach, Calif. “But for now, this is the end of my run of writing and drawing the Hellboy stuff.”
Outside Mignola’s work room, yoga-panted neighbors trot along in the blazing California sun. But inside, shielded from the ungodly blazing light (thanks to a collection of strategically placed black-out curtains), the artist offers a portal into his dark hellscape. Laid out are the last pages of “Hellboy” he’ll draw for Dark Horse Comics, a look inside Mignola’s mind.
Sitting inside the studio where “Hellboy” is made is akin to being inside a cabinet of curiosities. Animal skulls linger in the peripherals; blackand-white portraits of P.T. Barnum and 1850s opera singer Jenny Lind are tacked to a corkboard.
But the collection that takes up the most space is his library. A cursory look at one shelf reveals a series of titles too perfect to be believed: “The Book of Ceremonial Magic,” “Werewolves, Shapeshifters and Skinwalkers,” “Rasputin: Rascal Master,” “Ghosts in Irish Houses” and even “More Ghosts in Irish Houses.”
An emerald-colored vampire marionette hovers in the corner, discovered in Prague while scouring the city with “Hellboy” director Guillermo del Toro for a Kafka puppet.
“He eventually found one,” Mignola says. “It didn’t work for me, because my feeling was Kafka needed a hat.”
Not everyone has stories about searching the Czech Republic for rare modernist puppets, but then again, not everyone has spent the last 22 years crafting their own, unique supernatural universe, one that would grow into the successful superheroesque franchise “Hellboy.”
Few creators have the ability to conjure up whole worlds at the mention of their name, but the fantasy world of the Mignolaverse is a very real place with a style and host of characters uniquely its own.
Mignola’s strikingly peculiar look beautifully combines bold black shadows, jagged edges and wide-open spaces. He has a way with dimension: Three simple lines on the page can give a demon’s skin texture or reveal the scraggy ribs on the under- belly of a winged hell beast.
For the uninitiated, Hellboy is a half-demon, half-human creature summoned to Earth from the underworld. Eventually growing from a hell baby to a hell man, the character is known for his large stature, one hand made entirely out of uncrushable stone, a brusque (but often humorous) delivery, and his trademark pair of sanded-down stubs on his forehead (where his devil horns would grow, if not kept in check).
A mindless Hulk Hellboy is not. Instead, Mignola pulled inspiration from pulp writers Robert E. Howard and Manly Wade Wellman and their classic characvoided ters that roamed around and got into trouble. Hellboy is also a wandering soul looking to do right, but with pit stops.
And now, after twoplus decades of sketching and plotting the future plans of his red-tinted half demon, two feature films and numerous spinoff comic series, Mignola is taking a break.
For what? To focus on his painting.
“I want to focus on just being an artist for a while,” he says.
The character of Hellboy could probably use a break as well. Hellboy has fought werewolves, vampires, Nazis and sometimes even vampire Nazis. He’s traveled the globe, the apocalypse. And 10 issues ago, Mignola killed him and sent him to hell, as a vacation. This would become the “Hellboy in Hell” comic series and Mignola’s farewell tour.
“My idea was that he would just roam around forever and just have a good time,” Mignola explains.
“I was trying to get him away from all the crap that I’d heaped on this guy over the years. This will be his vacation. He gets to go to hell, which will be kind of a nice place, and he can just hang around and talk to fish and skeletons.”
Of course, Hellboy wasn’t the only one looking for a change-up. Mignola reveals that removing his hero from the real world and placing him in the underworld have been an important aesthetic change for the creator as well. Mignola had little interest in drawing modern-day conveniences and acknowledges that throughout his “Hellboy” run he’s probably drawn only two cars, “just sitting in fields,” and one plane. Apparently, there aren’t a lot of Honda Civics in this hell.
“As for the actual act of writing and drawing out Hellboy’s last pages, that proved to be a bit more difficult than expected. The final issue of “Hellboy in Hell” No. 10, wasn’t troublesome as a whole, but the last pages were another story.
“I’d always known what I was going to do, but when it came down to actually doing it, I kind of lost my nerve,” he says.
“I didn’t lose it completely, but I did kind of keep waffling back and forth. It’s one thing to say you’re going to do this weird thing, it’s another thing to actually do it.”
As for Mignola’s goodbye, small spoiler alert: The comic doesn’t end with fire and brimstone but, rather, a sense of calm.
“I don’t want to say that this ending isn’t satisfying for the fans,” he says, “but it’s not an easy ending. It doesn’t spell anything out in a real comfortable way. It’s an odd ending. So I did start wondering: ‘Oh, what is the audience going to think? Is it going to be too weird?’ And then I said: ‘Well, I can’t come up with an ending that’s any less weird. This is the ending I’ve always wanted, so this is the ending we’re gonna do.’”