LUCIDMEDIA

Fire & Brushstrokes: Talking about Hellboy: Animated with Tad Stones

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Monday, 14 April 2008 04:31

Adam A. Donaldson: To your knowledge, how has the Sword of Stones been received? Tad Stones: Business-wise, I’m told everybody’s very happy with it. And then as far as fans, it’s going over really well. I went to New York Comic Con and started just randomly signing posters at the booth and then quickly there was a line of people coming up to me saying that they loved it and are looking forward to the next one. So I’m very pleased. Obviously I can go into the movie and redo things to make it better, but so far as fans are concerned it’s a great first step. When I was watching the movie I noticed that the details had more in common with the comic than the movie, what was the reason for going in the direction you did? Mike [Mignola, Hellboy creator] expressed an interest in going the one way over the other and generally Mike always wants to go back to the source material. I’m not necessarily doing sequels to Guillermo [del Toro]’s movie, although Guillermo’s brought a huge number of fans to Hellboy, some of whom never read the comics. My love started with the comic stories. I’m not trying to put my vision on top of Hellboy; I’m trying to get close to Mike’s vision and that means only changing things for story reasons.

And you’ve also introduced Kate Corrigan into these movies, are there any other Hellboy characters that are going to show up?

In general sure. The one person that fans keep asking about is Roger and the problem with Roger is that you can’t just walk him on stage and say, “Here’s our Homunculus”; it really requires a major story. And the problem with Roger’s story, unless you’re going to create a new one, is that it doesn’t have a lot of Hellboy in it. Roger’s story is fantastic, but it’s really his story with Hellboy more at the edges. I’ve talked about adapting that story, but when I look at it I run into the same roadblocks that Guillermo and Mike did when they talked about adapting it. In the meantime, Sydney Leach pops up in Blood & Iron and on the villain side you’ll see many familiar faces in the Phantom Claw once we get greenlit.

I was going to ask about the Phantom Claw because you have a greenlight for the script, right?

Right, I’m at the climax right now as a matter of fact and it’s great because finally we’ve got a learning curve. I know what works and what doesn’t work on the film and can try different ways of interpreting things.

Getting back to Sword of Stones, it focuses a lot on Japanese mythology. Did you do a lot of research into that and is the stuff in the movie accurate according to that mythology?

Generally, the weirdest stuff in the movie is the most accurate. Japanese mythology is just full of very strange monsters and creatures. I didn’t get a chance to do as much research as I’d have liked, but luckily Matt Wayne (co-screenwriter) did a lot. He put way more in it then we were able to use just because of time and the giant battle towards the end he called out all sorts of Japanese specifics that we just didn’t have time to draw. Basically, we had to say we need five generic zombie guys for cannon fodder. He proposed other things like striking poses that were right out of Japanese woodblock prints, but we looked at that and said, to the Japanese culture that’s totally accurate, but for instance there’s the ‘mei’ pose and part of that pose is crossed eyes. In Japanese culture that means concentration and anger, but to us it looks like one of the Three Stooges. So we had to pick and choose where we drew that line.

What about Blood & Iron, how will that be different in terms of story and production? What can the fans expect from that one?

It’s an entirely different movie than Sword of Stones, which I refer to as a trip down the rabbit hole. It’s a kind of Alice in Wonderland adventure where it’s episodic and Hellboy’s meeting a series of obstacles that somebody’s putting in his path. Meanwhile his friends are on Earth, fighting other things that come from the evil at the centre of it all. Blood & Iron has a single driving story. It’s bound up in the past with Professor Broom’s first mission where he got out of the study and went out into the field and met evil face to face and that evil comes back to haunt Hellboy in the present. The team is together, they go out on the mission like they do in the early comics like Wake the Devil, and they all have a job to do. It’s a much darker story too, although I was pleased at the New York Comic Con that when we screened the entire movie people were laughing a lot, which was good because it was needed as a balance.

I noticed in Sword of Stones too, that there was a lot of humour, a lot of good lines. Well, humour has always been a part of Hellboy and the trick in adapting him is that writers will often try to make him out and out funny. He’s not a Spider-Man-like quipster, he’s got a very dry humour and it’s usually played off someone who’s way too full of themselves. There was an accompanying comic book for Hellboy: Animated, which you wrote one of the stories for. Are there going to be more of those? Yeah, I don’t know if it’s in the current previews on the Dark Horse website, but they’ve announced it for their line-up coming in June. In the second volume, I write another very similar Hellboy story, though this one might coerce me into writing and drawing, so I apologize right now to the public at large.

And that’s a new experience for you too, doing the comics.

Very much. I grew up with art books and how to draw comic strips because my Dad wanted to be a comic strip artist, but he graduated in the Depression and it was about getting a job not following your dream. It was unfortunate, but I benefited from having these great resources to look through. My problem with going to the comic form was less the overall demands but more about the specifics of writing for digest size and the fewer number of panels per page, and I found that really limiting. Then the trick with the one I drew was not being able to work on it everyday, because I have this day job doing Hellboy movies.

What’s the story going to be with Phantom Claw?

It’s a completely different film. This time it goes to the mad scientist part of Hellboy, with the first one being folklore and second one being classic vampires, werewolves and witches. This time, it’s an army of Frankenstein’s monsters, heads floating in jars, cybernetic apes, and a lot of equipment and flashing electricity. So you’ll get more of a Bride of Frankenstein kind of feel in this one and there’s a certain goggled avenger that’s also in the film.