LUCIDMEDIA

Interview With Mike Mignola

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Tuesday, 15 April 2008 03:45

My first question is, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask, what is the current standing of Hellboy 2?

MM: Gee, I didn’t see that coming. (Laughs) Universal looks to be making the movie; [director] Guillermo [del Toro] is running around still doing film festivals with his new one Pan’s Labyrinth, so as soon as he wraps that up. Then, in the next few weeks, he and I should be starting pre-production.

There was a story leaked on the Internet about what the movie’s going to be about, was that it?

MM: It’s pretty accurate. I mean, a few things have changed in the last couple of months, but for the most part at least to my knowledge, but that’s pretty much still the idea of the film.

Are you going to be involved in a lot of the design work?

MM: I will be. I was very involved in the first one, and I expect I’ll have a similar role in this one. I don’t know if I’ll do as much actual design on it as I did in the first one because we had the whole problem of what will Hellboy look like and that kind of stuff and a lot of those problems we’ve solved, obviously. Guillermo and I will work out an overall design and feel.

He seems really passionate about it, and I can hear that you trust him, but Hellboy was such a personal project for you; was it hard for you to let it go and let other artists play in your world?

MM: It all depends; with the Weird Tales book that we did, it wasn’t hard at all because the point was for people to do Hellboy different and do their versions of Hellboy. The most difficult thing was finding the right artist to draw the regular comic, and I got really fortunate that Duncan Fegredo was available and wanted the job. It was tough finding someone, but now that I have, I want to keep him.

Do you miss doing a regular book, working monthly and all that?

MM: Well, I never did the book monthly, but the day-in, day-out of it, it just became very difficult because I was juggling so many different things. So at some point you have to make the decision: do I keep Hellboy this small, little intimate thing? or do I want to keep expanding things and keep them going? The problem is that it takes me an hour to come up with a story, but it takes me sixth months to draw it. So you keep coming out with ideas, and they stack up, and at some point you just kind of go, there’s so many Hellboy things that I want to do that if I draw them myself not even half of them will get done. You have to make a decision: do you want these things to not happen? or do you want to happen with the help of someone else? and I’d rather see them happen.

Do you have any interest in going back to doing a monthly book or even a superhero book for that matter?

MM: I have no interest in doing superheroes, unless you consider somebody like Lobster Johnston [the Hellboy character] a superhero. Having gotten used to writing my own stuff, I can’t imagine working on somebody else’s character. I just finished three issues of Conan and it was really difficult because he’s not my guy; I know what my guys say, and I know what they do. And I have so much of my own stuff I want to do, I’d rather stick with that.

I was going to ask about the Amazing Screw-on Head animated series and where that idea came from.

MM: It started as an idea for a toy, and I remembered showing my wife the idea, and at the time it was more of a superhero idea, and then once I started playing with it and seriously drawing it, he became much funkier. I think it was always kind of a humour idea, but once I added Lincoln and put it in that world, it became this sort of weird, bizarre, not commercial project, but that was fine. I think my wife was a little concerned that I’d made up something that wasn’t commercial at all, but after doing Hellboy for ten years I wanted to do something I didn’t have to sell and do something I thought was funny.

Were you surprised by the caliber of people that came on to the project, like Paul Giamatti doing the voice?

MM: I couldn’t believe that when they called me said that Paul was going to do the voice with David Hyde Pierce. I couldn’t believe it, and I actually went and watched them do the voices because there was no way in hell I wasn’t going to see that happen; that was pretty cool, and it was pretty weird.

How did you develop your style, Alan Moore once called it “German Expressionism meets Jack Kirby,” did anything in particular influence you?

MM: A lot of stuff, kind of everything I looked at over the years and I went through different phases; I wanted to be this guy for a while; then I wanted to be that guy, and somehow all that different stuff combined into that style. But if you look at my stuff from ten years ago, it doesn’t look like how it does now, and if you look at my stuff from twenty years ago, you wouldn’t even recognize it, so it’s a constantly evolving thing with trial and error, trying to get it right.

Have you ever been at a convention where somebody brings you something and you think, “Oh my God, I can’t even believe you want this signed?”

MM: I see a lot of horrible stuff that I did and that’s the problem with learning to draw in print, all your mistakes are out there. But you bite the bullet and sometimes I’m curious and I want to look, but there are a few things where I don’t even open the comic, I just don’t want to know because I kind of remember.

You helped design the Disney animated movie Atlantis, so are you interested in doing more stuff like that in the future? is there anything you’ve got your eye on?

MM: Well, Disney came to me about that and nobody’s approached me with anything like that. The idea of designing a movie would be fun, I actually did a couple of days of work on a Pixar film and unfortunately I didn’t have time to do more. It’s fun. It’s fun to make up a world, but my hands are kind of tied working on my own stuff.