In the third of our interviews (following Doug Jones and Anna Walton) celebrating the DVD and Blu-Ray release of Guillermo Del Toro’s excellent Hellboy II: the Golden Army tomorrow we talk to the award-winning creator of Hellboy, the one and only Mike Mignola. A very special treat for me as I have been a huge fan of Mike’s art for a long time and consider Hellboy to be one of the best new comics characters of recent years (which is why the books take up a good chunk of my shelves):
(Mike Mignola at the 2006 WonderCon, borrowed from the Wiki entry)
FPI: Hi, Mike and thanks for taking some time to talk with me. You’ve worked on a variety of titles over the years, including cover art for Batman: a Death in the Family and work on Gotham by Gaslight, but obviously you’re best known for Hellboy and his ever-expanding world. Did you ever think when you were creating those first short stories that a decade and a half later you might be sitting there with deluxe hardback Hellboy Library editions collecting years of the work, two major feature films and an animated Hellboy under your belt?
Mike: I never really thought anything would come from it all. I decided to roll the dice after working on other people’s comics and go ahead and write something of my own that I would want to draw. I didn’t expect it to last long or become so popular, I thought I’d do this for a little while then end up going back for work to Marvel or DC
FPI: Although you’ve worked with a lot of different people for Hellboy and the BPRD comics it remains very much your baby and it’s grown with you – did that make it difficult to step back and let someone else adapt it for another medium? And in recent years you’ve been working a lot more with other creators for the Hellboy and BPRD comics too, how have you found that experience?
Mike: With the film it was relatively easy – I knew it was in good hands, so I said to myself this isn’t my thing, not the comic; its different so don’t lose sleep over any changes from the comics version. With the comics it’s a bit more difficult – those are the real BPRD and Hellboy for me and so I take great care who to work with on them. I’ve been very lucky there – take Duncan Fegredo, who’s doing it now with me, for example. It’s the hardest thing for me to stop drawing and find another artist.
(a scene from Hellboy: the Wild Hunt, written by Mike Mignola, art by Duncan Fegredo, published Dark Horse)
FPI: Well your art style is very distinctive and the world so well established it must be a bit intimidating for an incoming artist as well as a problem for you to hand over artistic duties to them.
Mike: You need an artist whose style can fit into that book but at the same time not be just a copy or imitation of my style. Duncan is a fan, which is good, but it also meant it was a little intimidating for him at first, but he’s handled it very well. When it comes to the BPRD it can be a bit different in style because it is a different series, but with Hellboy we need to have a certain look.
FPI: Absolutely and in the case of Hellboy there is such a distinctive look and style to it; even the colouring palette seems distinct to the series.
Turning to the Hellboy films, I was talking to Doug Jones earlier and he said you were on set regularly and great at helping him finesse out the character traits in Abe Sapien. And I know Guillermo is a big fan of your work – I’m wondering to what extent were you involved in bringing the Hellboy world to the movies? Was it mostly advisory material here and there, or were you involved in the story, design and casting too?
Mike: I spent the same amount of time on the first and second movies. The first was a bigger challenge in many ways because we had to start from scratch and work out how to translate the world shown in the comics to a film. How do we translate things like Hellboy’s stone hand? His coat? How will the make-up work to make him look right?
That wasn’t such a big deal for the second movie. We came up with an original story idea for the second film. I think I did a little less but I was contributing a lot of ideas, some of which were changed as it went along, some were scrapped. The second film was more Guillermo’s world – less a translation of my existing Hellboy comic world and more Guillermo’s version of it.
FPI: On casting, who was it who first thought of Ron Perlman for the role? I’ve been a fan of Ron’s since first seeing him as the hunchback in the film version of Umberto Ecco’s Name of the Rose and of course in Guillermo’s fascinating early horror Cronos; when it was announced there would be a movie version of Hellboy he was the first person I thought of.
Mike: I never thought it would really be made back when it was first optioned, so I never thought too much about it until a friend of mine said you know Ron Perlman would be perfect for Hellboy and I thought of course, he would be. I had seen him in Cronos so I knew Guillermo had worked with him and wondered if he had been thinking about him for the role, so when we got together to talk about it, it was like let’s put our cards on the table and we both almost said Ron’s name together.
(Selma Blair as Liz Sherman and Ron Perlman as Hellboy in the Golden Army, (c) Universal)
FPI: Hahah, talk about great minds thinking alike… I must admit, I’m a big fan of Ron; in Name of the Rose I actually thought he was a hunchback in real life, until I saw him in other films. He seems to be able to come and go in every sort of genre and always bring something effortlessly cool to them; I often think of him as the indy/genre version of Gerard Depardieu – great actor, unconventional (especially by Hollywood standards) look and always interesting in any film.
Mike: Ron is one of the most under-rated actors around. He may not look like the conventional leading man, but he has a lot of presence and he has some character traits in common with HB as well as the physicality. There were some things we found out as we worked out how to design aspects of the production – for instance, Hellboy’s stone hand is his right hand, but most people are right handed, so should we cover the actor’s normal hand with a mechanical prosthetic and leave them trying to use their left? Or change hands from the comics?
But it turned out Ron is left handed, so that was fine. Then we thought, if he is left handed will he be able to punch with the big right hand realistically? It turns out Ron’s dad coached him in sports to use his right hand too, so he has a kind of mutant ability when it comes to the right hand, left hand thing.
FPI: Obviously he was meant for this role, he just fits into it so well. Overall though I’m guessing you have been fairly happy with the films since we’ve now had the second one? Would you be happy to see that leading into a third film at some point? Film and comics, although they share a lot in common, are still very different artistic mediums and changes need to be made to make a story work from one work in the other, does that bother you or do you accept that as a necessary part of adapting the comics to cinema?
Mike: The third film is at the gigantic question mark stage at the moment. I was happy that some of the changes from the comic to film that Guillermo made, that I was worried the comics fans might not, like seem to have gone down well. You know fans can go crazy over changes to the smallest things sometimes, but they went down fairly well, even the love interest between Liz and Hellboy.
And because of the films a lot more people now know who Hellboy is, even though they have probably never seen the comics, they know it. I can be travelling on a plane, chatting to the person seated next to me, they ask me what I do and I say I’m a comics artist, tell them about Hellboy and now most of them know what I am talking about instead of giving me the blank look treatment.
(a page from Hellboy: Nature of the Beast by and (c) Mike Mignola, published Dark Horse)
FPI: As a long-time fan of the comics myself I noticed the changes right away, but I didn’t mind too much since the film seemed to me to have the style and spirit of Hellboy.
Mike: Its got the spirit, which is the important thing in adapting a comic to a film. You can change things and play fast and loose with details, as long as you stay true to the spirit of the work – look at the Iron Man movie as a good example of that
FPI: How did you feel about changes to your world, such as making the BPRD and Hellboy a secret from the public? It didn’t bother me too much, although I have to say I prefer the fact that in the comics the general public know who he is, he can walk into a chapel in Ireland and chat away to the priest for example. I seem to recall reading somewhere that you treat the films almost as the alternate-world version of Hellboy?
Mike: Yes, exactly – it was the only way for me to make peace with it and not lose sleep over it. And it makes sense – for a non-comics reading film audience to have a world where people know Hellboy and don’t react to him might be too weird for an audience that’s not already familiar with the comics world. I have it the other way where he is known by everyone and I thought it was funny in the comics, but a lot of movie goers won’t understand that because they may not be aware of the comic and obviously you want to make a film for as wide an audience as you can.
FPI: Mike, I’m afraid our time is up already, but thank you very much for sparing us some time and I look forward to many more Hellboy comics flowing from your pen in the future.
(FPI would like to thank Leah from MarketMe for kindly arranging the interview; the two-disc DVD and Blu-Ray releases of Hellboy II: the Golden Army, featuring almost four hours of extras, is released on Monday December 8th; our Hellboy graphic novels can be found here and some very cool Hellboy movie merch can be found here; you can also still read the preceding interviews with Doug Jones and Anna Walton)
Sun, Dec 7, 2008
Comics and cartoons, Film, TV and radio, Interviews