Again, it was certainly nothing conscious about it. I mean I was very happy doing Hellboy as just Hellboy. The trouble is, I had created these things at the very beginning, I had created these other characters. In the first mini-series I created all these other characters and some of them appear in the second mini-series, but once I started doing the short stories that were just focused on Hellboy, I really had so much I wanted to do with Hellboy that I didn’t have room for these other characters. I really didn’t know what to do with these other characters, I kind of threw in some weird prophecy stuff here and some back story there, but I didn’t really put that much energy into them, because I knew I didn’t have time to do them.

The first Hellboy mini-series, I didn’t know I was ever going to do another one, so I kind of tried to wrap that one up, but the second mini-series though, Wake the Devil, I trotted out a lot of pieces. I brought the Baba Yaga into it, and the Nazis were there and I had a lot more pieces I was putting out on the board that I had no idea how I was ever get around to doing anything with all this stuff I was suddenly trotting out. Sometime after that, when we realized what were we going to do with all these other characters, that’s when we started playing around with the idea of doing the B.P.R.D. series, and from then on it snowballed like crazy.

But again, the only reason that world got built, I mean I can build a whole world in my head, but to get it on paper for other people to see it, meant employing a lot of other people. My role has kind of been to do the broad strokes of stuff and to keep the history and the mythology, but as far as dealing with the actual characters and giving these characters personalities that’s really been Guy Davis and especially John Arcudi who really made this thing. I mean, if you look also at the pattern, I created Lobster Johnson and I wrote the first Lobster Johnson mini-series, from then on it’s been almost entirely almost all John Arcudi. Abe Sapien, I wrote the first Abe Sapien mini-series, set up a couple of Abe Sapien things in there and now it’s almost entirely Scott Allie. And B.P.R.D., the first couple of B.P.R.Ds were fine but I jumped in and wrote the third one which got a lot of stuff rolling and kind of established where to go with things and then I stepped away. My job with all these things has kind of been to get them started and then I kind of steer a little bit. Especially with John and I, we talk pretty often, and we talk in general terms of we want to take this here we want to take this there. I’ve got my vision of what happens to the world and how certain things happened but I don’t want to tie his hands and say you have to do this now; you have to do that now. I check in with him to just make sure we are going in the same direction.

Let’s go to Abe Sapien, what do you think makes that character work? What does he mean to you?

I have no idea. I don’t feel I ever had a clear beat on who that guy was. I don’t know. I can almost say I haven’t given it too much thought. Though I do know that Scot Allie and I have had a lot of conversations about Abe and where that character is going to go and one thing I can say about where Abe is right now, the Abe book as it is now was really designed to be a companion to B.P.R.D. but a completely different scale. While B.P.R.D. is big stories about a big team of guys doing things with a lot of guns, flying places and blowing stuff up, the idea of a man on the ground perspective of things, given the way the world has kind of crashed around everybody’s ears, we just thought the idea of small stories, more supernatural based stories from this one man’s perspective, and turning Abe more into a monster, I just thought was also a real nice thing to do. But as far as the personality of the character and stuff like that, I probably did play him a bit more like an innocent guy as opposed to Hellboy. Hellboy’s a little bit more in your face, a little bit more out there and in the first Hellboy series, Abe Sapien was more in disguise, he was like the secret guy, which I think we dropped almost instantly.