A lot of the smaller details are kind of left to me or John [Arcudi] and the personal stuff is generally left to me and John, although not all the time. Like with Abe, this morning, we were going over Abe Sapien #23 (which is a ways out still) and with this one he [Mike] just had more ideas specifically about how to tell the story so there was some panel to panel details that we were going over together. Normally that’s not really the process but it can kind of vary anywhere from, we talk over a three to five issue story in a pretty short phone call and then it’s sort of left to me. It can vary all the way from that to where he’s saying “Okay, put panel one like this” and we might go through a page or a couple of pages at that level of detail. So it really varies, but at the minimum it’s always the big turning point stuff and the way that the world is changing and how the demonology stuff works; [that] always kind of revolves around his input and his decisions.

What is it about Abe that makes him an appealing character for you personally to write?

Abe is really trying to understand himself. Abe and Hellboy have really strong similarities but one of the big differences is that Hellboy really decisively turned his back on what he was and what he really might be and all that. Abe thought it out more. Abe was more curious and more determined to find out what he was all about. He went out of his way to figure it out, but that was kind of before there was this indication that it might have something to do with the end of the world. So Abe has shown a willingness to really dive into the secrets behind his own origin, but right now the truth of that whole thing seems to be too scary for him. So while we’ve seen him really examine himself very closely in the past he’s too scared to really hit it head on these days and I find the conflict there to be the really interesting thing about Abe for me.

Can you talk a little bit about how the decision to make Abe kind of the object of this cult’s worship is going to affect his process here as he’s trying to discover where he’s at?

Hellboy was revealed to the public in the late forties or fifties, and so people knew since then that there is some sort of supernatural business out there but it didn’t really change the world drastically. It was when the Lovecraft monsters started poking up out of the earth a few years ago in B.P.R.D. that the world really changed for these characters.