Brian Truitt

USA TODAY

Hellboy has been around for 20 years, and in a way he's not yet a grownup for his comic-book creator Mike Mignola.

"It's strange because on one hand I still think of Hellboy as my new project, but it is two-thirds of my career at this point," says Mignola, 53, who debuted the big red cat-loving guy with the cut-off horns and the Right Hand of Doom in March 1994 with Dark Horse Comics' Hellboy: Seed of Destruction No. 1.

Over the course of two decades, Mignola has built an entire universe full of horror, noir, pulp and high-adventure around Hellboy, supernatural characters in the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, and others who've come into contact with the brusque superhero over the years in comics or movies.

Fans will be celebrating this legacy on Saturday as part of "Hellboy Day" in various comic shops across the country — Mignola himself will be stopping by Meltdown Comics in Los Angeles. And Dark Horse is making it easy for fans new and old to get their fix with a Hellboy Day digital bundle of every Hellboy comic — all 2,201 pages featuring the prophesied "beast of the apocalypse" — for $50 now through 3 a.m. ET Wednesday (digital.darkhorse.com).

You don't have to go very far to read the complete first issue, though. Check it out below as well as a conversation with Mignola about Hellboy's origins and where he's going from here.

Q. Hellboy actually dates to before that first Seed of Destruction issue. Your first drawing of him was in '91 and looks much different than the modern guy.

A. I was just drawing a monster. I was not drawing anything that was meant to be an ongoing series character. I was not known for any one particular series and somebody asked me to draw whatever I wanted, and I just drew this clunky guy. At literally the last minute, I realized he had this blank space in the middle of whatever belt thing he's wearing, and I wrote in "Hell Boy."

He's big and he's lunky and he's hairy and he's got a crab hanging off his belt and he's got a vulture on his shoulder and his name is Hell Boy. It was just meant to be funny. There was no thought at all about doing anything with it.

Q. At what point did you think about doing something?

A. I had done a Batman story for DC that I actually plotted myself, and it was a straight supernatural story. Coming off that, I realized that was really one of the first things I had done where I had made up a story and it was very much the kind of stuff I read and am interested in. I thought I'd like to do more stuff like that. If I've gotten to the point in my career where I can start making up stories, then I'd like to continue doing that so I get to draw what I want. But, do I do that with Batman? Or if I know what kind of stories I want to do, why don't make up my own guy?

I wanted to do an occult detective character because I loved those kinds of stories, but I knew I would get bored drawing a regular person. That's when I went back to that name. My goal was to do nothing but draw monsters — what if I pare this guy down? And really, not much of that drawing remains except for the broken horns on the forehead.

But a big clunky monster with that name became the vehicle for the stories I wanted to do.

Q. Do you have that original drawing hanging up somewhere?

A. It is. There's a funny story with it. I apparently loaned it to a publisher in New Jersey — I'd given them a bunch of the early Hellboy drawings to use and it was going to be a whole group of phone cards.

I forgot all about it, and it showed up on eBay. How it went from the guy I handed it off to to it ending up on eBay, I don't know, I don't want to know, but we contacted whoever the seller was and said, "How did you get that?" Within about a week, it was sent to us. Apparently we scared the (crap) out of whoever was selling it.

Thank God I have it. It is framed and propped up in the guest room.

Q. Was it at least selling well before it was taken down?

A. I don't remember. Somebody contacted us and said, "Do you know what somebody has?" I think the sale stopped pretty fast. As soon as I contacted the guy, he took it off.

It's such a primitive object, you had to really be a Hellboy fan to recognize what it is.

Q. You've done many Hellboy stories since 1994. What's changed the most in your writing and drawing of the character?

A. Certainly I've gotten much more comfortable in the writing end of things. I know my voice. In the beginning, I had no confidence at all — I now get periods of confidence. I don't get it every day.

It's funny that I still don't think of myself as a writer, even though I've been writing for 20 years.

Q. I grew up with your "Death in the Family" covers for Batman, Gotham by Gaslight and other artwork in the '80s. But then you created this whole universe around Hellboy. That seems even more impressive for someone who doesn't think of himself as a writer.

A. Certainly I never would have started this thing if I had known it was going to turn into this. I was intimidated enough just writing my own comic — and in fact after the first series I didn't script it. I plotted it and I wrote notes so that the real writer, John Byrne, would know roughly what people were supposed to be talking about. But I did not have any confidence in myself as a writer.

It was really only over the course of that first series that I became more comfortable with the fact that I knew what these characters should say, and John, God love him, he really did treat that first series like he knew I should be writing it myself. He knew I just didn't have the confidence, and when we got through the first one, he just said, "Now you're on your own."

I never set out to be writer, I never had a burning desire to create my own character – the timing just seemed right to do that.

Q. When you look back on your first issue…

A. Which I try not to do.

Q. Well, let's say you accidentally look at it. Can you say, "That wasn't too bad," or are you more critical than that?

That's why I don't look at it. It is dreadful. But, this is what happens: You get better with time. I actually have been looking at it the last couple of days because I'm writing something where I have to reference things that happen in that first issue.

The voice isn't there. John and I had a completely different take on what the writing should be like on it. We didn't have different ideas from each other, but together we'd agreed on this approach to the writing of it. It worked fine, but I realized after doing it that it wasn't the book I had in mind.

It's pretty primitive, and yet it does present all my ideas. It's not like at some point I said, 'Oh, we've gotta ignore everything that's gone before!" It's one of the things I'm proudest of looking at 20 years worth of this stuff. I didn't write myself into amy corners, I didn't have to hit any reset buttons, I'm still referencing things that are in these first couple issues of Hellboy.

To some extent, I got it right right out of the bat story-wise. It's the way it's drawn and colored, all that stuff has gotten radically refined.

Q. Reading it again now, it does seem like you're seeding a lot of things — aspects of his origin, the importance of frogs, etc. — that you returned to later in bigger arcs and B.P.R.D. stories. In the beginning, did you have plans for large, over-arching stories that utilized some of this at some point?

A. Certainly as I was approaching this book, I had ideas of where it could go. I didn't anticipate it selling well enough to ever do it again. I did try to make sure it worked as one complete story. If I never had a chance to do it again, I needed it to stand up on its own, though now I'm remembering I did end it with almost a cliffhanger waking up these Nazi guys.

For the most part, once I got the go–ahead to do more of it, then I did pull things from that first one and continue with the Nazis and then eventually the frog thing. I hadn't allowed myself to be too optimistic and plan to far ahead. When I did the second miniseries Wake the Devil, that's the one where by then I thought this thing was going to go on for a while. That one, I trot out a lot of stuff and don't really make effort to answer all the questions. That one really springboards a lot of stuff.

Q. The first Hellboy movie in 2004 definitely drew from that first issue of yours. As you watched the movie being made, was there any particular scene that really impressed you in how director Guillermo del Toro captured what you'd done?

A. My favorite is still probably the World War II stuff at the opening of the first movie. That is the one part where I kinda go, "Oh, look. I made a comic, and they made a movie out of it." From then on, it's really visually so radically different from the comic.

Q. You could have picked any villain in history. Why Nazis?

A. I grew up with Marvel Comics. Marvel Comics had its roots in World War II – Captain America fought the Red Skull, Baron Zemo was a World War II villain, so my idea of real comics was that stuff. I wanted Hellboy to be grounded in that kind of old-school, black-and-white, greatest-generation thing.

And Nazis do not require a lot of explanation. As soon as you see a guy with a swastika, you pretty much know who the good guys are, who the bad guys are, and they were into a lot of weird (stuff). The more I read about this stuff, the more I go, "Geez, this stuff I was coming up with is nowhere near as weird as the stuff they were theoretically really working on."

Q. Did you again look back at those Marvel comics in developing Hellboy's personality?

A. I looked more at the novels and the pulps and things like that. I didn't really consciously model too much stuff on anything.The closest thing we come is the writing style in the first series. John and I were talking about this pulp-magazine writing style from the perspective of the main character, so you have that voiceover running through — which is something I dropped completely when I took over writing the book myself.

I didn't want to be in Hellboy's head. I didn't want that old detective sound of "I did this, I did this…" I wanted to cut that out and to not know what Hellboy was thinking. I wanted to do that with pictures. Give me a silent picture of Hellboy and let the reader think about what he's thinking as opposed to me spelling it out for you.

Other than that, the personality of Hellboy is just me. I'd never written before, so the only way I knew how to write Hellboy was, what would I say in this situation? The stories draw from my literary interests, but the personality of that character is just me throwing myself into that story.

Q. That said, what's the most Mike Mignola thing about Hellboy in that first issue?

A. There might not be. I was still so early on in doing the book.

I don't think it's really present in the early Hellboy stuff. The humor kind of surprised me because I realized I needed the character to have a sense of humor. I didn't want to do a deadly seriously comic and by the time I did the third story, there's a lot of humor in it and that is what made it comfortable.

I do have dueling parts of my personality, and actually it does come across in the first miniseries a little bit. Rasputin starts going on and on and on, and I love Shakespeare and Bible epics and I love having guys making grandiose, dramatic speeches. At the same time, there's a part of my personality that's so embarrassed when I realize I'm trying to write that kind of stuff, and that's where Hellboy's voice comes in. Hellboy deflates the bad guy — he comes in and says, "You're boring me to death."

That's the two parts of my brain, the one part embarrassed by what the other part is doing.

Q. Bantering with a villain is very much a Spider-Man/Marvel thing, too.

A. I can't do it as much as a Spider-Man thing – I can't just do wisecracking stuff. I do it in much smaller doses, which is how Hellboy became the beast of the apocalypse.

I had a fight scene with this goddess character in the second miniseries, and I drew the fight scene but didn't really figure out what they'd be talking about. If it was a Marvel thing like Stan (Lee) and (Steve) Ditko, they could do a whole fight scene where guys were just mocking each other. I can only do that for one or two panels, and then I go, "Well, now what are they talking about?"

Because I had drawn the scene and I needed something to be in there, the bad guy starts trotting out stuff about Hellboy and prophecies and beast-of-the-apocalypse stuff, and I'm kinda going, "Uhhhhhhh, OK." I've gotta live with that, and then that thing starts snowballing and redefines the whole book."

Q. And it sets you up for many stories down the line.

A. Yeah, it gives him an interesting problem. I still write him as me and what would I do and what would I say, but he's got different problems than what I have.

Q. Hellboy in Hell No. 6 comes out in May. What's going to mark Hellboy's 21st year?

A. More of the same. (Laughs) The Hellboy in Hell stuff, I thought I was really going to go into these first couple of issues that dismantled the big story, and I would cut Hellboy loose from a bunch of his bigger problems and just roam him around in these smaller stories.

But things snowballed into this big story. He's got a parade of troubles that will run for at least 20 issues. All I'm thinking now is get through that big story before he turns 25.

Where he goes after that, maybe then he gets to become a roaming hobo-like character who nobody gives a (crap) about anymore and he gets to just wander through the suburbs of hell and have a good time.