Interview | Mike Mignola

On occasion, Kara and Matt sit down by the fireplace (metaphorical) with creators to talk about their books, their process, and what they read themselves. Since some folks don’t have time for podcasts, we also transcribe these chats. Some parts of the interview have been abridged for maximum hilarity. Enjoy our interview with HELLBOY’S Mike Mignola!



Matt: We have the biggest interview of all time, biggest guest of all time.



Kara: Ever.



Matt: You might know him from “Hellboy,” “Lord Henry Baltimore,” “Witchfinder.” Mr. Mike Mignola, welcome to the show.



Mike Mignola: Thank you.



Matt: This is probably the biggest moment for comiXology’s library in a long time. A lot of our fans and myself have been waiting for your books to hit the platform. I have to ask you, when you first started out doing Hellboy, and in the early days, did you think it would be this big and be so long-lasting when you started it?



Mike: No. I’ve always had such low expectations. When I started Hellboy, really, I didn’t think it would go beyond the four-issue mini-series. You hope it’s going to go, but it just seemed too good to be true, that I could actually get away with doing my own stuff. I’ve been doing stuff for Marvel and DC for 10 years, and I just assumed, “I’ll try this. If it works, great. If not, I was completely prepared to go back to DC and do whatever I could get.

Kara: I have to say, I recently discovered Hellboy, and read my way through everything, everything I could possibly get my hands on, I just wanted to read it. Part of what was so arresting about it to me was the art, because it’s so bold, and the use of shadow is excellent, but what I also really love are all the little details, or the side panels, where suddenly you zoom in on a skull or something.

My question is, what do you use for reference for all that stuff? Do you just have a creative skull in your basement or something?



Mike: I do have lots of pictures of skulls, and I’m pretty good at faking them at this point. That really comes about – I’m a horror guy, and I always wanted to do a spooky horror kind of a thing, and those kind of asides are really just the only way I came up with in comics to slow things down and give a certain kind of atmosphere and a certain kind of pacing. I guess if there’s anything I do, it is bringing that kind of stuff. Comics is completely different than film and everything else. You just come up with your own language for how to create a mood.



Matt: What is it about the occult that has drawn you? Because in my head, when you’re writing, I imagine you spinning your chair around, and there’s just this 30-foot tall library wall of books that you read and can source and love. Am I wrong in that? What is it about the occult?



Mike: It’s not quite 30 feet. If you put everything in the house together, yes, you’d get a pretty good-sized bookcase. There are bookcases everywhere, and since I was a kid, since I read "Dracula,” I just said, “This is my thing,” For whatever reason, that kind of gothic, spooky – especially Victorian-era stuff really, that became my thing.



I’ve collected this stuff forever, and actually, in the studio, if I spin my drawing table chair around, it’s a whole wall of folk tales and fairy tales, and stuff from all over the world, which is very comforting, because you know you’re never going to run out of ideas. That 900-page book on Italian folklore – you’ve never opened it, so you know that there’s at least half a dozen Hellboy stories in there if you ever run out of ideas. I’ve got a whole room full of that stuff.

Matt: Witchfinder is a book that I was ignorant of for a few years, and I just got into it, and I was blown away by how much I enjoyed the knighted detector for the queen. You mentioned Dracula, but the most recent volume, you have a writing team that’s on that book that played a big part in your favorite books, too. How did that come together?



Mike: Little by little, we’ve been very slow to expand the writers in our world. Part of the reason why the Hellboy world works is because it has been just Scott Allie, John Arcudi, and me for so many years, and you can control things.



With Witchfinder, it’s a lot more open, because it isn’t tied directly to the B.P.R.D. and Hellboy, so we were casting around for people to write. I had written one, John Arcudi had written one, and then I was like, “Well, who else do we want to bring in to this book?” I had said to Scott Allie, “The top of my list would be Kim Newman. We’ll never get him.”



I love Kim’s work. He’s got such a wonderful feel for that Sherlock Holmes Victorian-era type stuff. He did write one of my all-time favorite vampire books, “Anno Dracula,” where he plays with all these Victorian-era characters.



I said, “Well, I know we can’t get him, but here’s a list of other guys.” Scott had said, “Well, why don’t we try for Kim?” and he said, “Yes,” so it was really pretty much as simple as that.



Matt: That book, too, has – I don’t know how to describe the writing in that book, but it’s very novelized. I don’t know how to explain it, but it feels so strongly written, and you’re in the world. When you’re reading those four or five issues of Volume Three, you feel like there’s nothing going on around you with Sir Edwin Grey, and I don’t think I’ve experienced that in a while, for that book.



Mike: It was very good. Both he and Maura, working together, I don’t know really know where one lets off and the other one picks up, but they’re so familiar with that world, with the real world of that stuff, and as well of the supernatural and the Victorian literature stuff, so they’re able to blend all that stuff.



Kim and Maura, they really knew what they wanted to do almost from the word “go,” and it was so rooted in specific things – that particular part of the country and everything else. Again, if there’s any formula to what we do with this kind of stuff, it’s, “If we’re going to land these great writers to do this book, then let’s let them do what they want,” as opposed to, “We’re looking for a guy to write this particular kind of story.”



It was just, “If you have any interest in this character, what would you like to do?” Then see if we make some suggestions to make it work with the rest of the Hellboy world. For the most part, you hire really good people to do this stuff, and then you get out of their way, and let them do their best work.

Matt: Is that your comfort zone? I think I’ve seen you say that you’re not a writer, but is that your comfort zone, letting people have the toys and build what they want, or is it writing, or is it drawing? Where do you fit in?



Mike: I’m much more comfortable drawing. I’d like writing. I don’t think I’m particularly good at it. I’m good enough to get what I want, for my own stuff, but I’ll never be comfortable calling myself a writer, even though with Hellboy, there was a six-year stretch where I didn’t draw the book, I just wrote it. I never think of myself being complete unless I’m doing the whole thing.



I have created this world, so in a lot of this stuff, my position is almost editorial. I love working with other writers, I love working with other artists, and just bouncing stuff back and forth with them. Writing solo is fine, and I’m comfortable with that really, on my own stuff, because then I get to play around with what I’m doing. It’s a whole different animal.



On more and more of these books, you see me listed as a co-writer, and that’s really just me coming up with vague ideas and bouncing them back and forth with other writers.



Kara: Do you have other writers that are on your future projects, pie-in-the-sky, “would love to work with them” list?



Mike: No, not really. We’re working with another writer right now who I’m very happy to be working with, who’ll be doing several of our books. I don’t think he’s been announced yet, so I won’t mention it.



Again, part of why the Hellboy stuff works and the B.P.R.D. stuff works is we have so few writers. For the most part, except for maybe Witchfinder, we are telling one big story, so I don’t want to bring in writers and then tie their hands. It’s easier to work with guys who have been there for a long time and know where we’re going.

Matt: Baltimore felt like that it had that kind of huge, overarching story, and I recently finished, I think it was 21, which felt like it could have been the end of the series. It had been a while since I read a book that built and built and built to an ending like that. Is that what you mentioned earlier, with spitball ideas, and then he outlines it and runs with it?



Mike: Yeah, Baltimore’s funny, because I’d come up with this thing years ago that I was going to do as a graphic novel. I didn’t do it. I finally turned it over to Chris and said, “Why don’t we do it as a novel?”



Chris and I have known, when we did the comic, we knew we were filling in this kind of hole in the middle of the novel. We knew, to a certain extent, where the book was going, but when we got to the end of the novel, then it was interesting, because we just didn’t have a gigantic story in mind. It only took a few minutes for us to come up with where this story would go.



I’ve got to say, from the very beginning, we didn’t see the big picture of what we were doing. The trick with all this stuff, Hellboy, Baltimore, and everything else, is to make it look like we knew what we were doing from day one, but mostly we don’t.



Kara: At what point did you decide that the universe needed Lobster Johnson, a real pulp hero?



Mike: Everything I like, I like to have my version of. Ed Grey is me loving all the Victorian-era ghost stories and occult detectives, and Lobster Johnson – the pulp stuff, the 20s, 30s and 40s, pulp magazine hero-stuff was such a big part of my development process. When I was 13 years old, I was reading Doc Savage and that kind of stuff. It’s such an archetypal thing, that I just thought we needed something like that in the Hellboy world.



Even Hellboy’s origin story involves an old-fashioned superhero character that I borrowed from John Byrne for the first Hellboy story, but since that’s John’s character, I never felt comfortable asking to use that character again. We needed that kind of a guy, and really, it’s the only superhero, the closest thing to a superhero, in the whole Hellboy world.



I’d come up with the name. It was in Italy. I woke up one morning, probably after drinking way too much espresso. I woke up with this name, Lobster Johnson. I just thought it was the greatest name I’d ever come up with, and for years I just had the name knocking around until I came up with the idea of doing this pulp hero.



The name could have applied to anybody, and it was just, “Oh, I want to do a pulp guy, and I’ve got this Lobster Johnson name. Oh, we’ll just stick them together and find some justification for why his name is Lobster Johnson.”



Matt: Do you have interest in doing more illustrated novels, like more outside the norm 22-page, 30-page comics?



Mike: I don’t have a lot of interest now. I am doing one more with another writer, not Chris. I’m giving Chris a break, because I tend to torture him enough on the comics.



The novels have been fun because they’re basically just ideas for comics that I’d said, “Yeah, that’d be great, but I’m never getting around to doing it.” Baltimore, like I said, I knew it was going to be too much work, and I had all the Hellboy stuff going on, and I just couldn’t see taking this big break to do what I knew would take at least a year to do as a graphic novel.



Then I did “Joe Golem and the Drowning City.” I was actually about to start that as a graphic novel when 9/11 happened. I was living in New York. It was about a ruined New York City, and 9/11 happened. I mean I really was a week away from starting this thing, and I went, “Well, I just have no desire to do that.” Again, it goes back on the shelf until I sheepishly said to Chris Golden, “Hey, would you mind doing it? Maybe we should do another one of those books.”



I have one more character like that that’s been knocking around in the back of my head, a really vague idea for a character. Not a whole story plot, but I this idea for a character, I had a name for a character, and again, I talked to a writer some months back, and said, “Yeah, I had this kind of idea for a character. Do you have any interest in doing something like this?” Yeah, I’m going to do one more book like that.



That’s it right now. That’s all I know.

Matt: There’s a lot of artists that have been dabbling in digital. They draw on paper, and they do paint colors. Have you ever dabbled in trying digital work?



Mike: I’m so low-tech that getting my emails and Facebook, that’s about the extent of my computer use. I’ve never done any artwork on the computer. I wouldn’t even know where to start. The closest I’ve ever come is sitting behind my colorist, Dave Stewart, while he does stuff, and I go, “Can you make that more orange? Could that be blue instead of green?” and watching what he does.



Like so many things, you go, “Yeah, if I was 20 years younger, and I had the time, I should learn to do that,” but at this point, I’m like, “As long as I’ve got somebody great who can handle that kind of stuff, I don’t feel any need to do it.” Yeah, no. Another lifetime.



Kara: Have you ever drawn something that has unsettled you? Like it’s terrified you that you put this thing on paper?



Mike: Yeah, I don’t think I’ve ever done any images I found particularly disturbing. I think my stuff tends to be funny, and not particularly scary or grotesque, or anything like that. I’ve been horrified by some terrible drawings I’ve done, but only that kind of disturbing, I think.



Matt: There was the Red King that Ben drew on Baltimore. I thought Ben’s work on Baltimore was just career-defining. His stuff is so amazing, and it fits so well in that universe. The way he drew the Red King, I’ve always thought was pretty frightening.



Mike: Yeah, Ben is a funny animal, because his stuff is very solid, and it’s very…I don’t know what to say about it. It’s rooted in the real world, but it’s got a little bit of a cartoonish-ness to it, and it’s very solid, so it’s the last guy I expect to do something that’s disturbing, but he has done some very disturbing things.



Ben is one of those guys that, as long as he wants to work with me, I want to work with him. I never want to let that guy go.



He’s actually doing some pretty exciting stuff right now that I don’t think we’ve announced yet.



Matt: Oh, Jeez. Hopefully…



Mike: Yeah, he’s going to be around for, hopefully, a long time.



Matt: That’s great. The highlight of his work was in, I think, the last…it might have been the Red King. It’s the storyline where Baltimore meets his friends at the bar. I remember the panels that he drew of Baltimore busting through and then the reveal at the end of that run was just next-level stuff.



Mike: Yeah, he’s terrific, and he’s one of those guys, he can do anything. He’s willing to put in all the work. He does a lot of research, a lot of homework, and he doesn’t cut any corners. He’s completely not the artist I am, because all my stuff tends to be, “Well, I’ll kind of vaguely indicate this stuff, because it was too much work to draw it all.”



Ben, he can give you mood, and he can give you atmosphere, but he also gives you all the little specific pieces of information. Sometimes the detail guys, they tend to make this blur of information, where it’s just you don’t settle on the big picture. You just get lost in all these little things. Ben can put all that little stuff in there, but still focus you on the important images, if that makes any sense at all.



I’ve tried to describe what Ben does in a lot of different interviews, and I’ve never really hit on it, but his work is deceptively simple. Yeah, a lot of wonderful impact in his work. He’s a great character guy. It feels like they’re people. I don’t know. I’m at a loss. I just don’t want to be without him.



Kara: What comics are you reading now?



Mike: I wish I had an answer for that. I look at a lot of stuff, but it’s been a long time since I actually read any particular comic. I just don’t follow comics.



Matt: Do you still seek out horror books, or do you still sit and read those?



Mike: No, not really. I think maybe because that’s what I do, so it’s probably the last thing I would look for, if we’re still talking about comics. When it comes to literature, I’m still a horror guy.



The last thing that really hooked me, and this goes way back, when Ed Brubaker was doing the criminal stuff. I’ve never been a crime fiction guy at all, and Ed gave me the – I guess at the time there were five books of it. I just started leafing through it one day, and I read a little bit here and there, and then, boom, I was hooked. I didn’t come up for air until I’d read all five books.



Maybe because it was so much not my kind of thing, it grabbed me, and it’s just so well done. I haven’t had that experience in comics since those things, not that there isn’t great stuff out there. I’m just busy.



When I’m not doing comics, I’m reading books. It’s like comics is the job, and for recreation, I read a different shaped thing.



Matt: What’s probably the best novel or book that you read in the last while that you could recommend?



Mike: Oh, God. Susanna Clarke’s “Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell” is still one of my all-time favorite books from the last 10 years, or I guess it’s been more than 10 years now. That one always pops into mind.



There was another book called “The Golem and the Jinni.” It’s a supernatural novel set in turn-of-the-century New York City. That’s a beautiful book. I read a lot, so I tend to remember something until I’m into the next one.



Matt: That’s a pretty good list, though.



Mike: Yeah.



Matt: Mike, it was an honor having you on. I know this is a big moment for us, to be able to share your work with a new audience, and we’re very excited about that. Thanks for coming on to the show today.



Kara: Thank you!



Mike: Cool. No problem. Thank you.



