Where would Dark Horse Comics be today without Mike Mignola? I shudder to think about it. Here's Mike now with a special guest post about his lengthy career with Dark Horse!

I’ve told this story a bunch of times. It’s not only my favorite Dark Horse moment, but probably the defining moment of my career—also the best case of being in the right place at the right time (except for that night I met my wife) that I’ve ever experienced.Long story short, a bunch of us where at a party, we approached Mike Richardson and said we all wanted to do our new creator owned books for Dark Horse, we wanted a separate imprint, AND we wanted the best creator owner deal Dark Horse had going. Now I was in good company—Frank Miller, Art Adams, Dave Gibbons, John Byrne, Geoff Darrow, etc—and it would make sense for Dark Horse to cut those guys that kind of deal and look at it as a pretty safe investment. They all had giant commercial books to their credit. In the comic book world they were giants. But me? I had just drawn what I think may be the only Alien comic Dark Horse produced that didn’t make a dime. I had a couple moderately commercial books in the past, but not many —and there was no reason to think that, left to my own devices, I was going to come up with another one. Mike said yes to us at once THEN asked me what I’d be doing. I said “Hellboy” and he said okay and that was it. At least that’s the way I remember it. I know he didn’t ask me what Hellboy was about. I don’t know if I had a sales pitch ready, but I’m sure I was expecting some kind of discussion. I mean you don’t just don’t plop out the name “Hellboy” without some variation of “what the hell is that?” coming back at you. I don’t know that any other publisher would have been interested in Hellboy—I KNOW that no other publisher would have taken it without some idea of what it was going to be. The truth is Mike had a lot more faith me than I had in myself. I appreciate that.-Mike Mignola