It’s been a big year for the Hellboy Universe: Frankenstein Underground had its debut, Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. impressed as it wrapped up 1952 and headed into 1953, Abe Sapien had some big reveals, while B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth more than live up to its name with one of the Ogdru Jahad making its way to Earth, and finally, Hellboy in Hell had one of the best Hellboy stories ever. So I thought it’d be a good idea to take a moment and look back at it all. Oh, and Mike Mignola decided to join me and share his insight.

It’s a long interview, so I’ve split it into three parts running over three days. Yesterday we discussed Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: 1952 and Frankenstein Underground, today we look at all the rest of 2015, then 2016 on Wednesday 30th.

Mike Mignola: No, it’s not.

Really?!

MM: Hyperberum, I believe, was mentioned in Wake the Devil.

OK, I’ve got to reread that now.

There’s a scene in there where you cut away to these kind of Sanhedrin-looking figures that are praying. My feeling was always that we were seeing the survivors, or the good guys of Hyperborea, where they have left the world, the physical world, and they’ve gone to some etheric other place. I think they reference Hyperberum. I might be wrong, but that was certainly the connection I had.

You’re quite right. I’m looking at it now.

MM: I stumped the expert! How about that?

Oh, that frequently happens. I’m just lucky I have Scott Allie catching me on things.

MM: I always have to correct Scott too. It’s so easy for me to roll out a billion years of this stuff and every once in a while Scott has to stop me and say, “Wait, wait, wait. I can’t write that fast”. So he at least is trying to write down all this stuff.

And, of course, the problem is I will come up with this stuff and then, as soon as I’m done talking, I forget what I said. So if Scott isn’t just taking notes, that stuff just disappears into the air. He’ll call me up and say, “You told me once this thing, and let me see if I’ve got it right…” and I’m going “I have no recollection of any of that”.

That’s fortunate then.

One other thing that came out of the latest Abe Sapien was that Abe needs to re-examine his relationship with his adoptive father Professor Bruttenholm. Now, we know from Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. that Bruttenholm knew more about Hellboy than he ever told him, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that was the case for Abe too.

MM: You’ll see… Boy, I just saw some pages today. Oh my god, those new pages… Yikes.

It’s interesting. I’m so glad that Scott wanted to focus on Abe, because I had a vague outline for certain things where Abe could go. Once he left B.P.R.D., he was back in my lap and I handed it off to Scott. I had a bunch of half-formed ideas, and Scott’s tendency is to do that stuff really slow. I probably would’ve done six issues of Abe Sapien and gotten the whole thing out of the way, but Scott’s done this wonderful job of stringing this stuff out and pacing things so radically different than I would do it.

Continued below

Which is great. Scott’s been putting up with me for twenty years, so my feeling is “You want a book where you can do something the way you want to do it? Do it.” The whole idea of Abe [Sapien] was to be something that would cover the same geography as B.P.R.D, but in such a completely different way. And Scott’s focus is so much more old-school supernatural, radically different from John [Arcudi]’s approach. I just thought it’d be terrific to have these two parallel books out there.

You’ve gone completely crazy with B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth lately. I mean, you’ve got an Ogdru Jahad on Earth. I mean, I can’t even begin to comprehend how the B.P.R.D. can deal with that. Once the Ogdru Jahad are walking the Earth, there’s no going back from that.

MM: I don’t want to give anything away … We only let out one. I think it was John’s idea. I can’t remember if it was John’s idea or my idea to bring one of those guys out. If it was my idea, I surprised John with it. If it was John’s idea, he was surprised I let him do it. I don’t remember exactly which way that went, but either way, Scott was surprised at what we were talking about doing. But as long as there’s just one of ’em and we’ve got a character (or characters) that are powerful enough to oppose something that huge… Yeah.

We needed to go some place. You’ve got a bazillion Ogdru Hem running around; you can’t just do a bigger one of those guys. This is why a lot of all these series seem to wrap up faster than I thought they were going to, because you accelerate things to the point where you go “We’re much further down the road faster than I thought we’d be”. It’s certainly happened with B.P.R.D., it’s happening with Hellboy in Hell, where certain events happen and you go “Oh, I no longer can do these stories because we jumped past that kind of thing”.

Yeah, like Johann going into the Sledgehammer Armour. That’s a major turning point. How long has that been in the works?

MM: We’ve been talking about that for a long time. It’s funny, because John and I wouldn’t get on the phone very often, but when we would we’d have a two-hour conversation where we’d cover a lot of ground. And I never tried to micro-manage John. Honestly, I look back and I don’t remember who came up with certain ideas—probably even ten minutes after we were talking on the phone, I can’t remember who came up with certain ideas.

We bounce stuff back and forward. John’s funny in that at some point he’ll just go “Yeah, yeah, yeah. I got it” and I kind of like to know the ins and outs of particular things, but John likes to get a sense of where we’re going, and then he just wants to go. That’s how he works best and that’s worked out great.

Scott and I are much different. Scott and I really go through minutiae. Scott and I spent three and a half days in Portland plotting the next big arc of B.P.R.D, and it was exhausting, but within three days we broke it down almost scene by scene, so we’ve got a pretty clear idea of that whole arc.

OK, so let’s talk about Hellboy in Hell: The Hounds of Pluto. I loved this series, and those opening pages, that moment with Alice, was really cathartic. Hellboy’s free in Hell, but he’s also alone, and those pages brought that home in a very real way.

MM: Yeah, it is true. The easiest stuff to write is when he’s got somebody to hang out with, which is why I had, at the end of issue five, these skeleton guys, so Hellboy could power around with those guys for a while. I mean, I assume there’s a certain amount of time in between issues five and six where he was wandering around with these skeletons guys and went and had a few drinks somewhere, and then in issue six we see him in the bar talking to some other guys…

Continued below

So, yeah, I like the idea that he’s gotten used to where he is so that when he’s talking to a guy and suddenly this guy’s got a skull head instead of a human head, he’s not really surprised by that kind of shit anymore. But, yes, he does end up a lonely character.

I like when you flip that and start showing a more skeletal version of Hellboy.

MM: Yeah, it’s something that’s been very liberating, to realize that it is Hell, so I don’t need to obey any particular rules, and it’s just my gut instinct for how to show certain things. And as the book goes on, it’s more and more stuff like that where there’s a completely different set of rules to how things in Hell would function, or there’s no rules at all about how things would function.

My favorite thing is I’ll draw the doctors in The Hounds of Pluto story and at some point—it’s not just that I got tired of drawing their human heads and decided to give them skull heads—but at some point you just go “This point, when we cut back to them, they’ll have skull heads.” It’s a fun gag to do, and it’s a constant reminder, hopefully, to the reader that “That’s right, we’re in Hell, and everybody’s dead”, so we can do this gag.

I like the theme of one thing passing and another taking its place in this story. You know, Queen Mab passes, and Alice takes on her role. Your mythology is always shifting. It’s interesting to think that some day a third race of man will see the World Tree that sprung out of Hellboy’s blood and speak of it with the same reverence as Yggdrasil. The present events are simply mythology in the making.

MM: Yeah, I’ve been referencing Ragnarok since the very beginning of Hellboy. And it’s always been the idea that one world ending means another world starts. So we’ve been in the middle of a creation myth for twenty years.

Yeah, Hellboy himself is called “The Destroyer of Worlds”, but he’s also called “The Creator of Worlds”.

MM: Yeah, it’s why … I never really thought of Rasputin as a villain because from his perspective, he has been chosen to do this thing that really needs to happen. By defeating Rasputin, you’re really just postponing this thing that ultimately is going to happen one way or the other. If Rasputin had his way, the end result wouldn’t be different, but maybe mankind would have suffered a little less. Things would have changed much more quickly. I think even in The Island when [Hellboy]’s talking to the big iron maiden version of Hecate, and I think she says something like “It could all be over in a moment, but by fighting against this thing, this change of the world, you’re really just dragging it out”.

I have a crazy theory for you. After The Hounds of Pluto it occurred to me that perhaps Yggdrasil is not the first World Tree; there could have been ones before it. I wondered if there was a World Tree for each of the great races of man.

MM: In The Island, when I trotted out that thing with the Watchers and stuff—I don’t say “God”, I say “the Power”—I don’t know if I had a mention of the Power creating the world, so I don’t know if this world, this physical object, this planet, has been around through all these different ages or if it’s started and we’re on to the second or third cycle of that world.

I don’t know, and it ultimately doesn’t really matter, but I do like the idea—it was an idea that came up really late, and I think it was actually just when I was coming up with Hounds of Pluto—was that idea of a new World Tree. I just thought it was a great image: this bright green sprout coming up through a place [that] I’ve drawn as a leafless grey object.

I have to thank you really. You’ve given me so many stories this year that were wish fulfillment for me. The Hounds of Pluto, obviously, but also the 1953 stories with Bruttenholm and Hellboy out in the field together—that’s something I’ve wanted for over a decade.

Continued below

MM: Thank you. One thing we keep finding is “Oh! We’ve never done a story like this”. Really, we’ve seen… Was that the first time we’ve seen Hellboy and Bruttenholm out in the field together?

It’s been spoken about, but it’s never happened on the page.

MM: Yeah, so I knew that that was important. Unfortunately, I did think that meant that I needed to write those books. I originally thought that John would write the ’52 book all himself, I wouldn’t plot it, but I knew ’53 meant we had to have Hellboy in England for a certain amount of time and I felt like “Ugh, I’m gonna be the only person that can do those!” I don’t want Chris Roberson to feel like he’s got to try to ape me, so if I’m setting this book up where Chris can take the book in his direction—which is different in a lot of ways for my way of doing things—[then] for the Hellboy in England thing, I need to do that; I need to stake out that territory.

I like that Hellboy and the B.P.R.D. has opened up the opportunity to do stories like that again. And another I have to thank you for is The Exorcist of Vorsk. I have been hoping one day you’d do a story from beginning to end where it was just about puppets.

Yeah, it wasn’t supposed to be. My brother [Todd Mignola] and I came up with that story. He brought me this Russian folk tale, which he had already altered from the original, because at some point I was talking about just doing a book of Russian folk tales, and he wrote this for that. Then I decided to turn it into a story told in Hell.

It had been sitting in a drawer for a long time, and I was finally like “OK, I really have to do this thing”, but I just couldn’t get excited about drawing it as people. So the thing I need to do to get excited about doing that story was translate everyone into puppets. I’m glad it worked. There’s just certain things… There’s an absurdity to that story that I can only see it done with puppets. There’s something about the way, in my head, puppets move and the rattling wooden arms, that just lent itself to the kind of weird hysteria that would be in that story.

And it also freed me up to do weird things, like suddenly coins are flying through scenes and stuff. It’s just really not in any way naturalistic.

Yeah, it allows you to treat the story in a figurative way.

MM: Yeah.

Check in tomorrow for the final part!