Music Credits: Original music by Philip Brunelle; “Universe in Hands,” written and performed by Kai Engel

Mike Mignola: ﻿Before I did Hellboy, I had never drawn any one character for more than a year. But I love that character, he's always fun for me to draw.

Jo Reed: That's comic book author and artist Mike Mignola and this is Art Works, the weekly podcast produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m Josephine Reed.

Just in time for Halloween— we’re taking a look at what it takes to create a monster. And who better to help than Mike Mignola, the creator of Hellboy— that very large demonic creature who might look like a devil but who fights on the side of good and has a wicked sense of humor. Hellboy might have been Mike's first creation but he wasn’t his last by a long shot— there’s Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson, Sir Edward Grey, and Lord Baltimore— to name only a few. There are, at the moment, 13 Hellboy graphic novel collections and several spin-off titles. There are also two animated and two live-action films about Hellboy— the latter directed by Guillermo Del Toro and starring Ron Perlman. Mike also created the award-winning comic book The Amazing Screw-On Head and he’s co-written with author Christopher Golden two novels (Baltimore, Or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier And The Vampire and Joe Golem And The Drowning City). Mike clearly has cornered the market on good titles. Mignola has also won dozens of writing and illustrating awards. His drawing is distinctive-- Alan Moore has described his style as "German expressionism meets Jack Kirby" and that seems about right. It suits his subject matter-- monsters and ghouls abiding in shadowy Gothic worlds. This love of the Gothic runs deep in Mike Mignola— pretty much as far back as he can remember.

Mike Mignola: I remember being in elementary school and finding a book on ghosts and must've checked it out half a dozen times. And then, yeah around age 12 or 13, I read Dracula and I remembered knowing that that was it. That world, the Victorian... Gothic, foggy streets, coffins, all that, that was it for me. I never got over that.

Jo Reed: Did it scare you?

Mike Mignola: No, never for a second. No, I mean, that's an interesting question because I just find that stuff very exciting and comfortable. No, I don't remember ever being scared, just being fascinated. Does that make me sound like a lunatic? Never even thought.. never thought about it.

Jo Reed: I'm a lunatic in the opposite direction because when I first read Dracula, why I was reading it, I have no idea but believe me the number of crucifixes and rosary beads I had affixed to me as I was reading it would give anyone pause, and I was about three quarters of the way done and I just stopped, I said, "I can't do this anymore," and my husband at the time said, "Finish the book, he dies at the end." And I said, "But suppose he doesn't in my copy of the book, then where will I be?" And I just could never get to it.

Mike Mignola: Well, that would be interesting.

Jo Reed: No it would not have been interesting. It would've just undone me.

Mike Mignola: No, it means that if you had the copy with the different ending, I didn't know that that was a thing.

Jo Reed: I have no idea if it is but if you can use that as an idea, run with it.

Mike Mignola: Alright. Well it's funny 'cause I was thinking about this recently because you know, Halloween time everybody's posting on Facebook their favorite horror movies and my favorite horror movies... well, actually a couple of 'em are really scary but mostly it's about atmosphere and just this really interesting cool spooky world but I don't go see that stuff to be scared. I go to have this other kind of exciting cool... I guess spooky is more my thing. Creepy is more my thing and not, "Ah, that scared me," kind of a thing.

Jo Reed: You studied art in college?

Mike Mignola: Yeah, I went to art school.

Jo Reed: Was it with drawing comics in mind?

Mike Mignola: Not specifically. I knew I wanted to draw monsters. The only thing I could ever do was draw and the only thing I ever remember wanting to draw was monsters and somewhere along the way... I was in an art school for a couple of years and I knew what I wanted to do but at some point you're kinda going, "Well where am I gonna go to draw monsters for a living?" And I had read comics, I had been a fan of comics and I knew that they published stuff with monsters so I thought, "Well my best shot at drawing monsters for a living would be to go into drawing comics." Because I'm a big fan of illustrated books but you know, certainly at that time there weren't a billion jobs for guys to illustrate Dracula and Frankenstein, you know, I just... I never imagined, "Oh, there'd be those jobs." So if you wanna draw that kinda stuff, you move to New York and draw comics.

Jo Reed: And you went to work for Marvel Comics?

Mike Mignola: Yeah. I also didn't know how to draw comics. I knew how to draw, I didn't know how to draw comics and I was lazy and scared so I went in as somebody who would finish other people's drawings. In mainstream comics, you have a guy who pencils stuff and a guy who comes along after and inks it.

Jo Reed: Oh that's what the inker is, I had no idea. Oh, okay great. I was going to ask you.

Mike Mignola: That's what an inker is. So I was gonna be an inker and eventually I would get a job hopefully doing covers or pinups or something of monsters but it turned out I was a terrible inker so I had to learn how to draw comics.

Jo Reed: And was that a hard process or you were just so motivated it was okay?

Mike Mignola: There's a real beauty to having no fallback plan. I have almost no skills of any kind so I was in New York, I had failed as an inker. And really I mean, I could draw probably better than I thought I could. I had editors at Marvel Comics saying to me, "You should draw comics," but I was just lazy and scared but when the safety net of being inker is pulled out, you kinda go, "Well, I guess I have no choice but to learn to draw this stuff," so most of my early career was trying to find jobs that I could draw.

Jo Reed: Let me ask you this, did you find your style of drawing when you started creating your own characters, your own world? Or did that come before and allow you to create your own characters in your own world?

Mike Mignola: Yeah I think it's the latter. It took me a few years to figure out what I was doing and once I started knowing what I was doing and developing a kind of style which wasn't you know, intentional, it's just you do this stuff long enough you kind of feel what works for you and what doesn't. My style isn't suited to doing a lot of like mainstream comics. I've drawn Superman but nobody's begging for me to come back and draw Superman again, it's just not really what my style is suited for. Batman was fine, shadows and stuff like that. So but I had developed a style so at some point you go, "Well, I've got the style now I might as well make up something to suit that style," but I also had the subject matter I wanted to do. Having bounced through a bunch of different stuff and doing superheroes and whatever else, I did a Batman book that I plotted myself that was a supernatural story and coming off of that I said, "Yeah, I finally did something that feels like the stuff I'm interested in," so I'd like to do more stuff like that but do I make up these stories and put somebody else's characters in them or if I know the kind of stories that I wanna do, why not just make up my own guy who's a monster so then I'm drawing monsters all the time. So yeah, I got to that point where I just said, "I'm ready to try doing my own thing."

Jo Reed: And that thing was Hellboy?

Mike Mignola: Yes.

Jo Reed: Where did Hellboy come from?

Mike Mignola: You know, what I remember is going to conventions and people would say, "Well you know, you drew Batman for me last year, you know, just draw whatever you want," and I started drawing this guy. There was no story or anything, it was just kind of a monster shape that I liked and I just made up this thing, this monster and at the last minute I wrote, "Hellboy." He had like a belt buckle kind of a thing on him and I wrote in, "Hellboy," just off the top of my head and I thought it was funny. So there was no conscious effort of making up a character, it was just this throwaway thing. But I always thought that name Hellboy was funny and it was really the only name I ever made up. So after doing that Batman job and kind of going, "Well, yeah, I wanna make up my own thing, what am I gonna do? Well, I made up that lunky monster kinda character named Hellboy, that's kinda funny, let's do that." This was 20 years ago so I was... well, I was younger than I am now but I was old enough that if I made up some deadly serious sounding thing, I would be embarrassed. So I didn't wanna do, you know, Oxaron, [ph?] demon slayer, I couldn't do that because I would be embarrassed. But Hellboy, I thought that name let everyone know that I knew it was funny. And that was always really important to me, even before I knew there was gonna be a lot of humor in the book, I was much more comfortable with a kind of a tongue-in-cheek name.

Jo Reed: Tell me the difference between working in somebody else's world and working in a world that you create yourself.

Mike Mignola: I mean it's completely different. I mean ten years I worked for Marvel and DC and I didn't have a lot of trouble except, you know, I wasn't cut out to do most things, so I managed to work steadily for ten years. But first off, doing my own stuff, I found it to be terrifying. Originally I had somebody else script Hellboy because I'd never really written anything. I had made up stories but I'd never done all the dialogue and we did the first book together. A guy named John Byrne scripted the first book and then he knew that I should be doing it myself so he kind of acted as my training wheels. So once we did the first book he said, you know, "You're on your own. You can do this." And that was horrifying because nobody was sending me a script. It was just really me and the blank paper. If you work in mainstream comics, there's an editor telling you what to do, there's a writer telling you what to do, there's a lot of people telling you what to do, and in a way they're gonna not let you screw up too bad, maybe. But when you're doing your own book for a company that really respects and appreciates somebody who owns their own thing, they really kinda let you go. If you're gonna embarrass yourself, you're gonna embarrass yourself, and they're gonna go, "Well, I guess that's what he wanted to do, so there we go." Fortunately my first editor, when I first wrote for myself, she was a writer and she was very patient and she talked me through it. And I mean, there's always a therapy part of that editor job and she had me re-write in a bunch of things so I learned quite a bit and then my second editor, who's still my editor, he was told when he took over the job, you know, "Mignola can't spell anything, so correct his spelling but when it comes to the artwork and stuff he knows what he's doing so just don't say a word," and on that very first job we did together, I drew something that didn't really work and he called me on this one bit-- that's why he's still my editor-- because I didn't want somebody who was going to let me screw up. If I've done something that doesn't work, somebody please tell me. But I know so many people who have done their own, create their own thing and then gone back to working for Marvel and DC and I could never do it. I mean I guess if my life depended on it I could if I had to but the freedom of just being able to make up your own stuff and not look over your shoulder and say, "Oh, what's this guy supposed to look like," or, "Can you send me a reference for this," or, "I guess I've gotta see how this guy whatever." Yeah, once I got a taste of the freedom and once I saw that I could get away with it, I couldn't imagine going back.

Jo Reed: Did you know when you first started Hellboy that you were putting this character on really what became an epic journey?

Mike Mignola: No, not at all. Going into it I thought I'm gonna put everything I like into this first... was a four-issue story. "I'm gonna put everything I like in there because chances are it's the only time I'm ever gonna get to do this." At some point during the course of that book I started seeing other possibilities. From the time I started, the hope was I would be able to do this thing which is why I was very careful to make up a character that if it worked I would enjoy drawing this character for years-- which is why he's not a regular human being, which is why he's a monster-- 'cause I figured well I'll never get tired of drawing a monster. But I had no reason to believe anybody was gonna buy the thing so I certainly didn't write the beginning of a gigantic epic. It had an ending, my story had an ending. There were places to go but, you know, it didn't hinge on being on, you know, 200 pages long. And when it was over-- and it sold okay-- my first thought was, "Well I guess I'll go back to doing another Batman book or something and maybe I'll come back to Hellboy in between mainstream jobs." But actually my wife... I'm sure Dark Horse said this also but my wife I remember saying, "If this is what you really wanna do you should give it another shot. Instead of going back to DC, the safe thing, just keep doing Hellboy. Do it as long as they'll let you do it." And it sold well enough, I mean, the company obviously wasn't losing money on it, just, you know, "Stick with it." And by the time I did the third one... the third one was a story called "The Corpse" and it was so much fun. The second one was scary 'cause that was the first time I wrote myself but "The Corpse" I had so much fun doing it and everybody started telling me, "It's the best thing you've ever done." That's when I went, "Oh, if the thing that's the most fun is also the best thing I've ever done, well, maybe I can do this."

Jo Reed: You actually killed that character and let him wander around hell. What prompted that?

Mike Mignola: Well when I started figuring out what this epic thing was gonna be, I kind of knew that that would happen at some point. But around the time of the second movie I started having a real lack of confidence in my own drawing. I started second guessing everything I was doing and I stepped away and just wrote the book for a while. I did this big three-book epic that a guy named Duncan Fegredo drew and it was fun writing for him but really quickly I realized I missed doing the book. But if I was gonna go back to the book, I wanted to go back to a different book. Again, partly being lazy but yeah there were other factors. I realized I didn't wanna go back to a book that took place in our world and I had done other stories that I had made up that were set in much more of a fancy kind of a world and I went, "I like that world I've been drawing for other things... the old houses and things like that." And I said, "I wanna put Hellboy there. I wanna take him off the planet and put him there." So the idea of killing him meant I could transplant him to hell and my version of hell would be made entirely of everything I wanted to draw. I would never have to worry again about, "Well, you know, do I have to show him getting on an airplane, do I have to-- if he's in a city, are there cars? If he's in a city do I have to look and see what that city looks like?" No, now it's my city which is made of only the things I want to draw. It worked story wise... I mean the artist is usually in charge. The artist in me just said, "No, no, I'm happy to draw him but I wanna draw that place."

Jo Reed: And my next question was going to be about world building which is what you do. So creating for a character whether it's Hellboy or Lord Baltimore or any of the many others you've created, how do you develop the history, the mythology around them?

Mike Mignola: It's always different but I think in most cases... it-- certainly with Hellboy-- my writing tends to be very vague. I'll drop hints about this incident or I'll mention that incident but I haven't got it all mapped out beforehand. The trick is to not write myself into a corner and then naturally. When I throw enough pieces out there, I start seeing the puzzle-- rather than knowing everything beforehand. Right now with Hellboy and that Hellboy world, I know 98 percent of it but when I started I just had a big collection of things that I thought were cool and I sprinkled them far enough apart using this puzzle analogy. I had my handful of pieces, I separated them enough so there was room to add new pieces in between as I figured out what the puzzle looked like... does that make any sense?

Jo Reed: Yeah it does make sense in fact.

Mike Mignola: Excellent.

Jo Reed: And I also wonder about the kind of responsibility you feel as the creator of these worlds when they're in somebody else's hands-- with the films that were directed by Guillermo del Toro? Another form of collaboration, do you have a sense of, "Okay, these are my babies, let's be careful"?

Mike Mignola: Yeah I mean you go into the film and you know you don't have any control. You know, with the films, I was very fortunate that del Toro was a fan of my work, and at least in the beginning wanted to be kind of faithful at least to the spirit of what I was doing but we knew it was a different medium. You know, there were certain things I was doing that he just didn't feel you could do in the film and I was... you know, I was fine with that.

Jo Reed: Did you like the movies, Hellboy and Hellboy 2?

Mike Mignola: You know I mean, I like some bits more than others. It's nothing I'm ever gonna be able to be objective about because, again, it is my character and I was there, I worked on the film. So when I look at those movies, I kinda go, "Oh, it was cold that day," or, "Oh, they didn't use the take that I thought they were gonna use," or, "Oh, they cut this scene too short," so it's more like watching home movies than it is watching something I can watch as a story. I like the first one better 'cause it was a little bit closer to my work. But I knew the first time I met del Toro, I said, "Listen, I've done it my way, you know what you're doing. I'd much rather see a successful del Toro picture than somebody trying to second guess what a Mike Mignola movie should be." So I found it was easier to say that than it was to actually experience it 'cause with the second film I mean del Toro really... that second film he owned those characters. When we made up the second movie together, we made up the story. We started going back to my comics and adapting something from the comics but really in the first movie he had made so many changes to the character, you really couldn't go back to the source material. So we had to come up with a story that was based on the del Toro version of Hellboy and over the course of that movie it went even further away from the original idea we came up with. So that's a real del Toro movie that just happens to have a character in it who's named Hellboy.

Jo Reed: Fair enough. Your characters have also been presented in graphic novels obviously. We talked about Hellboy but what was interesting is Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire began its life as an illustrated novel that you co-wrote with Christopher Golden. Tell me about that decision to move into prose.

Mike Mignola: Originally it was going to be a comic. It was gonna be the great other Mignola comic. Again, while Hellboy took place in the more or less contemporary world, Baltimore was meant to be that period... that, that World War I era, between the Victorian era and World War I. I much preferred drawing that kind of world... the costumes and the architecture and the old-fashioned kind of tanks and things, I just love that stuff. And I knew I could do a really good job with it but as that story ballooned into something, I realized it was a huge amount of work and I couldn't imagine taking that much time away from doing Hellboy. I'm really slow, so it would've meant putting Hellboy down for at least a year, and at that point Hellboy was kind of up and running and I was having a lot of fun with Hellboy and I never could quite make the time to do Baltimore. And I had told Chris about it many times and he finally said, "Are you ever gonna do that thing?" And I'm like, "Well, what if you wrote it as a novel?" So I'll get to draw the bits I wanna draw 'cause I did a lot of illustrations for it and I'll kind of always regret that I didn't do it as a graphic novel because there's just stuff I could've done there but I couldn't see taking the time to do it.

Jo Reed: But then it became a comic series.

Mike Mignola: We did eventually, you know, turn it into a comic book because the novel has a strange structure where there's like at least a ten-year gap in the middle of the novel. So even as we were doing the novel we said, "Oh you know, we should either do other stories set in that hole or it'd be fun to do it as a comic," and it's been great. I mean, he's done a wonderful job with it. But no there was never any part of me that said, "I want to do prose," because I don't write that, it's just what happens with comic projects that don't happen.

Jo Reed: You mentioned earlier in our conversation you prefer Victorian literature, you like that atmospheric stuff that happens in them. Can you talk a little bit more about that kind of material or why you find it so appealing?

Mike Mignola: You know, I think I'm shamelessly old-fashioned. There's something about that stuff... everything about it-- the mood, the atmosphere, I don't know. It's, you know, again, when I discovered that world, that was it. I can't really explain it except that that's cozy to me. That world is cozy. I don't know. it's my other world.

Jo Reed: Yeah, well it's mine too. I like Dickens and I like Trollope and part of what I like about it is the writing because...

﻿Mike Mignola: ﻿Oh yeah.

﻿Jo Reed: ...you just have time. They're big books and you really get to know the characters and that's part of what I like about it so much.

Mike Mignola: Yeah it's... well, especially Dickens... what an amazing parade of characters. Next to my drawing table I've got four drawers of DVDs and one of 'em is all the old like black and white good ghost movies, the classic horror movies. And one is all the Hammer films which are, you know, color and bloodier but still that all the films are set in that time period. And then one drawer is all Shakespeare and one drawer is all Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. And those are my comfort movies to put on, especially if you get like a Dickens mini-series that's eight hours long. Boy, just put on eight hours of Bleak House to roll around in that world. I'm very happy sitting there drawing with people speaking that language and being able to look up and see that world.

Jo Reed: I'm right there with you. You've said that you're an admirer of H.P. Lovecraft and that he's been an influence on your work. Can we talk just a little bit about him and what it is about him particularly that grabs you?

Mike Mignola: Yeah, you know I discovered him around the same time I discovered a lot of guys who are writing in that period, the '20s, '30s, Pulp magazine stuff. Lovecraft does definitely stand out and I think even though this stuff is set in the '20s usually, he was such a throwback. He was such an antiquarian kind of a guy that all of his stuff, even though there's mentions of cars, I mean, it really feels like that time period stuff that I like-- you know, the old classic ghost story stuff-- except it's a different kind of creature. He wrote nothing like a traditional ghost story but I liked his monsters and I liked the mood. It was the mood and it was the atmosphere, and when it came to doing Hellboy, I did borrow some of those Lovecraftian ideas. The idea of this other stuff that was in the world that got kicked out of the world and if you read the wrong books or you say the wrong words, you start inviting this crap back into the world. So that I always found a really compelling idea, the idea that there's this gigantic universe out there and don't draw attention to yourself, otherwise you might attract the attention of those things.

Jo Reed: Excuse my ignorance but has he been adapted to comics?

Mike Mignola: Yeah, I've never done it. Other people have with varying degrees of success but I think part of the problem I have with people adapting Lovecraft is he talks about such big things. He talks about, you know, this big unknowable cosmic, blah, blah, blah, stuff and his creatures, he'll mention, you know, "You could barely see it but it kind of suggested this and it kind of suggested that." And most guys wanna draw the monster and as soon as you can see the monster, you'll lose the, what to me makes Lovecraft work. When I have done my Lovecraftian kind of things, I mean, the first... that Batman story I made up had a very Lovecraftian kind of thing in it. I just made sure that I showed you a piece of the monster. As soon as you see the whole thing, then it's a guy in a rubber suit. You know, no matter how well you draw it, it's a guy in a rubber suit. If you see the whole thing it's not Lovecraft anymore.

Jo Reed: Do you still enjoy drawing Hellboy?

Mike Mignola: I do and I'm amazed because before I did Hellboy I had never drawn any one character for more than a year but I love that character. I think there's something about him because he's the first thing I made up because I infused a lot of my personality into that character. He comes out of my style and he's just... he's always very easy and fun for me to draw.

Jo Reed: Okay, so tell me what's next? Do you have any new projects, upcoming projects?

Mike Mignola: Yeah, I mean, right now, I'm, heading towards the end of the second volume of Hellboy in Hell. So right away all my energy is focused on finishing up the Hellboy in Hell stuff. But really I'm kind of looking forward to doing some non-comic stuff, just doing artwork. A funny thing that's happened with the Hellboy in Hell stuff, I love that world. I made up that world in other comics before I put Hellboy there so I love these... the architecture, I love these kind of ghostly, pseudo-Victorian characters that are wandering around through these odd tangles of cities and things and I would love to just take some time to do artwork and just draw and paint that world and not necessarily do comics for a while. I probably shouldn't be saying that but... and not that I don't love comics, I do, and I love that... you know, Hellboy in Hell world. But there's part of me that wants to see what it’d be like to just do a picture and not have to make a story.

﻿Jo Reed: ﻿Yeah, I bet.

Mike Mignola: It'd be fun to try to just do a picture and say, "I don't know who this guy is, I don't know why he's sitting on a rooftop but I like that just as a picture."

Jo Reed: And I look forward to seeing it. Mike, thank you so much really. As you can tell probably from our conversation, I am just not a horror kind of genre person. I really enjoy your work so thank you.

Mike Mignola: Oh, thank you.

That is comic book author and artist Mike Mignola.

You've been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. To find out how art works in communities across the country, keep checking the Art Works blog, or follow us at @NEAarts on Twitter.

For the National Endowment for the Arts, I'm Josephine Reed. Thanks for listening.

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