Mike Mignola Talks the 20th Anniversary of Hellboy

For two decades, Mike Mignola has been masterfully crafting the world of Hellboy, turning the character from independent comics sensation into a cult icon. For twenty years, Hellboy has been a staple of the industry, with Mignola’s fiercely imaginative art and storytelling thrilling and chilling fans all over the world. Hellboy has been one of comics’ greatest independent success stories, having blossomed into two films and has attracted a legion of followers eager for more. It is our true honor to look back at the past two decades with Mike Mignola as we discuss the creation of the character, his philosophy on constructing Hellboy’s world, what collaborators like John Arcudi, Guy Davis, and Scott Allie have brought to the story, Mignola’s influences, the genesis of the supporting cast, and just how it feels to have forged a comic book legend.

Den of Geek: What made you make the jump from work-for-hire to creator-owned work in 1994?

Mike Mignola: You know, I never had the burning desire to do a creator owned book, but clearly the Image stuff was happening so there was talk of doing this, a lot of people were doing it, guys I knew were doing it, and I just got to the point where I looked around and I kind of felt I had done everything I wanted to do. I didn’t want to repeat myself too much. So, I had plotted a Batman story for DC that I really liked and I really had a good time plotting my own story, a supernatural story, and really, that’s what made me turn the corner. I thought I would like to keep making up stories, it’s the only way to be assured that you can draw what you want. I was really in a position to think, “do I continue to make up my own stuff and sandwich other people’s characters in there or, if I want to make up my own stories, why don’t I just create a guy built to do these kinds of stories?” That was really it, timing wise it was perfect timing because Frank (Miller) was at Dark Horse, and John Byrne was starting stuff at Dark Horse, and Art Adams was talking about doing creator owned stuff. We were in San Francisco so we were comparing notes, so there was this perfect storm of people we knew were all in the right position so we could all walk in Dark Horse together as a group.

Do you see any similarity in today’s market with the Image boom? Has the cycle repeated?

I know so little about what is going on in comics. I’ve been living in my own little corner of the world for 20 years now, so I don’t pay attention. I certainly do see a lot of creator owned stuff out there. The difference is, in ‘94, it was kind of, there were guys that have been doing it for ages, but there was this definite move for some of the mainstream comics guys jumping into the creative thing. There were a bunch of us creating books in a grey area between mainstream comics and what would be considered the more traditional independent kind of comics. It felt like a big step then, particularly because we got the big guys that came from mainstream comics, guys like John Byrne and Frank Miller. Now, it’s so accepted as a way of doing business, it doesn’t have that focus it did then.  I’m not saying that it was better back then, I think it’s great that everyone is growing up in an industry where this is a viable option.

Well, it’s certainly a stage set by you and your contemporaries so we thank you for that.

I’ve always been surprised by the shortsightedness of guys who are real successful in mainstream comics who don’t go and try a creator owned thing. It’s one thing if that’s just what you want to do, I was certainly one of those guys, I was very happy doing whatever I could at Marvel and DC as long as I was having fun doing it, but it’s amazing the number of people who come to me and say, “I really want to do what you’re doing, but…,” you know? “I’m under contract, or I’ve got this deal or I’ve got that deal or my page rate is so much better,” and you go, “Gee, if you’re a big guy doing a big Marvel or DC project, you can’t find a couple of months here or there to try doing a creator owned thing?” It’s one thing if you don’t want to do it, but if you’re saying you really want to do it, but your DC page rate is whatever it is, I’m always saying, find the time to at least try it, otherwise, you’re never going to find out if it works. You would think guys like me would be pretty shining examples of the benefits to at least trying this thing. But, you know, what do I know?

You kind of answered “why Dark Horse over Image,” because your contemporaries were there, correct?

Yeah, I mean I was never one of those guys, I was never an Image guy, I’m not really a different generation than Jim Valentino, but there was a different mentality to those guys. It kind of came through channels probably through Erik Larsen, who I knew, and Marc Silvestri, I kind of got the sense if I wanted to do something for Image they would be open for me to do something. They were primarily a superhero thing, that was the energy and mentality to what they were doing which was way out of step to what I was thinking and the kind of stuff Dark Horse had been publishing almost from the very beginning, actually, from the very beginning. Things like Concrete, it was certainly much more the kind of stuff I was looking at. They published The Rocketeer, it was much more my kind of people.

Talk about the genesis of Hellboy. Where did he start? Where there any fundamental changes from initial spark to final concept?

Well, there were a lot of changes, where he started was, with that Batman story I mentioned, I wanted to do those kind of stories. It was just a matter of making up a character that visually I wouldn’t get bored drawing. My first thought was to make up a human being who was an occult detective, because, fiction wise, I love that kind of stuff, but I knew I’d get bored drawing a guy. So the smartest thing I did was make it a monster, so it was a monster fighting monsters, because really, all I wanted to do was draw monsters. It’s pretty well known at this point that I had drawn kind of this clunky monster once that appeared in some convention program book and I had written “Hellboy” on it. So, here I am with the kind of story I want to do and this one thing I had drawn that was really fun. It was a matter of just taking that clunky troll kind of thing, giving him a shave, putting a coat on him, and cleaning him up to be Hellboy.  

But, at the beginning, I had no back story to that character other than what you saw in the first couple of pages in the first Hellboy story. There was no plan to get into who this guy was; it was just going to be a fun visual gag that our good guy, our stand in regular guy, hero guy, was going to look like the devil. And he just kind of appeared magically one day, that kind of origin. So the biggest change is that even by the end of that mini-series the wheels were all turning on who this guy was and he just took over. Originally he was just supposed to be one of the members of a team of guys. It might have all been different if I actually was able to come up with a name for a team, but I couldn’t, so I settled on the only name I ever made up that I liked, which was Hellboy.

What authors or artists inspired your approach to Hellboy?

My approach to Hellboy? Authors, hmm?

Lot of HP Lovecraft in there.

Yeah, you know Lovecraft is a guy that everybody flags and certainly there is that. I like Lovecraft a lot; I’m not the biggest Lovecraft expert or fan on Earth but certainly that period, that pulp magazine period and the Lovecraft and Lovecraft kind of guys that were dealing with these big cosmic forces, as opposed to just these Frankenstein and Dracula kind of stories. It wasn’t just Lovecraft, there were other guys around that time even before Lovecraft that were writing that kind of stuff: the big unknowable universe stuff. I wanted that. I wanted that mythology in there. So, Lovecraft was big and his contemporaries were big.

Another pulp guy around that same time, a little later actually, Manly Wade Wellman, who wrote this series of stories about a character named (Silver) John who wandered around the Appalachian Mountains and just kind of stumbled into various supernatural things. I put an article about him in the back of the Crooked Man trade paperback because (Wellman) was the guy that came up with the idea of a character that just wandered around and stumbled into something, it was really appealing. I had created Hellboy as a member of a team but with really sort of the second story, but really with the third story, I was doing stories about Hellboy just sort of wandering around the world, and that was much more appealing to me than just the structure of a team being sent on missions. So, Wellman, whether I knew it or not at the time, he was a huge influence, and kind of the doomed hero thing that Hellboy sort of turned into, that came from reading an awful lot of Michael Moorcock when I was in high school. None of these were real conscious things but that’s the kind of shit that had been kicking around in the back of my head.

Any Robert E. Howard in there?

Yeah, again, like Wellman, Howard has those stories about a guy who’s kind of roaming around and runs into stuff, and probably within the structure of the way I’ve done Hellboy, so much of it ended up being short stories, and they’re not the kind of short stories that end up taking place in any chronological order, so the fact that I was doing, I was doing these stories sprinkled throughout Hellboy’s career, that’s very much a pulp magazine thing, very much a Robert E. Howard thing. The Conan stories were written wildly out of chronological order, as far as the character’s life goes. So, yeah, the pulp magazine guys were big on informing the way I built that thing.

You brought up Dracula before. After you did the adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula for Topps Comics, you seemed to embrace the style that would be utilized in Hellboy. Did that Dracula project inform Hellboy in any way?

Yeah, Dracula was right before. There were two books I was working on at the same time, Dracula and this one issue of Aliens I did for Dark Horse, but, yeah, I think Dracula was a huge step in that direction. For whatever reason, maybe it was the subject matter, yeah, that was a big move in that direction. There was another component in Dracula, which turned into such a weird project. I was working for Topps which was weird enough, working on this movie adaptation and then ended up getting roped, just for a few days, into working on that film. It was suddenly like, wow, my career was taking this strange turn that I’m actually working with Francis Ford Coppola, and I remember consciously coming out of that, there was a night where I had dinner with Francis and watched a rough cut of the movie, and I remember coming home from that dinner going “What am I going to do now?” Would I just go back to doing just another Batman or another Aliens or whatever, it seemed like my career had gone so off the rails, so far afield from anything I imagined doing, maybe the next step is to try something different.

Interesting that that project propelled you in the right direction…

Yeah, considering that it was a project that ordinarily I would have said “no” to since movie adaptations are notoriously nightmares to do, because there’s always last minute changes, but this thing worked out so well and it was such a cool thing, I only had to change two or three things along the way but mostly it was just really, again, I said “yes” to the right project at the right time and it turned out pretty well.

What was it like to see Hellboy on the big screen for the first time? Put us in your head at that moment.

It’s hard to jump to seeing it on a movie screen because so much led up to that. I mean, it was such a slow process getting there. It was six years between (Guillermo) del Toro and I meeting about Hellboy and it being on the screen. So there were so many years there where you knew it wasn’t going to happen and then when it did happen, I never let myself believe it was going to happen, and then you spent months in pre-production on it. I spent a month on the movie set so I watched it get made, by the time it was on the screen, I had seen it. I had seen bits and pieces. I do remember the first time we screened it, and that was pretty exciting, but not because of the movie, because I was sitting there with Ron Perlman and we were getting nervous, and del Toro was nervous about what were people going to think so all that excitement and anticipation about what was going on and not about, “Oh, look, cool, a movie!”

Because when you’ve worked on something for so long, when you were sitting on the set when they were shooting certain things, to me it’s always kind of like a home movie, you know, when you’re watching you’re going “Oh yeah, it was cold as hell or, that other take was better.” I’ll never be able to look at it objectively. I do remember how weird it was at San Diego (Comic Con) before the film came out and they had these panel trucks driving around with these big posters of the heroes and posters of the villains, and I remember that being extremely surreal and there was an element of “Oh shit, they really did make that movie.” There’s about a year there that was pretty much a very strange surreal blur of, you know, working on the movie and then the filming of the movie and then sliding into the promotion of the movie. It was a pretty wild ride.

I can imagine. That’s just awesome. One of the most impressive things about this run is the world building you did. You didn’t just create a character, you created a complex, shared fictional universe. What was you approach to constructing Hellboy’s world?

Again, it was certainly nothing conscious about it. I mean I was very happy doing Hellboy as just Hellboy. The trouble is, I had created these things at the very beginning, I had created these other characters. In the first mini-series I created all these other characters and some of them appear in the second mini-series, but once I started doing the short stories that were just focused on Hellboy, I really had so much I wanted to do with Hellboy that I didn’t have room for these other characters. I really didn’t know what to do with these other characters, I kind of threw in some weird prophecy stuff here and some back story there, but I didn’t really put that much energy into them, because I knew I didn’t have time to do them.

The first Hellboy mini-series, I didn’t know I was ever going to do another one, so I kind of tried to wrap that one up, but the second mini-series though, Wake the Devil, I trotted out a lot of pieces. I brought the Baba Yaga into it, and the Nazis were there and I had a lot more pieces I was putting out on the board that I had no idea how I was ever get around to doing anything with all this stuff I was suddenly trotting out. Sometime after that, when we realized what were we going to do with all these other characters, that’s when we started playing around with the idea of doing the B.P.R.D. series, and from then on it snowballed like crazy.

But again, the only reason that world got built, I mean I can build a whole world in my head, but to get it on paper for other people to see it, meant employing a lot of other people. My role has kind of been to do the broad strokes of stuff and to keep the history and the mythology, but as far as dealing with the actual characters and giving these characters personalities that’s really been Guy Davis and especially John Arcudi who really made this thing. I mean, if you look also at the pattern, I created Lobster Johnson and I wrote the first Lobster Johnson mini-series, from then on it’s been almost entirely almost all John Arcudi. Abe Sapien, I wrote the first Abe Sapien mini-series, set up a couple of Abe Sapien things in there and now it’s almost entirely Scott Allie. And B.P.R.D., the first couple of B.P.R.Ds were fine but I jumped in and wrote the third one which got a lot of stuff rolling and kind of established where to go with things and then I stepped away. My job with all these things has kind of been to get them started and then I kind of steer a little bit. Especially with John and I, we talk pretty often, and we talk in general terms of we want to take this here we want to take this there. I’ve got my vision of what happens to the world and how certain things happened but I don’t want to tie his hands and say you have to do this now; you have to do that now. I check in with him to just make sure we are going in the same direction.

Let’s go to Abe Sapien, what do you think makes that character work? What does he mean to you?

I have no idea. I don’t feel I ever had a clear beat on who that guy was. I don’t know. I can almost say I haven’t given it too much thought. Though I do know that Scot Allie and I have had a lot of conversations about Abe and where that character is going to go and one thing I can say about where Abe is right now, the Abe book as it is now was really designed to be a companion to B.P.R.D. but a completely different scale. While B.P.R.D. is big stories about a big team of guys doing things with a lot of guns, flying places and blowing stuff up, the idea of a man on the ground perspective of things, given the way the world has kind of crashed around everybody’s ears, we just thought the idea of small stories, more supernatural based stories from this one man’s perspective, and turning Abe more into a monster, I just thought was also a real nice thing to do. But as far as the personality of the character and stuff like that, I probably did play him a bit more like an innocent guy as opposed to Hellboy. Hellboy’s a little bit more in your face, a little bit more out there and in the first Hellboy series, Abe Sapien was more in disguise, he was like the secret guy, which I think we dropped almost instantly.

Visually is there a little Creature from the Black Lagoon in there? Is that your Universal Monster roots coming out?

If you want to go back to that, it wasn’t Creature From the Black Lagoon at all to me, though I guess some of that’s in there. I’m a Marvel comics guy, so when it came to making a team of guys, which I thought the book was going to be, I was looking at those Marvel characters and I was thinking “we need an underwater guy like the Sub-Mariner.” I like the atmosphere of a guy being underwater. I had no idea what the fuck to do with a guy that could go underwater since I hadn’t planned to do a lot of stories that took place underwater, but, you know, that was one of those things I liked. So there was some Sub-Mariner, and Triton from the Inhumans. I had never been the biggest Creature From the Black Lagoon fan, he always seemed kind of clunky to me. I mean he is a guy in a suit where Abe Sapien was more this naked guy, he’s closer to the super-hero characters I mentioned, at least in my head.

It’s interesting because of the tone and the themes that you would be more informed by Bill Everett and Stan and Jack and all those guys just shows you can pull all this stuff from different places…it’s just fascinating.

Hellboy from the very beginning has been me mashing together everything that has been rattling around in my head. So there’s a lot of movie stuff, a lot of literary stuff, but it’s all informed by growing up reading the classic Marvel Comics stuff. Kirby is always in there kind of supercharging everything.

Want to talk about Liz Sherman?

Again, Liz is a character I didn’t know where she was going. I didn’t really know what to do with her; I did do more with her than I did with Abe. I mean, I did kind of kill her off and bring her back, and I did play her as this kind of grim tragic character pretty much from the beginning. But she was one of those characters, I was very happy to hand her off to John Arcudi because I just didn’t know where to go with her. It’s one thing to say she’s got angst over killing her family and she’s got this horrible power. I did my bit with Liz with her unloading that power, bringing Roger the Homunculus to life. I’m very into characters sacrificing themselves in heroic self sacrificing ways, so Roger dying so Liz can live again, that was kind of all I knew to do. Beyond that, the beauty of John Arcudi is I hand him that and I say “it will be great to do this with the character and this with her and this with her,” but John’s thing is, he then treats what that would do to the character. These kind of broad stroke suggestions of mine, he turns that into personality stuff. So, thank God for John Arcudi.

Why don’t we talk about a little more creator owned stuff? It’s arguable that Hellboy has been one of comics’ greatest creator owned success stories. How did you maintain such a degree of control over your property?

Well, there is also the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. It’s kind of like what I said before, I’m a little surprised that Hellboy, maybe I’m wrong, maybe more people look at Hellboy and think, “Oh, I’d like to do that,” but what I hear is a lot of people saying “I’d like to do that, but it’s not possible.” My feeling is, I was not one of the big guys in comics, I just made up something and I made up something that was what I wanted to do. So, there was never any plan to do all these things with Hellboy. It never would have occurred to me that they could make a movie, and stuff like this. I just wanted to make up a book where I got to do what I wanted to do. I wanted to be left alone to make up my stories as long as I could get away with it. So, you know, I’m the poster boy for getting away with murder and at this point I’m so spoiled because for twenty years, really, I’ve been doing this book for myself.

If it hadn’t sold, I’d like to think I’d still be doing it if there wasn’t the movie but who knows. The movie certainly helped as far as getting name recognition out there. I just think, the piece of advice I’m always giving to people is try doing your own thing, make up something you really like. I do see a lot of stuff out there that just seems like guys are pitching movies or pitching TV shows and, that’s fine, if you want to do that, I just had no interest in doing that. I wanted to do comics, and so I made up the comic that I wanted to draw, and I say to people, if you want to do this stuff, and if you’re serious about doing comics then make up something you really like. Maybe it’s not going to work, but no one will care. Maybe it won’t sell, but if it does, you’re stuck making the book made up of stuff you really want to write and draw about. If it doesn’t work, and this is something I was thinking about with Hellboy, even if it doesn’t work, even if I just do this first mini-series, at least I got something out there, I got something in print that shows what kind of thing I would do.

I think that became really important to me, I needed to show whoever was watching what was inside my head, and the first Hellboy mini-series, I figured I would do it, it wouldn’t sell, and I would limp back to DC, because I pretty much shut the door on Marvel by then, but I could go back to DC and I would do another Batman book. At the time I had a good relationship at DC. I could have done other stuff. It would have been a dead end for me, ultimately, but that’s what I was thinking, and, in fact, after I did the first Hellboy, I did think of doing another Batman book for DC. Actually, it was my wife, who had no reason to believe Hellboy would turn into anything, but she was the one who said, “You know,” and the people at Dark Horse also said, “If you’re serious about doing this thing, just keep doing it.” I did not have a track record sticking with anything for any length of time. So, for me, doing something for a year was rare enough. But now doing it for twenty years is pretty…it means I could make up the book I actually wanted to draw because I’ve been doing it for twenty years not because I’m stuck here but because I’m really having so much fun doing this thing.

Well it certainly shows. Speaking of Batman, you did the Batman/Starman/Hellboy crossover with James Robinson…

Yeah, it started as just kind of a joke with James Robinson. He had said something about Hellboy and I said jokingly, “Well, if there was a Hellboy/Batman crossover you’d write it, right?” Then he pitched it to DC adding Starman without my knowledge (laughter), which is fine. But I think, I have no interest, no love for Batman at all, I have no affection for any of the DC stuff.  It just wasn’t stuff I grew up with. But there was the thought of, well, this is the kind of thing that might give Hellboy a little bit more attention because, again, to me, and I think everyone else at the time, Hellboy was just this odd little independent character, but if you paired him with a mainstream comics character, it could turn Hellboy into a mainstream comic character.

There was also, Archie Goodwin was going to edit it. What was exciting about that project was working with Archie who is not only a legend as a writer and an editor but who, you know, had gotten to be a friend of mine when I lived in New York. I did that one issue of Batman with him which was a great experience and I really, like, wanted to do Hellboy for Archie Goodwin. So, the overall memory of that book is actually terrible because Archie died about the time I turned in the first few pages. So if you look at that book, the first eight pages, I think, look great, and after that, I couldn’t have given a shit about drawing any more of that book but I was stuck. So when Archie died, the book just kind of went to whomever. I have no idea who edited that book after Archie died because clearly, it seemed, from my perspective, I would turn in pages and someone was just throwing them in a drawer. It was hard to maintain any sort of level of enthusiasm for it once Archie was gone.

I would imagine so, thank you for the recollection. Let’s enter the lightning round. Want to talk about Kroenen for a few seconds?

Yeah, all I got is a couple of seconds on him. I just, he was entirely just a visual thing, you know, the gas mask kind of thing, well, it wasn’t really a gas mask, but whatever that kind of mask is. That was just a guy I needed to have standing there. Because I had this odd freak show cast of Nazi characters, I brought them back in the second mini-series; you have a guy in a mask, a dwarf, and a girl. OK, no matter how badly I draw them, you can tell them apart. Not much thought really went into who that guy was as a character. I think after that second mini-series I did start establishing this kind of odd, interesting relationship between him and the dwarf Nazi scientist and the fact that he killed him and then he felt bad about it at the end. Yeah, but not much deep thought, really until we had to do that Hellboy Companion book, because I felt we needed to get some of this stuff in print so we could keep our stories straight on who these guys were. That was fun, to actually come up with back stories for those characters. The character I was drawing in the comic, he was just, you know, the tall one.

Well, let me tell you something, when you first looked at him as a fan, the second you see him, you can’t look away from him. It was quite effective.

Well, that’s cool! Cool, thank you.

Yeah, the recollection of that is like, you know you read so many comics as a fan; you see so many pages in your life, every Wednesday. Sometimes you see a character that is just like, holy shit, like the first time you see, you know, Kirby’s Mister Miracle or like a Steranko Nick Fury, it’s right there with that, so I pay you that compliment.

Thanks!

You’re very welcome.

Purely by accident, I assure you.

Any characters, not just limited to comics, that you would love to have Hellboy meet?

You mean outside of my world?

Outside of your world, yeah, anything?

No, no, at this point I’m so in my world. I might have answered that question too fast. I’m so in my world, though I have started playing with a couple of story ideas that involve Hellboy, I can’t give any of them away, but taking a certain piece of literature, say the Fall of the House of Usher, and say, what if that was a Hellboy story? And I’ve done that with another writer and there’s at least one story I’ve written, or plotted, that’s on a shelf here, where I happened to read this short story, and as I read it, I added, I did my Hellboy take on that story. So, that’s something I would love to do somewhere down the line, is take some of these literary things and really do my mash up with these entirely old, public domain kind of stories.

Like a Hellboy/ Sherlock Holmes sort of thing…

Yeah, maybe (laughs).

OK, maybe we’ll hear about that in San Diego, possibly, maybe?  

You’re not going to hear about any of that stuff. Right now, all my energy, all my brain power, is going into the Hellboy in Hell stuff, which was intended to be just this rambling collection of short, odd little stories and, despite my best efforts, has turned into this kind of epic that is definitely going in a particular direction. When it gets in that particular direction, then it’s freed up again to do fun, odd little stories, but until I get where this thing wants to go, I’m kind of chained to that beast for awhile.

And finally, twenty years of Hellboy. You hear those words, what comes to your mind? Are you able see the scope of your creative accomplishments?

Yeah, the first thing was that, holy shit, that means my daughter is twenty! I can’t wrap my brain around that. She was born like, in May, she was born a month before Hellboy. So, if Hellboy is turning twenty, shit, that means she is twenty. But yeah, looking at what I’ve done in twenty years or what I’ve done with people like John or Guy Davis and Scott Allie, I got to say, it’s pretty exciting. I’m really proud of what we’ve managed to build and the fact that it’s still growing organically. Really at no point was it that we need more books. Dark Horse never came to me and said “add more books, the thing is selling.” If anything, I got the other end of stuff, “well, they don’t want too many of these books.”

But the fact that this little thing which started as this little thing kept sprouting and spreading out and, you mention this Victorian occultist in one panel and then he gets his own book and that book starts affecting everything else, and Lobster Johnson is mentioned very briefly and he gets his own book and he spreads out and the fact we were able to weave story elements and historical elements through these different books that tie them all together, and at no point, really, have we done something and said, “oh, shit, we shouldn’t have done that.” You know the fact that it just all feels really organic; it is telling just one big story. I’m pretty proud of that.

And well you should be.

Really, at the twenty year mark is really where I started looking around and going, “How many people have done this?” Not that I want to blow my own horn, and certainly I didn’t do it alone, butyou get so focused on what you’re doing that you don’t realize how rare it is that you did it and also you really appreciate the fact that you got the opportunity to do it. From day one, Dark Horse left me alone to do really whatever the hell I wanted. Again, had it not sold at least break even numbers, I’m sure, you know, it would have all come to a screeching halt at some point, but the fact that it has done well enough that I’ve been able to do it, yeah, it’s something I’m very happy about.

And we’re happy you’ve been doing it. Mr. Mignola, thank you. Anything you want to add?

No, I could babble some more, it’s a good thing you stopped me when you did.

Anything you want to plug?

We’ve got this art book to kind of celebrate the twenty years. This Hellboy: The First Twenty Years, an obvious title, you know. I’ve pulled a bunch of the covers and other odd bits I’ve done over the last twenty years, mostly focusing on the last ten years because I don’t like my old stuff very much, but it’s a great book for me. To be able to look at a book of my own work is pretty rare, but it’s great for showing exactly what we were talking about. Hellboy starting out as this little isolated thing and how it kind of grows and expands. So, I’m very proud of this little book that comes out in March.

It was a pleasure sir, thank you so much.

Hellboy: The First 20 Years from Dark Horse comics is available on March 19th. National Hellboy Day is March 22nd!

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