Mike Mignola, Hellboy creator, didn't see character's success coming

Mike Mignola, Hellboy creator, didn't see character's success coming
Hellboy, created by writer/artist Mike Mignola, first appeared in comics in 1993.

Long before Hellboy hit the silver screen, creator Mike Mignola didn't hold much hope for the big red guy's chances. The comic book, about the son of the prince of darkness who has forsaken his father's infernal origins, stood a snowball's chance in hell of catching on.

"When I did the first "Hellboy" comic, I figured I had this one chance to draw my own comic," says the creator, "so I tried to cram everything I liked into that first series."


And cram he did, irreverently mixing everything from gothic horror, B-movies, superhero comics and pulp fiction. The resulting witch's brew of moody atmosphere and two-fisted action was a resounding success for Mignola and publisher Dark Horse Comics, one that has since spawned a series of novels, toys, animated features and video games.

If Mignola thought the "Hellboy" comic was a long shot, pitching the horned hero to Hollywood must have seemed beyond impossible.

"We owe it to Mike the fact that he consciously made our lives much harder, because he chose the cheesiest title, the cheesiest name, but it's absolutely intrinsic to the character," says Guillermo del Toro, director of "Hellboy" and "Hellboy II: The Golden Army," opening Friday.

"Because he's not Hellman, he's not Spawn of Satan," says del Toro. "He's Hellboy."

But there is a lot more to Mignola than the apocalyptic monsters and evil Nazi scientists in the pages of his "Hellboy" comics.

Mignola started drawing minor comic titles in 1980. His distinctively blocky, design-heavy art style, which he once described as "German Expressionism meets Jack Kirby," perplexed readers until 1988's "Gotham by Gaslight," a one-shot from DC Comics that re-imagined Batman as a Victorian-era vigilante doing battle with Jack the Ripper. The offbeat book set the stage for the rest of Mignola's career.

In his typically self-effacing manner, Mignola writes it off, saying, "'Gaslight' put me on the map, and then I careened off into projects that nobody gave a shit about."

One such project was the comic adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's "Bram Stoker's Dracula," which was a kind of homecoming for the artist, who refers to the original novel as his biggest influence.

"At age thirteen, reading 'Dracula,' I remember thinking, 'Oo, this is it. This is the thing.' That sent me off on the whole folklore thing, the whole style of Victorian gothic. Dracula was it."

The comic adaptation segued into working on a small amount of concept art for the movie and marked Mignola's first brush with the film world.


"As a reward for the little bit of stuff I did, Francis [Ford Coppola] invited me up to watch a rough cut of the picture," says Mignola. "I assumed it was going to be a dozen guys, but it was just me, him and George Lucas. At that point I was thinking, 'Well, my life has taken an odd turn.' It was pretty weird."

Mignola's life only got weirder when Disney approached him to adapt his art style to the animated feature "Atlantis: The Lost Empire." During his first meeting with the studio, he was shown enlargements of his "Hellboy" comic pages overlaid with notes on how he did things, in terms he didn't understand.

"I remember watching a rough cut of the film and these characters have these big square weird hands," recalls Mignola.  "I said to the guy next to me, 'Those are cool hands.' And he says to me, 'Yea, they're your hands. We had a whole meeting about how to do your hands.' It was so weird I couldn't wrap my brain around it."

Collaborating with director Guillermo del Toro has been a lot easier for Mignola to handle.

"We have a great relationship," says Mignola. "He and I speak the same language, we've read the same books, talking about artwork; a lot of that stuff, we're on the same page."

The two first met when del Toro heard talk of a Hellboy film adaptation being made. A huge fan of the comics, he wanted in, but Hollywood was predictably slow to get behind a movie about a wisecracking demon.

Instead, del Toro brought Mignola on as a concept artist for "Blade II" in order to see how well they would work together. They also hoped the vampire movie would be enough of a commercial success to get studios interested in Hellboy.

"The night 'Blade II' opened del Toro said to me, 'If they don't greenlight Hellboy now, they never will,'" says Mignola. "I always thought 'Hellboy' was a lost cause, I never believed a Hellboy movie would be made, or I thought I never believed it. But somehow over the years he made me believe. He's got that infectious personality and he made me believe he was going to get this thing done and suddenly, in that one moment, I was like, 'Oh s---, maybe they won't!'"

Ron Perlman is a believer too. The actor, who stars as the devilish superhero, thinks it is easy for audiences to relate to the surprisingly down-to-earth Hellboy.

"He is a guy who chronologically is 58 years old, but emotionally and spiritually is 15," says Perlman. "He's fun and he's funny. When he's fighting these creatures, there's all these zingers, all the trash talk just to piss them off. When we fell in love with Muhammad Ali, it wasn't enough to win: He had to kind of own you while he was doing it. He had to show you how much he was smarter than you, and funnier than you and badder than you."

"Hellboy" wound up making $150 million in combined ticket and DVD sales, paving the way for this summer's sequel, "Hellboy II: The Golden Army."

Still, for Mignola, it all comes back to the comics.

"My focus is very narrow; it's primarily on the comics. I don't want to be a guy sitting at a desk spending whole days designing Hellboy coffee cups. Even though I did, but it didn't take that long."