Later, Mignola became interested in doing a creator-owned comic, as he felt it made more sense to create his own characters for the stories he wanted to tell, rather than trying to shoehorn existing characters into these stories. Mignola elaborated, "The kinds of stories I wanted to do I had in mind before I created Hellboy. It's not like I created Hellboy and said, 'Hey, now what does this guy do?' I knew the kinds of stories I wanted to do, but just needed a main guy." He initially created Hellboy as part of a team of five, but scrapped this idea when he realized he could not think of any team names that he liked.