Mike Mignola recently came to Portland to raid the shelves at Powell's Books, the thing he misses most after having lived here. He also managed to come by Dark Horse and help me finalize the Hellboy Companion. After Mike got a tour of our book-design department, he said, "It's scary seeing everybody working on Hellboy books . . ." There is a movie coming, and we're doing all the publishing related to it-not to mention a steady diet of Hellboy comics and trades. Watch as the character rises more prominently in the pop (or pulp) culture hive mind-more mentions on reality shows? Hellboy art used as props on more dramas? New readers flocking to the books?

Mike and I visited Dave Stewart at his palatial studio, and he showed us an Iron Man series by Eric Canete, a fantastic artist with whom Dave's struck the perfect color approach. A couple minutes looking at Dave's screen was all it took to get Mike and me to contact Eric ourselves. You should be seeing a Mignola/Canete collaboration in the next year.

Dave's house is generously decorated with artwork-comic art, pop poster art, and oil paintings. But it was something else that caught Mike's eye: antique anatomy posters. The posters you see nowadays are nothing compared to the old ones, beautifully painted, with captions in Latin. Over Dave's entryway hangs an enormous framed piece, twelve feet by seven feet, of squids. It would've left Lovecraft shivering in a cold tub, staring to the window with contempt and fear at the unkind and menacing universe. I'm pretty sure some of the animals in this poster are made up, but it was the colors that caught Mike's eye. We spent the night talking about a project Mike's gearing up to draw. He told Dave, "When we're working on that thing, every color you're gonna need is in that octopus poster."

Finalizing the Hellboy Companion has been a nightmare. We had no idea what we were getting into, creating an encyclopedia of the Hellboy world. Crafting the individual "life" stories of each character to read as concise, linear narratives, without destroying the mystery, wasn't easy. Setting every important event-and, let's face it, a lot of unimportant ones-on a timeline has driven us crazy. Rachel Edidin's hair color has changed seven times since beginning work on the book. There are a lot of people to thank for getting this info right . . . but we'll save that for the book.

Then came the juggling act of illustrating the book. Mike had done a dozen or so new drawings for the book. We spread those drawings-along with a hundred other drawings pulled from every Hellboy and B.P.R.D. series since the beginning-on the floor of Mike's hotel room, selecting images, placing them in a sequence, pulling them back out and onto the floor, until after two days in the room we had the book.

So for the next few months, enjoy an embarrassment of riches in Hellboy publishing. The long-awaited Hellboy hardcover program is starting, with the first two Hellboy series in one massive hardcover, 9"x12", with some fifty pages of sketch material. Darkness Calls is getting collected, also with a bountiful sketchbook section. Johann's origin is explored in B.P.R.D.: The Ectoplasmic Man. I don't have room to mention all of it here, so camp out in your local comic shop during the months of May through July, and look for some great comics from Mike and his cohorts.

-Scott Allie
editor