I recently had the pleasure of talking about Box Full of Evil (that's what the series is called) and some other fun stuff--including ghost stories!--with Mike, and while I've talked with Mike a lot before, I'd never really spent a big chunk of time throwing ideas around with him. As a big Hellboy fan, this was a cool experience, because I learned a lot about one of my favorite characters. And on a somewhat more professional level, it was fun to talk with a creator who doesn't take himself or his work way too seriously. So read on, fellow fans, to discover what Hellboy's hand signifies, what new projects Mignola's been working on, and why he's afraid of certain toys. But keep the light on--it gets scary!
SE-G: Well, let's just jump right into this.
MM: All right.
SE-G: Well, the first question I have is what have you been up to lately?
MM: It's the best question because I work all the time. Nothing ever gets done, so I don't know what the hell I've been up to.
SE-G: Well, I know that Box Full of Evil is finished because I've already read both copies of it, so let's start by talking about that a little bit.
MM: Okay.
SE-G: You go for it. Just explain what it is please.
MM: Oh. Wait, you're supposed to ask questions.
SE-G: Okay, then. Mr. Mignola, what can we expect from Hellboy: Box Full of Evil?
MM: You've read it. You know better than me. Basically, it's an odd one because I started it saying "I want to deal with this Hellboy/Beast of the Apocalypse thing," and then as soon as I started dealing with that, I found I wanted to stop dealing with this. So I brought it up just to kind of get it up and out in the open and kind of state "here's what's going on," and then the end of the book is me going "okay, but now we're done talking about that forever" . . . I opened up the can all the way and then I tried to nail the lid on for good.
SE-G: Yeah, well I'm not sure you really did that . . .
MM: Well you don't want to close it completely, especially since I change my mind about what I'm doing at least three or four times a day. But I want it closed for now.
SE-G: You're so fickle. But regarding the new miniseries--are there new characters in there that Hellboy fans haven't seen before?
MM: In the actual miniseries, we've got Egor Bromhead, who is sort of an Aleister Crowley-type wizard. He's good, and...
SE-G: No, he's not good, he's bad.
MM: No--he's bad, he's bad, and he gets what he deserves. But he's a good character . . .
SE-G: Yeah.
MM: Other than that I don't think there's any real new characters . . . well, actually, there is. We do trot out one of the big, high muckity mucks from Hell for the very first time.
SE-G: The guy at the end of the book?
MM: Yeah.
SE-G: I had to go ask Scott (Allie--Mignola's editor at Dark Horse --ed.) who he was because I didn't remember him from any other story.
MM: Yeah, on one hand I've got a sketch book full of all the big players, all the big Hell guys. But the way Hellboy has gone, I've been very nervous to actually bring those guys out. At various times I've talked about doing a story that takes places in Hell.
SE-G: And Hellboy has never been to Hell has he?
MM: Not other than I guess when he was born. But, I've got this whole thing worked out where he came from and all this, you know, and I actually was going to do it for the Christmas book this year, but I didn't. I want to go through Hellboy's origin in a flashback story. It would be so much fun to do, but it would be so radically different than what I have been doing, I think it's better that I just drop little bits and pieces of it here and there.
SE-G: So it kind of fits in eventually somewhere along the way?
MM: Yeah, so bringing that guy in at the end of the book was really the first big cosmic moment in the Hellboy saga or whatever.
SE-G: Yeah, what's his name?
MM: Astaroth.
SE-G: And how long has this particular story been on your drawing board?
MM: As in how long did it take to draw, or how long had I been thinking about it?
SE-G: Well how long have you been thinking about it?
MM: This one . . . well, I had the title a long time ago. It was one of those titles that I called up Scott one day and said "Box Full of Evil", and I was already thinking about what we would call the sequel--"Box Full of Evil II, More Evil." It was a fun title, and I didn't really have a story, and then I came up with this business with a monkey with a gun. and I went "hey, that works!" Then I kind of put the miniseries together really pretty quickly, so it wasn't one of these things where it was sitting around for two or three years. This one kind of...
SE-G: Popped up.
MM: Bits and pieces. The title was there, and then suddenly, about twenty minutes after that, it all clicked together. I said "okay, I'm doing this one next."
SE-G: You brought up the monkey with the gun--did you just think of that as an image that you would really like to draw because it's hilarious? I don't want to ruin the story . . .
MM: Yeah, there was that little bit of dialogue preceding the monkey with a gun that I just thought was funny. If something makes me laugh, then I know I'm going to want to do that thing. The trouble with that kind of stuff is it's only funny to me once. And then by the time I've actually drawn it and I've scripted it and all that stuff, I go "man, this isn't funny at all" because there's no spontaneity left.
SE-G: Really?
MM: It's the same with Hellboy's name. When I first came up with it, I thought that was the funniest name on earth. But of course, you know, three years later or five years later or whatever it was, when I finally sat down to draw this thing I was like "what a stupid name."
SE-G: Geez! You must be kidding. But I do think Hellboy is funniest--like in Seed of Destruction--when that old lady refers to him as "Mr. Boy."
MM: Well, I'll use that again.
SE-G: Yeah, I find Mr. Boy really hilarious for some reason--then again I sometimes laugh at really dumb things, so . . .
MM: Well, boy am I doing a comic for you.
SE-G: Yeah, you certainly are. And the monkey with the gun works, too. I love Abe's dialogue there.
MM: Yeah, I was trying to come up with dialogue for that, but the monkey isn't talking. But I have quite a bit of space devoted to Abe Sapien and the monkey together, so it was one of those things I run into a lot where I go "well, I don't know what type of conversation would be going on here, but it seems like something should be said."
SE-G: What do you say when a monkey has a gun anyway?
MM: Yeah. I mean, none of my characters tend to be those bantering kinds of characters like Spiderman, who's always making wisecracks.
SE-G: Which is a good thing.
MM: And they also tend to say "Uh . . ." a lot, which I don't see a lot of other people using.
SE-G: I think that kind of works though, because it's a more realistic. What would you be saying if there was a monkey holding a gun on you? "Good monkey . . ."
MM: That's the only way I know how to write stuff. It's pretty much what I would say.
SE-G: Well, it works, so congratulations on figuring out how to write a comic book.
MM: Well, thanks.
SE-G: About the monsters in this book, or I guess I should kind of say the lack of monsters in this one--it seems like a lot of times Hellboy stories are big, kind of monster jamborees where you get crap coming up out of the ground, and tentacles and demons everywhere. It seems like this one was a little bit more--not in the bad sense of the word-- mundane, as in you're using kind of mundane household things to get the horror across.
MM: Yeah, but there is a demon who becomes the Beast of the Apocalypse running through the whole story.
SE-G: True.
MM: But yeah, I'm not dealing with big clunky monsters, but one of the things I've always got in mind is whether I've done something before. Box Full of Evil--good, bad or otherwise--at least is not like any of the ones I've done before. So probably more than any other Hellboy story, Box Full of Evil became like a mechanical thing of saying "okay, I'll take this guy, put him in this room, get him from this room to that room, this happens, that happens, and because this happens and that happens, and he does this and he does that, then this other thing happens."
SE-G: That's kind of a cool exercise. And it also seems like it's more about atmosphere this time around.
MM: Yeah, again that's something that has kind of fallen on my shoulders since the first Hellboy stuff. People have kind of said "oh, you're the atmosphere guy." And I guess I like that. And I'm also kind of constantly looking for ways to do that and do it different every time, so this time it was those deer heads.
SE-G: That creeped me out really bad.
MM: Oh good.
SE-G: It looks like there's blood dripping from their mouths?
MM: Again it's a house where something terrible has happened, so I wanted something new and scary. I've done stories where, you know, there are frogs spilling out of the walls or whatever, and with this one, I felt I needed something different. And the deer heads . . . I just thought "well that's kind of something."
SE-G: Really creepy.
MM: Yeah.
SE-G: Let's talk about where it takes place. I know Abe says something when they first show up at the house in Scotland--Hellboy says something about having been there before in '69 when some bad witchcraft thing happened. Is that something that you're going to get around to later?
MM: No, I throw those things out just to kind of throw them out there--just to give the sense that they've done this stuff before.
SE-G: That there's a history behind some of the things that they're currently working on . . .
MM: Yeah. The example everybody always uses is there's a Sherlock Holmes story where Sherlock Holmes mentions the Giant Rat of Sumatra. On one hand you really want to know that story and on the other hand you know it couldn't be nearly as good as that title.
SE-G: Totally.
MM: But other people, I mean other people besides Doyle, have written Holmes stories, about the Giant Rats of Sumatra, so I wouldn't mind if somebody else wrote that witchcraft story. I also mentioned a giant vampire cat in another story. You know--that giant vampire cat! So if somebody else wants to write that giant vampire cat story--fine by me.
SE-G: I'm going to give Gary Gianni a call with a list of suggestions . . .
MM: That would be good.
SE-G: It would be! So let me see-- the whole basis of Box Full of Evil is apparently an old folk legend about St. Dunstan.
MM: Yeah.
SE-G: And the Devil's nose and the tongs.
MM: Right.
SE-G: So is the tong part real?
MM: The tong part is real.
SE-G: Because I thought that was really funny.
MM: The part that isn't real is the whole box part, but the goofiest stuff tends to be the stuff that I didn't make up.
SE-G: It's horribly goofy for some reason, imaging this Saint with the Devil's nose in his tongs . . .
MM: Yeah, it's one of those things--after it was all done I looked back and said "gee, maybe I should have done a part where you had a one-panel flashback of St. Dunstan holding the Devil's nose with these tongs," but it would have been so silly.
SE-G: That would have been great, though.
MM: Yeah, I know.
SE-G: Have you ever drawn the actual Devil in a Hellboy story?
MM: The trouble with that would be, according to the mythology I'm kind of working with, there's no guy walking around saying, "hi, my name is the Devil." There's a bunch of different guys, and Astaroth is one of the bigger guys. There's probably, you know, a devil guy . . .
SE-G: But there's also his cabinet or something.
MM: Yeah, there's a ruling body there. But my tendency would be never to draw the big guy, because that would be just too much.
SE-G: And that's one of those things that you would certainly want to save at least `til the end or something. But lately, especially, you've been incorporating a lot of folk legends in your work. Is that something you have an affection for?
MM: It's something I've always wanted to do, and ever since I started reading these things, I knew I wanted to incorporate them, somehow, into these stories. The imagery is so peculiar--like the imagery of Dunstan with the tongs and everything--I've always gravitated towards that kind of bizarre stuff. And some of the best Hellboy stories I've done have almost been straight adaptations of old folk tales, so I always fall back on using those. As a matter of fact, I've actually got to start reading folk tales again because I've pretty much used just about all the stories that I've read that have made me say, " boy I'm going to do that one!" There are two I haven't done that will probably round out the next short story collection--whenever I do that. But I want to kind of get some more of that stuff going, because the next thing I'm doing has nothing to do with folk tales.
SE-G: For Hellboy or for Jenny Finn?
MM: For Hellboy.
SE-G: Okay. Well I just mentioned Jenny Finn, so let's talk about some of your other projects . . .
MM: Even though Jenny Finn isn't for Darkhorse?
SE-G: That's okay. This is an interview about Mike Mignola, not about Darkhorse.
MM: Okay.
SE-G: So, I'm really curious about this project. I love Troy Nixey's stuff.
MM: He's good.
SE-G: How did this whole thing come about? I guess maybe you should tell everybody what it is first?
MM: Jenny Finn is a very, very odd book that I am writing, and Troy Nixey is drawing. I met Troy at San Diego last year, and he was one of the few guys I hadn't met that I really wanted to meet. We started talking, and he said he'd love me to write him something, and I said, "well, what do you want to do?" And he said he wanted to do something in that whole Victorian era. I said, "Great. Got anything more specific than that?" He ended up sending me a sketch book. He had done fifty drawings of just odd things, so I looked at that and started thinking, "well, okay, lots of tentacles and creepy weird paranoia, and I don't have to draw it, so it can all have crowds and all this other stuff I don't like to draw . . ." and it can also have little girls which I would think would be very difficult to draw. And I ended up coming up with this very strange thing about child prostitution and Jack the Ripper and sea monsters and stuff. The first thing that popped into my head was those slightly creepy portraits Charles Dodson--Lewis Carroll--used to do. He used to take those photos of those little girls, and I said I want to do a book about one of those little girls.
SE-G: The funny thing about all those pictures is that the little girls look really complacent and kind of pleased with themselves. They don't seem very innocent in the pictures.
MM: Yeah, there's this weird kind of "been around the bend too many times" look in a lot of their eyes.
SE-G: It seems like an odd thing for such young girls to have that when they're getting pictures taken with their clothes off, but at the same time there's really nothing obscene or lewd about the pictures.
MM: No, but there's a very definite thing that went on in the Victorian society which is a preoccupation with little girls. And it wasn't necessarily pornographic--there was this real interest in that image. And I said, "Well let me, let me play with that." And, you know, when I think of Victorian England I always think of Jack the Ripper, so as an accident, he kind of worked himself into this story.
SE-G: Didn't you do something on him earlier, too?
MM: Yeah I did a Batman book with Jack the Ripper.
SE-G: Oh that's right. Okay.
MM: So yeah, this is a miniseries that Oni is going to publish, and I just finished scripting the first issue, and it's very odd--the weirdest thing I've ever thought of. In fact the strangest thing about this book was coming up with things and just saying, "I don't know what the hell that is!" It's actually disturbing to me, but what the hell? We'll give it to Troy and we'll just blame him for this thing.
SE-G: Good plan. When is this--is it September?
MM: It's, actually, I think, June. The first issue comes out in June.
SE-G: This June or next June?
MM: Yeah, this June.
SE-G: Wow.
MM: Yeah.
SE-G: Wow. Troy must be working fast then.
MM: Yeah. I was a little nervous about the scheduling of this, myself.
SE-G: But I'm sure Joe and Jamie (Oni editors Joe Nozemack and Jamie Rich--ed.) have it all worked out. Well, I'm looking forward to that. It sounds neat-o. What else for Hellboy? It seems like this one just kind of popped out all of a sudden, you said.
MM: This one actually went real fast--especially after the agony of Hellboy/Batman which just took forever. This one went so fast, I don't know if I'll ever have that happen again, but I seem to get slower all the time. What else have I been doing? I'm doing this, Hellboy newspaper thing for Dark Horse Extra. And I've got to illustrate the stories for the Hellboy short story book . . .
SE-G: Whose stories do you have in so far?
MM: Who do we have? Nancy Collins.
SE-G: I heard Poppy Z. Brite was going to do one.
MM: Poppy has written her story. It's in here.
SE-G: What's that like? I read one of her novels, and it grossed me out so horribly.
MM: She uses the worst language of anybody, but I haven't read it all. Yvonne Navarro, who I've never read, turned in a story that sounds great. Most of what I've read is everybody's synopsis of the story, and most of my illustrations are just based on those one paragraph descriptions. I'm going to sit there and read this book probably when everybody else does. I'm really excited about that, so I've got to finish those illustrations, and I've got to do a two page Hellboy story for Dark Horse Presents--but you know about that one.
SE-G: I love that one. I can't wait to see it.
MM: And I've got to do a story for Hellboy, Jr.--probably the last Hellboy, Jr. story, and then I start on the next Hellboy mini series.
SE-G: Which is . . .?
MM: The Conqueror Worm.
SE-G: Oh that's the one that you had originally planned to do with Matt Smith?
MM: Yes.
SE-G: And then Matt pooped out?
MM: Yeah. Hopefully Box Full of Evil will lead into that a little bit because for the backup features in Box Full of Evil we have a Lobster Johnson story, and we have a little snippet about Roger the Homonculus being brought back to life, so Roger the Homonculus and Lobster Johnson are both in Box Full of Evil, and those are like little teaser previews of those characters.
SE-G: And you just did that thing in DHP about Gosburo Coffin . . . do you have plans to do more work with the character and the artist--Ryan Sook--in the future?
MM: Yeah, I'd love to work with Ryan again. He's really good and getting a lot better real fast. It's just very scary because he's like 20 years old.
SE-G: Really?
MM: Yeah.
SE-G: Wow. I like Ryan's stuff. I really like the way he draws people moving. His action scenes are really funny. It almost reminds me of Bob Burden as far as the kind of...
MM: Wonkiness of it.
SE-G: Yeah, wonky. That's the word I was looking for.
MM: I feel like I tied his hands on that Dark Horse Presents story because I gave him thumbnails, and I wouldn't do that again. It was just he was a new guy, I had never worked with him, and it wasn't a brilliant story, so I needed a certain kind of visual story telling to kind of pull the thing off. There's talk of doing another one of those Lovecraft issues next year, and if they do that, I've already got another Gosburo Coffin story for that. I've got several Gosburo Coffin stories, including a long one that I would love to have Ryan do, and I think he'd love to do them. It's just a matter of where can we put them? Because, it's a period thing and it's not Hellboy and I think you run into the thing of, you know, "well we can't really sell a comic of this."
SE-G: That's why I think it worked in DHP really well the first time around. I thought that whole issue was great.
MM: Yeah. Me too.
SE-G: Scott's story was really good, and I've been waiting to see more of Galen Showman's stuff because I love his work.
MM: Yeah, he's good.
SE-G: Okay, next question. It's kind of a random one about Hellboy's hand. Is there any sort of, you know, legend thing I'm missing? Is that a reference thing that I don't get?
MM: No.
SE-G: You just completely made that up.
MM: I completely made it up, and I've been waiting for people ask me about it, and no one's ever asked me about it. So I thought, "Well I'll start doing stories that focus on the hand."
SE-G: And see if anybody asks you about it.
MM: Yeah, and get people to wonder what the hell it is, because at some point I figured out what it is, and I wish people would ask me since I know what it is now.
SE-G: Well I'm asking you because I'm dying to know.
MM: Well, I can't tell you. I mean, I did do that story in Dark Horse Presents, "The Right Hand of Doom" . . .
SE-G: Yeah, but that just raised more questions.
MM: Well that's kind of the trick on that stuff. And, actually, there's an epilogue that I want to add to Box Full of Evil when it's collected. There will be a new four or five pages which is pretty much Hellboy sitting down talking about his hand. And he's relieved that the Beast of the Apocalypse thing is over with, you know. I mean that Beast of the Apocalypse crap--that's yesterday's news. But his hand is going to give me fits because the way it will be collected, "The Right Hand of Doom"--that's the DHP story--will be followed by Box Full of Evil, and then the epilogue to Box Full of Evil will be kind of going back to him with that little scrap of parchment with his hand on it, just saying, " this thing is going to be trouble. In the future, this thing is going to be trouble." But in Box Full of Evil we do have characters sitting around saying "we're going to cut this thing off because we need it to reach our goals . . ."
SE-G: Well that's what I was wondering-- what sort of powers does this thing have, anyway? If you won't tell me explicitly what the deal is, maybe you'll answer some questions. Could Hellboy live without it?
MM: That's a real good question. I don't know, but I sure as hell want to cut it off him at some point to find out.
SE-G: No!
MM: I've plotted several mini series where that's brought up, so at some point I would like to have that happen. It's already almost happened twice--in that Hellboy/Ghost thing I did, it almost happened, and here it almost happened. My feeling is Hellboy's hand is probably the device that will bring about Ragdaron.
SE-G: And that's where the Doom thing comes in . . .
MM: Yeah, the Right Hand of Doom. It's the bad one. I mean there's that quote which I made up-- I thought it actually was in the Bible, but I just made it up it turned out-- something like "I looked down into the pit into the beast and in his right hand was the key to the bottomless pit." That's my take. Hellboy's hand is the key to the bottomless pit --whatever the hell that means.
SE-G: Yeah, so he better hold onto his hand.
MM: "The Right Hand of Doom" (in DHP's 1998 Annual) wasn't the most complex story but what it basically said was "you don't want it, but you're the safest person for this thing to be with."
SE-G: Does it have any powers to protect him in any way--I mean other than being this big thing that he can use to whomp on people . . .
MM: It probably does. It probably does something to him that he's just not aware of. I mean, I never want to get to a point where Hellboy goes "hey if I say this, beams will fire out of this thing."
SE-G: That's good.
MM: I don't think that's going to happen. But his hand might be what makes him almost completely indestructible. Because he does get blown up and shot and stabbed and all these things happen to him, and he's still okay. And also, since he is this demon character, maybe it's what makes him good. I don't know.
SE-G: Which leads me to something else I've wondered about--since he was allegedly born in Hell, how did he get to be good?
MM: Actually my feeling with that stuff is he was raised by good guys.
SE-G: But he seemed so, I don't know, sweet to start off with.
MM: Yeah, he was just cute, and if he'd grown up in hell, that cuteness probably wouldn't have lasted very long. But since he grew up on an Army base with a bunch of, Army guys, he turned out okay. It's wasn't one of those government paranoia horrible things where they're sawing his head in half to look at his brain. It was a nice place.
SE-G: Well, you figure they were so just relieved that--after this whole thing popped up and they didn't know what sort of terrible thing to expect--they got this cute little demon boy. The Army guys were probably nice to him just because he turned out to be so cute and little-- kind of like a hell puppy.
MM: Exactly--he became like a little mascot.
SE-G: I've always thought that Hellboy is really cute, both as an adult and when he was little. I always worry that I'm going to offend you when I say Hellboy is cute, like that might make him less tough . . .
MM: I think he's cute.
SE-G: I think Marv from Sin City is cute, too.
MM: Well, I can't defend you on that one. Now I think you are nuts.
SE-G: Anyway, that takes care of the hand thing, and the general consensus is that Hellboy's cute. Another thing I wanted to talk to you about, and we were kind of hitting on it a couple of minutes ago talking about the short story book--it doesn't seem like you're really overprotective of Hellboy, as far as letting other people work with the character.
MM: Probably not as protective as I should be.
SE-G: It just seems like you let other people have fun with it, which is something that not a lot of other people would do. I think most people would be more anal about it. Like someone else might say, "if you're going to write a Hellboy story, you can't do this and you can't do this and you can't do this." What's your theory on that sort of thing?
MM: My theory is if I want other people to do it, I'll let them do what they do. Certainly that was the case in that short story book because I didn't want to decree anything like that, and I instructed Chris Golden, who edited the book, "don't bog these guys down with time lines and this and that and too much specific stuff." The right story is based on what I do. They don't have to conform to continuity really, and anyway, there's a pretty loose continuity. One thing that's worked out real beautifully with Hellboy is he appears in the 40s and then I started really dealing with him in the 90s, so there's a giant gap where people can do stuff. There are a few things in some of the stories where I did say, "well, you're mentioning this and I don't want to get into that yet. So I did ask that somebody leave a particular situation more open-ended. So on one hand, they didn't have to conform, but I didn't want anyone to glaringly contradict stuff that had been done. When I do it, it will be my way, but I'm not going to try to hire other people to be me.
SE-G: That's a neat way to approach if, if you're intending on doing projects like this.
MM: When Chris wrote the first Hellboy novel, I thought I was actually going to be able to control a lot more than I was, and as soon as that thing started coming in, I realized it was such a completely different animal from what I do. Hellboy is thinking about stuff in the novel. In my book he doesn't think--he stands silently while he thinks, but we don't know what the hell he's thinking about. You can't really write a book like that, so I let that just became a separate animal.
SE-G: Yeah, and it worked. It worked quite nicely.
MM: And for the most part the audience response has been overwhelmingly positive. I'll keep doing it, but at no point do I want to say "okay this guy is going to replace me on the book." I came close when Matt was going to do The Conqueror Worm mini series. But when that thing fell apart, part of me was kind of relieved because it is probably best that I not do that.
SE-G: Yeah, maybe that was a big sign. It's a fun story, anyway . . .
MM: Well that's the other thing. When I made up that story I said "wow, this is so much fun. Why the hell am I giving it to him to do?"
SE-G: And this is kind of interesting--you just mentioned the whole, the big 40 year gap in Hellboy's life. That's a biblical parallel. When you first hear about Jesus in the Bible, he's just a baby, and then the next thing you know he's 30 years old.
MM: Wow.
SE-G: Had you ever thought of that?
MM: No, I didn't think about it, but you make a good point.
SE-G: I always thought that was kind of ripe ground for somebody to go in and try and write stories about those lost years--you know, Jesus when he was 12 and stole an apple from a fruit merchant . . .
MM: Yeah, if they had wanted to pad out the Bible, they could have done that. Kind of The Lost Tales of the Bible. I mean there's a new Dark Horse book (laughs).
SE-G: That's the one I'm going to write.
MM: That won't cause any trouble.
SE-G: No, not at all. Nobody would mind (laughs). So what about Hellboy? If somebody came to you and said I want to write a story about Hellboy when he was 20, Hellboy at the prom. . .
MM: Well, that's what most of the short story book is.
SE-G: Oh, cool.
MM: I think most of the short stories in that collection take place somewhere in-between, Hellboy's origin and what I'm writing now. And one of them I think, takes place really early, like when Hellboy is still living at this Air Force Base in New Mexico. That's the nice thing about The Chained Coffin short story collection--and I think this was one of the books that all the writers saw--that to me was an example of what sort of thing is good to do. For the most part they are these stray stories. They're stuck in that place where Hellboy is just kind of wandering around Europe and having cool adventures, and those are my favorite Hellboy stories to do. I sort of feel like I've got my hands tied up with all this baggage with the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense and all these other characters and these missions and stuff, which I have to do. I enjoy doing them, but to me the Hellboy that I really enjoy is the Hellboy stories where he just kind of stumbles on to different things.
SE-G: Those are really fun stories because you never know what to expect from page to page. On one page there's a little dog and then the next page--monster dog from Hell! So a reader generally has no idea from looking at the first page, or the first couple of panels, what the story is going to turn into.
MM: Right.
SE-G: But, if he's been assigned to a case, you pretty much know that he'll have to deal with at least a few things very directly . . .
MM: Yeah. Still the formula with those stories is to say "okay, here's what you're going to do and then once you start doing it everything starts going wrong." And the way I plot things, I'm pulling in stuff that, for no logical reason, should be there. There's some kind of logic that I have in the back of my head or based on all the research I've done, but for the most part, you don't see it coming. You know, from the way the story was set up, you didn't expect to see bird women and a giant snake woman and all these kinds of things.
SE-G: I felt that way about the floating Japanese heads, too, in the backup story you did for the Abe Sapien one-shot. That was one of my favorite stories because it seemed like you really nailed the element of fantasy horror where you could be walking through the
woods anytime, and something that bizarre might happen.
MM: Well that one, more than maybe any story, I think, is a complete adaptation of an old folk tale. I couldn't have made that story up. The only thing I left out--which I wish I could have put in that--was in the original story, when he finds the heads in the woods, they're eating bugs off the trees.
SE-G: Oh, that would have been just too creepy.
MM: Yeah, also it would have been kind of difficult to pull off, and I didn't have that many pages, and it was one of the toughest ones to draw because the story telling was very odd for whatever reason. I had a lot of places where I just didn't know what the next panel was going to be. And since it took place in Japan, with a culture and a general sense of design that I'm not really that familiar with, I was like "is this Japanese enough?"
SE-G: It did look Japanese--I just think it's really scary when you draw people smiling.
MM: Well, if the smile you're talking about is the smile I'm thinking of--yeah, that was a particularly bad smile.
SE-G: Oh yeah, it was nasty. I'll let you get on with your day here in just a second, but there's one more thing I want to ask you about. What sorts of things are you afraid of?
MM: You mean like real serious afraid of?
SE-G: Yeah, I guess. I mean, it doesn't seem like you're particularly creeped out by any of the kind of stuff you depict. You just have a really matter of fact way of handling it, and that's really reflected in Hellboy as a character.
MM: Yeah. I mean, there are the all-too serious things, like losing someone you love. That and cancer. That's about it.
SE-G: I read something in the newspaper the other day about how researchers have done psychological studies of boys and girls-- boys tend to be afraid of monsters and animals and stuff like that and little girls tend to be afraid of things like strangers and kidnapping. Most boys do have sort of a monster fetish thing, but it seems like at some point it becomes not so much "I'm afraid of these," it's more like, "I'm just reveling in this crazy monster shit."
MM: I don't think I've ever lost sleep over monsters, but I remember when I read Dracula when I was little, like in sixth grade, in bed, and I remember constantly saying "this is it, this is what I'm going to spend my life thinking about, because this thing works for me like nobody's business."
SE-G: I think that happens to some people, and, for whatever reason, not to others.
MM: And ghosts--if I sit up reading books of true ghost stories, you know, if they're written in that real matter of fact kind of way . . . "take the so and so turn off to so and so castle and in December the headless monk plays the organ" . . .if it's written real matter of fact, like this really happens, I will have to kind of shuffle down under the covers a little bit more when I go to bed."
SE-G: Have you ever read The Turn of the Screw?
MM: I've never read that, no.
SE-G: That book is so scary I can't finish it. And considering how long ago Henry James wrote it, I'm amazed it's still so effective.
MM: Right.
SE-G: And all it really is about is the specter of a woman in this house.
MM: Have you seen the movie?
SE-G: No.
MM: The Innocents?
SE-G: No. Somebody's supposed to be making a big Hollywood adaptation sometime this year, but I don't know how it'll be.
MM: They'll ruin it.
SE-G: I'm sure they're going to put Nicole Kiddman or someone in it.
MM: Go see The Innocents.
SE-G: Is that the same story?
MM: Yeah. I think Truman Capote wrote the screenplay, and it's absolutely horrifying. It's the scariest ghost movie I've ever seen because of the matter of factness it has.
SE-G: Yeah, that's how this novel is. It's really just a short story, and I've gotten halfway through it and I just can't read it beyond that point. It horrifies me so much just because it really puts the idea in your head that you're just going to turn around and somebody is going to be standing there.
MM: That's the scariest thing in the movie and it's real simple. There are no special effects, which is why nowadays would be turned into a spookier ghost thing.
SE-G: Yeah.
MM: But you have somebody walking down a hall, and at the end of the hall someone walks by, and she knows there's no one else in the house. And that to me is the scariest thing. It shouldn't come from eerie special effects. I mean, that's why the movie Poltergeist was terrible, because everything was heralded with special effects, whereas in real poltergeist cases, pennies fall out of the ceiling. It's not a blue zap of electricity and pennies are falling out of the ceiling--it's just `how the fuck are pennies falling out of the ceiling!?' One thing that always scared me as a kid--and still does--is inanimate objects moving. I was scared to death of my own G.I. Joes. Even when I was out of college, and I'd gotten a couple of old G.I. Joes, it was great!--until I put them on a shelf and started thinking when I went to bed that night, `where should I really put these? Should I put them in my bedroom where I know I'll wake up in the morning and they'll be facing a different direction, or do I leave them in the other room?' Then I'd run the risk of waking up in the morning and seeing one silhouetted in the doorway. So, yeah--I still have my problems with that sort of stuff.
SE-G: Do you actually believe in ghosts?
MM: I don't know. I've never . . .
SE-G: You've never had the whole paranormal experience?
MM: No. The only thing I have is some really vague childhood memories where my brothers and I were convinced that our house was haunted, and a recurring thing that I think was a dream--but I remember going to my dad really upset like this had actually happened.
SE-G: What was it?
MM: Well, I don't know if I dismissed it as a dream. If it was a dream, it was a real recurring dream, and it was this: me sitting there late at night watching TV and the channels were changing by themselves.
SE-G: That's scary.
MM: But it wasn't like, you know, a remote control thing because it was the old dial TV where the dial was actually turning.
SE-G: Wow.
MM: So I remember that distinctly as something I didn't like.
SE-G: That kind of creeps me out.
MM: And my brothers had a thing happen in their bedroom where they heard footsteps come down the hall.
SE-G: Ooooh.
MM: They heard the footsteps come into their room, and there was enough light coming into the room so they could see nobody was there, and something bumped against their dresser, and then the footsteps went back out the room. So that was scary.
SE-G: Some day we'll get together and I'll tell you all my ghost stories.
MM: I mean I love ghost stories.
SE-G: I've actually had some just kind of unexplainable, scary stuff happen. If I start thinking about it, I just get goosebumps and everything just because I know I've been through a couple of things that make me uncomfortable to think about.
MM: I've done some Ouija board stuff and I was the guy who always wanted to believe in it. And I remember doing this Ouija board thing with my brother, and it was working--I mean this thing was really moving around. And I was the guy, when we were done, who kept saying to my brother, "you did that. That didn't happen." And he's looking at me going "I didn't do that."
SE-G: I'm so creeped out by that stuff that I won't do a Ouija board. I know weird stuff would happen. I'm a magnet for that weird crap.
MM: Good.
SE-G: No. Not good. I'd rather not have it happen, I think. When we all go to Wizard World this year, Dave Land and Scott (Allie, Mignola's editor--ed.) and I are going to go to this old haunted cemetery in Chicago that's supposed to be one of the most haunted graveyards in all the world. If you're there, maybe we'll drag you along.
MM: That sounds good.
SE-G: Dave's done some research. We have a whole write up of it, and it tells you all about the different ghost personalities that are known to be there.
MM: Wow.
SE-G: And there's supposed to be ghost cars that will try to run you off the road.
MM: That's cool.
SE-G: Yeah, so we're kind of excited about going there. Dave has heard all my ghost stories, so he's like "you're a magnet. I want you to be there."
MM: Actually, I want to mention that in a Hellboy story coming up--somebody wants Hellboy to go with them some place just because they think he's a magnet for this stuff. I think that is kind of a neat angle I haven't really explored with Hellboy --"if we go to a haunted house with you, shit is going to happen."
SE-G: That's a scary thought, and it's not very fun, because I'm a really reasonable person, and I would choose not to believe in this kind of stuff. It's just that from the time I was really little I just picked up on stuff that made me uncomfortable--that would make me say, "I think I want to leave this room right now."
MM: I knew a guy when I was in California, in Berkley, and he was an occult detective--a real, you know, haunted house investigator. And I just begged this guy to take me with him, because I really wanted to see this, but not by myself. If I'm with some guys who do this for a living, I really want to be there. But he would invite me to like these witchcraft things, and I don't care about that stuff. I want to go to a haunted house.
SE-G: Then maybe the graveyard thing will pan out. I'm curious about that because here I am talking about me being a magnet and hopefully nothing will happen because it's really scary when it does, so. I haven't had anything like that happen to me since I was 19, but the fact that it was happening when I was 19 creeped me out.
MM: Tell me you're not that much more than 19 now.
SE-G: Well I'm 25 now, but this was just recent enough memory where I had to realize that I wasn't just seeing stuff because I was a kid.
MM: Yeah. I think there's definitely something. I don't think that there's, you know, a guy named Beetlejuice who's sent to do certain things.
SE-G: No, not at all.
MM: But there's got to be some kind of imprint left by certain stuff.
SE-G: I think that `imprint' thing is key. My family lived in a house for a couple of years that was unmistakably haunted. We didn't really tell people about it, but when my brother came home from the Army--he had never been in this house before because my family just moved there--I came home one day and he was standing on the porch because he had been alone in the kitchen, and somebody came up and touched him on the shoulder. So he just left. He was alone and somebody touched him, and we hadn't told him anything about the other stuff that had happened.
MM: I mean my grandmother's house --which, you know, my grandmother was kind of a sad and miserable woman who was sick a lot and blah, blah, blah-- I remember her house, and if for some reason I would be left alone in that house, either I would wait outside until someone came home, or I would position myself in this one particular part of the house where you could see into about five different rooms.
SE-G: (laughs) I've done that.
MM: I kind of wanted to keep an eye on what was going on in that place.
SE-G: That's creepy. But, we'll tell ghost stories some other time.
MM: Cool.