The Conqueror Worm takes Hellboy and the rest of his Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense crew to Hunte Castle, a decaying former Nazi hideout in northern Austria. BPRD satellites have detected a mysterious space craft of Earthly origins plummeting from space back to Earth, and its relentless course -- it's headed straight for Hunte Castle! -- suggests that something big and terribly evil is taking shape.
I caught up with Mignola on the phone recently, and this is what he had to say about his newest Hellboy adventure.
Shawna Ervin-Gore: Let's get started by talking about the title of the new miniseries and where you got the idea. In the opening pages of the first issue, you use a poem from Edgar Allan Poe'sLigeia -- appropriately enough called The Conqueror Worm -- as a narrative of sorts.
Mike Mignola: Right.
SE-G: Is that poem something that you had read a long time ago and kept in mind as inspiration?
MM: I've always liked that poem. I liked the basic imagery of it, and the Conqueror Worm is just a great, great concept. It just sounds fantastic to me. It turned out by a happy accident that as I plotted the mini series, I sort of rediscovered the poem. I knew that I was going to use The Conqueror Worm as the title, and I knew I was going to use that poem in the body of the story. But, after I plotted the mini series, I went back and reread the poem, and it turned out there were so many places where the poem seemed to suggest things that were going on in the story. So I was able to actually use probably two thirds of the poem at the beginning of the mini series, and then in various places in the miniseries I could drop in a few more passages from the poem. So I think, all told, through the miniseries there's only one chunk of the poem I never used.
SE-G: After I read the first two issues, it was interesting to go back and re-read the poem at the beginning. It's incredibly eerie how well it lays out, albeit indirectly, what's coming in the series.
MM: The beauty of that poem, in this instance, is that it's extremely vague. It hints at some basic ideas and suggests that something interesting and big is unfolding, but I don't know what the Hell is actually being said.
And that's also my way of writing this stuff. I like to hint at a lot of ideas but never quite come out and state much of anything as fact. Using Ligeia just adds an extra level of suggestion as to what's coming in the story.
SE-G: Plus, comics are more valid if they quote classic poetry, right?
MM: Of course.
SE-G: Anyway, you've taken the concept of the Conqueror Worm, which in the poem is a really abstract signal of the end of times -- or at least the end of humanity on this plane of existence -- and you've made it into an actual beast.
MM: You know, there are so many strange characters in this miniseries that, at various times, it seems to me that almost any of them could be the Conqueror Worm. There is a worm, but so many of the other characters also represent that ominous, impending doom feeling. In a way, this miniseries also is aimed at resolving a lot of what's happened to Hellboy in the past.
SE-G: Let's get philosophical for a minute.
MM: Lay it on me.
SE-G: One of my college history professors really supported the theory that the "evil machine" that many people associate with Nazi-ism was only made possible by all of the individuals who bought into the ideas that Nazis espoused. A lot of people were unsatisfied with what life was turning out to be, and joining in the creation of something that was bigger and bolder and darker was better than whatever else they had going on at the time.
MM: Right.
SE-G: I feel that a lot of your characters who are actively participating in attempting to trigger the supernatural apocalypse, if that's what you'd call it, are in many ways in the same sort of situation, whether they're Nazi or not.
The machine that they're contributing to is far greater in scope and power than any of the individuals involved, but their participation as mere individuals makes it all seem possible.
MM: That's something that has occurred in at least two of the major Hellboy stories so far -- Wake the Devil and this mini series. It's usually one person -- or in this case, a ghost -- who sets the events in motion. And so it just becomes a big domino thing.
In some ways, that also describes the way the miniseries evolved because The Conqueror Worm started out to be a much-smaller-in-scale kind of story. Once I started doing it, I realized that I was dealing with the kind of characters who tend to grow loftier goals as they go. And eventually, I ended up going back to that whole Ragnarok thing -- the end of the world/beginning of the world kind of nonsense that people expect from me now. So, from these humble beginnings, where these idiots are trying to do their bad Nazi stuff, everything snowballs into this giant thing about the end of the world, the creation of a new race of man and blah, blah, blah.
You know, now that I think about it, even that first miniseries was basically the same thing. Here are these individuals, and here's this giant purpose they're trying to serve; now let's watch it all go out of control. So I guess I agree with your professor.
SE-G: And almost inevitably, the individual get swallowed up by that giant purpose.
MM: Yeah, they get lost in it, or consumed by it. And I think in almost every case, it's not even Hellboy who stops it from happening. It's just that the whole thing collapses under its own impossible weight.
SE-G: He's sort of like a wrench in the system, but it's not like you've given him these huge powers to, say, prevent the apocalypse from happening.
MM: Hellboy's the faulty piece of the machine. He's supposed to be a part of this big, evil plan, but won't participate.
SE-G: I'm curious about your method of research for the Nazi-based stories. What sort of research did you do for The Conqueror Worm?
MM: I think on this one I did absolutely none. The beauty about writing the Nazi Hellboy stories is that there are a lot of established ideas to work from. It's pretty well-known that there were rocket scientists working for the Nazis, and in fact, some of these guys went on to work for NASA. So they were building, you know, bombs -- even flying bombs. Why couldn't they have been working on a space program? When you hear about the scientific experiments of the Nazis and their huge-scale plans in so many different areas, it doesn't seem like that much of a stretch to imagine that they were working on space crafts. I'm sure it came up in a meeting.
SE-G: Ew, Nazi meetings! Okay, let's talk more about some of the characters in The Conqueror Worm. It's clear that you intend Roger the Homunculus to play a large role here.
MM: Yes.
SE-G: This is really the first time since Almost Colossus that he plays a real active role, to the extent that we hear a lot from him, and the reader gets a good idea of how he sees the world. There's obviously a good deal of innocence about his character. How would you describe him?
MM: I think in some ways he just wants to be like Hellboy, or just one of the guys, in general. He feels that he owes the people he works with everything. If the boss asks him to do something, he says, "Okay." It's like he wants to prove he's a good soldier. Even though he knows that the situations he gets into are extremely dangerous, the fact that the BPRD guys brought him back to life and take care of him means that he'll do whatever they want him to.
SE-G: He also seems fascinated or concerned with things being "right." At one point in The Conqueror Worm, he sees another character shoot a Nazi without any warning, and he questions that, despite the fact that he's there to put an end to what the Nazis are doing, too.
MM: Again, I think there is a level of innocence he's dealing with. Also, this is a character who was basically asleep for 500 years, so he probably doesn't have the visceral response to Nazis that other people have. If someone was fighting the nazis in WWII, or if someone is basically up on modern history, that person may not think twice about shooting guys wearing swastikas. But Roger has no first-hand knowledge of that terrible association, so he takes individual actions pretty seriously. He points out things that aren't nice because he's trying to understand what it means to be human.
SE-G: Roger strikes me as the most interesting character in this series because you've put him in a number of situations -- but I don't want to give anything away, here -- where it's made clear that he is seen differently even by his co-workers, because he isn't human.
MM: Right.
SE-G: At one point, Hellboy gets really pissed off by the fact that another character goes out of their way to point out the fact that Roger is not human and suggests that he is therefore less valuable. This also comes up when Hellboy is talking to one of the bad guys (again, I don't want to give anything away!), who says something derogatory about Hellboy not being human. My question is, is this something that you were intending to approach in the story from the start, or did it develop as you went?
MM: It became a major theme in the mini series. I don't usually deal with it because, you know, when I'm dealing with Hellboy, I think of him as just one of the guys. And I think I deal with the rest of them as if they are just one of the guys -- Abe, Kate, everyone.
But this is the first one where I have actually said, "Let's draw a line between who is human and who isn't human, and where does Hellboy fall once that line's drawn?" I guess the idea is that if you've been around long enough, everyone will consider you to be just one of the guys. But if you're kind of new and you have a particularly bizarre origin, or if you've done something wrong in the past -- which Roger accidentally did when he was first brought back to life -- then it's a lot easier to say that you're not human. You don't count. We've gotta keep an eye on you, and on top of that, you're expendable!
SE-G: That definitely seems to be what Roger's up against.
MM: And I don't exactly know what makes Hellboy any different. I mean, nobody even knows where he came from! Same thing goes for Abe Sapien -- nobody knows where he came from, either. But given that Roger is a homunculus (an articificial human made of herbs and bodily fluids, stewed in a jar and incubated in horse manure -- ed.), there's a pretty clear understanding of where he came from. And I think if you understand that, it may be easier to say, "Well, we know this guy was manufactured, therefore he's not as valuable as humans or these other mysterious beings that we've got running around working for the BPRD."
SE-G: And what I think really works with how you present this is that Hellboy knows where the Bureau stands on this. He knows they're not putting a lot of faith in Roger -- that they doubt him and his capacity to act in any dependable manner.
MM: Hellboy knows this, but Roger doesn't.
SE-G: Exactly. But throughout this story, Roger seems to become more driven by the concept of his own life, especially as he encounters some of the strange, more evil concoctions the Nazis leave lying around in the castle. At one point he runs into some particularly nasty things in the evil basement science lab of the castle, and he clearly distinguishes between what he is and what these other things are. It's very compelling to see him becoming more aware -- even minute by minute -- of who he is and how he is different from other creatures.
MM: And none of that was planned. None of it was in the plot when I first started working on it. The thing is, I've got all these actions for people to be going through so I can tell this story, but they've got to be talking about something while they're doing this stuff. And maybe on some subconscious level I knew the miniseries was about these particular things, but I script as I draw, and it wasn't until I actually was drawing it that I started realizing there were so many interesting points to consider with Roger. That's what happens, though. I come up with the skeleton of the thing and the guts kind of grow as I'm drawing it.
SE-G: So, how's Hellboy doing these days? I felt a little more reluctance from him this time around, once he got the call about the Nazi space ship rocketing back to Earth.
MM: Right.
SE-G: He really didn't seem to want this to be what it was.
MM: Well, I don't think he's ever really said, "Oh boy! I get to go out and break stuff." Maybe he did when he was young, youthful, and exuberant, but I think its just natural to say, "Let it not be these guys again. Can't it just be simple? Does it have to be some giant monster from another dimension?" But that's just wishful thinking on his part.
SE-G: Here's another question: Are you afraid of monkeys?
MM: No. Not really.
SE-G: You sure have a lot of evil monkeys in your books.
MM: That's because monkeys are funny.
SE-G: True.
MM: They're a bitch to draw, but they're funny. And that Frankenstein gorilla character we see in issue two had shown up in -- well, I guess it's just in one other story. But he was a good sidekick.
SE-G: I just think it's funny that Hellboy always seems to end up fighting monkeys.
MM: Everyone always says "always", but really its only twice....out of how many gazillion Hellboy monsters, everyone remembers the monkeys.
SE-G: Maybe it just sticks because monkeys are indeed so funny. But Hellboy also says something about having to deal with the gorilla again, so maybe that's why it seems like he's fought a lot of monkeys.
MM: But he only says that because the other guy just keeps going on and on about his stupid monkey!
SE-G: Aside from the events that unfold in The Conqueror Worm, I'm curious about what's going on with Hellboy these days...have you planned the end of the series? Do you know what's going to happen to him yet?
MM: I do know what will happen to Hellboy. I figured it out in the last year, but -- who knows? --I may change my mind. I also may never get around to doing the stories about what I see as his ending. I see him more as one of those King Arthur type characters, where they've got a certain role and one way or the other they're going to perform their role, but all the while they're sort of trapped by unseen powers. Good, bad or otherwise, you've got certain crap you're going to have to accomplish. There's a line somewhere in that relatively bad Excaliber movie about king Arthur, and I think he's talking to Guenevire when he says something to the effect of, "maybe there will be a time when I can just be a regular guy." I think he's talking about once they are both dead, but unfortunately, I think that's also Hellboy's situation. He's got a lot of shit that one way or the other he's going to accomplish -- not even by any conscious effort on his own part -- but obviously he's here for some kind of reason. To the Nazis, or Rasputin, or whoever brought him to earth to perform whatever they had in mind, he obviously isn't performing that role. But he's performing some role. As much as he doesn't want to, and as much as he'd probably rather wander around and do little things here and there, he is serving some big purpose.
SE-G: I remember talking to you a few months ago, and you were concerned that The Conqueror Worm was a little too unwieldy, or too complex, to be only a four-issue series. Do you still feel the same?
MM: No, not really. Now it doesn't seem that complicated to me. I don't think I'd scripted much of the series when I first said that, because things ended up working pretty well -- unlike, say, Wake the Devil, which started a bunch of stuff and then didn't quite resolve it all.
SE-G: I'm glad you brought up Wake the Devil, because in some ways this series serves as a sequel to that story. Did you intend that?
MM: Yeah, it does pick up where Wake the Devil left off in a way, and I used some of the same characters. But I definitely wouldn't call it a sequel. It's a continuation, and it does tie up some of those loose ends -- or at least it shows that a lot of what Hellboy has been through is related. That's one thing that I've found with the Hellboy stuff -- it really is like one of those big domino things you set up. You knock one down and it knocks down two more, and the thing just balloons on you. The whole Hellboy business has done that. Suddenly I've got all these characters doing all theses things, and it's going in different directions, and once again, I'm just trying to put the lid on something. I also want to wrap up this particular story so that I can move Hellboy into another direction. My feeling is this is that last time I'm going to deal with the whole Nazi thing. It's too easy to use the Nazis now. They did all this horrible stuff, and they have mad scientists, which are cool, but I think this one will take care of it.
SE-G: So, speaking of moving in different directions with Hellboy --you've done different stories where he battles different kinds of creatures and demons, but it's been pretty Eurocentric, what with him fighting Nazis and everything...
MM: Right, but not always...
SE-G: Well, he did go to Japan, where he fought floating demon heads, and we had a conversation a few weeks ago when you told me you want to send Hellboy to Africa...
MM: Yep.
SE-G: So, if there's obviously this other world operating with demons and ghosts and all this sort of stuff, is there any connection between the different cultures in this world? The really classical demons and monsters all seem to know who Hellboy is ...
MM: I think this goes back to that purpose Hellboy serves that we were just talking about -- some basic root that all this stuff is spurring up from. But the whole deal with Hellboy going into other cultures is to deal with the supernatural elements of those areas. Hellboy in Africa will deal specifically with African types of ghosts and monsters, and -- at least what I've got planned so far -- he's dealing with African folklore, so we get the kind of regional feel. It will be radically different from Japan, and it will be radically different from England. I want to show the diversity of different cultures. There is a flavor to those kinds of stories that is really hard to beat. The Japanese story I did I thought had a lot of humor to it, and there is often a lot of humor in those kind of stories. But its different from humor that you would find in an Irish story. So, while I want to adapt these things to suit my own purposes, I do want to keep what seperates them from each other realtively intact.
SE-G: Okay, here's another way to approach that. In Japanese story about the floating demon heads, it didn't feel like the demons recognized Hellboy as being a demon. They just sort of saw him as another person they could terrorize. But I guess I'm just wondering about this supernatural world, and if there is some sort of hierarchy or order to it, Hellboy is a part of that, and sometimes other critters from that world recognize him more than others.
MM: I see. Some of these things recognize Hellboy for what he is, but it would probably be a higher ranking guy that would know him. The heads that he fought in Japan were pretty low level demons. They didn't know what the Hell was going on with anything. They were just hanging out in some house eating people and being evil. In the same way, I would think that some of the eastern Europe vampires wouldn't recognize Hellboy as what he is just because they are so low on the overall scale of things.
But, if we start dealing with a major Hecate-level deity from Japan or Africa or some other place, then they might say, "Oh, it's you. I've been waiting for your coming for 60 million years..." You know, that kind of stuff. So I do think of that as some kind of ranking, and the higher you are up in that supernatural hierarchy, the more knowledge you have, and the more you say, "Oh, I know who you are!"
SE-G: I'm only making such a point of this because I think it's pretty interesting, but I guess the point is that -- if any of this stuff were real -- eventually the spiritual beliefs of these cultures might overlap or their beings might interact with each other.
MM: Yeah. That's something that I don't feel would really happen in one of my stories --a round table meeting between Vishnu, Hecate, and whoever. I mean, it's the kind of thing that Neil Gaiman could do. I don't want to do it, necessarily, but I might. Actually, there is this elf guy with twigs coming out of his head, who's always looming around in the trees watching what Hellboy's doing. Now, when he's not there with Hellboy, he could be hanging out with Vishnu and god knows who else, but I don't know.
SE-G: I hadn't thought about him, but you're right -- he seems to be everywhere in the Hellboy stories.
MM: Well, mostly, he's an element that shows up to say that something is keeping an eye on Hellboy. Somebody somewhere is interested in what he is doing, and maybe those guys are aware of this big picture. Hellboy is just becoming aware of the outline, you might say, and that's really more than he wants to know.
I read a lot of Michael Moorcock in high school. I guess I love the idea of a guy saying "I am not controlled by fate!" and fate says, "yeah, we knew that you were going to say that. It was preordained that you would think that at this point."
What does fate have in store for Hellboy this time around? Pick up the first issue of Mike Mignola's four-part Hellboy: The Conqueror Worm in May to find out!