We asked Mike Mignola and John Arcudi to interview each other about B.P.R.D. and really dig into the behind the scenes thoughts that make the series so amazing. We're grateful for their time and hope you enjoy their chat as much as we did when we first read it. Pick up the latest B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Devil's Engine on shelves next Wed. May 16th! Join the B.P.R.D.!
DHC: There's so much going on right now in the B.P.R.D. narrative as a whole. How do you keep it all straight with so many series, timelines, and time periods happening at once?
Mike Mignola: This is pretty much all I think about, so keeping stuff straight is pretty easy for me—at least the broad strokes. In fact, there is a ton of Hellboy-universe history that I've worked out that hasn't found its way into the books yet. But for the really specific stuff—when and where specific things happened—that Hellboy Companion we did some years back comes in handy.
Two-part question: How do you keep all this stuff straight? And do you ever feel like your hands are tied because I've got so much of our world history—especially its ancient history—mapped out in my head?
John Arcudi: Fortunately, I really don't have to keep it straight. I just call you!
But when it comes to B.P.R.D. continuity, it's not always so easy—even with the stories I've written. I keep the whole stack of TPBs on my desk and refer to them with some regularity. I've caught myself several times right before I hit the Send button where I've made a huge gaffe and have to scramble for the rewrite.
And as to the second part of your question—do I ever feel like my hands are tied? You know, I did once when we first started, mostly because you had it all in your head and I didn't know any of that, but as we talked more about it and as I became more confident (and I believe you became more confident in my writing), it rapidly stopped being an issue. Also, I became a generator of the continuity myself and I really got on a tear, but then when I had a question, or when some other element that was all yours would crop up, we've always been able to use those things as plot points or problem-solving devices. Maybe that sounds odd, but that's how it's worked out.
When did you first get a sense of how big this whole story line was going to get?
MM: After the first couple of Hellboy short stories ("The Wolves of Saint August" and "The Corpse"), I realized how many stories there might be about Hellboy's past, but I think things really started to take off with the second miniseries, Wake the Devil. I put a lot of new pieces on the board with that one—Roger, Hecate, and the Baba Yaga show up, Edward Grey is mentioned, and we get all that fun stuff with Zinco and the Nazis. Now it was clear this thing could go in a bunch of different directions, and there were suddenly a whole lot of characters that wanted to be fleshed out. At the same time I was starting to realize I didn't want this to be a team book—I wanted to deal with who Hellboy was and where he was going. I saw the potential for a whole lot of different stories, but since I was the only guy doing the book I just didn't know how much I'd actually be able to do. So I tried not to think about all that potential.
It all started to change when we did the B.P.R.D. spinoff book, and what started out as an experiment worked. When I wrote Plague of Frogs—that was like Wake the Devil—I introduced a lot of new stuff and gave the impression things were going somewhere. And then, really, when you came on board after that everything started to take off. I started to see just how big the story was, and that it might actually (with the help of a lot of really great artists) be possible to get that story into print. And with you firmly in charge of the ongoing story line, it's freed me up to focus on the history—that's what I've had the most fun with the last couple of years—creating these characters and events in the past and seeing how they relate to the ongoing story. Seeing things from the past, like the Heliopic Brotherhood (which started out as a joke), impact three or four different titles in a pretty organic way—that's pretty exciting to me.
Recently we finally came up with a couple of different ways to do stories set during World War II, and your Edward Grey book (Lost and Gone Forever) happened because you just wanted to write a western for John Severin—so is there some other period of history or some event that you've been wanting to write about that you might bring into the Hellboy universe?
JA: You know, there is one era that's always been on my radar, but I never thought about it in relation to the Hellboy universe until you just asked. The turn of the twentieth century! You got all kinds of things happening. The burgeoning automobile business, the birth of manned flight, and most importantly the invention of a ton of things that really made the twentieth century so, so different from the previous one thousand years. Light bulbs, motion pictures, phonographs, radio, and the people who developed them like Tesla and Edison. Bigger-than-life inventors who were also huge personalities in the press. The thing that strikes me about it most is that it was a time where magic and technology were overlapping in the public eye.
Our main characters—our "heroes," if you will—are all good intentioned (most of the time). Sometimes, though, we get the sense that their adversaries, the "villains" in these stories, are more on the ball, have a better idea of what's really going on—and maybe are even doing more good than our "good guys." Where does that sensibility come from? What were the influences that led you to want to explore those sorts of ambiguous narratives?
MM: First, let's sit down and figure out how you can do that turn of the century thing—I'd love to see that. And, of course, we don't have any of our main characters who were around then, so it's a challenge—and that makes it fun!
Now my answer—all my major "villains," starting with Rasputin, have sort of been on the side of evolution—moving the world forward towards its destruction, making a rebirth possible. The whole destruction of this world to make way for the next is lifted right out of Norse mythology—Ragna Rok. I love the big, epic finish, and you don't get a bigger finish than gods fighting an army of monsters—they lose, but they go down swinging.
I wouldn't know how to write a so-called villain who was just evil. Rasputin feels he's been chosen to do this great thing. Mankind's run its course, so it's time to get the next thing up and running. It's not that he hates mankind; he just knows where things are going, and it's up to him to get things going in that direction. My "villains" are usually the guys with a clearer understanding of the big picture—that's why they usually come across as crazy. The big picture is scary. It's the kind of thing that would make a regular guy go crazy. And my "good guys" are usually regular guys. Even the monster ones like Hellboy and Abe think of themselves as regular guys. They don't want to look at the big picture. They are usually fighting to keep things going the way things have been going. From a cosmic perspective, they're the ones gumming up the works.
Are there characters floating around right now that you'd really like to provide more background for? Characters you've created or ones I've created. I always say some of these guys do take on a life of their own. Lately I've been thinking about Professor Bruttenholm—we've started to get into his past with Hellboy a little bit in the B.P.R.D.: 1946 and 1947 books, and now I'm getting all excited about what he was doing before Hellboy was around. Do I look backwards more than you do? Or are you itching to give us the background on one of these characters yourself?
JA: I don't think you look backwards more than I do, but I do think you look further back! Which is to say, I like to think about the histories of these guys, but mostly after World War II. Here's a for-instance: I'd like to look more at Abe's time at the Bureau between when he was found (in 1979) and 1994. In my head I've created a whole series of stories and relationships he had with agents other than Hellboy and Liz. This extends to Agent Sal Tasso, who Abe "rescued" from Scotland after The Abyssal Plain. I'd also like to look a little harder at some characters I created, too—agents Giarocco and Nichols, and even Captain Daimio (or at least his family history); and then there's Fenix, but with any luck I can fit those histories into the main story lines without slowing things down.
DHC: We can't wait to dig in further with the upcoming B.P.R.D. Hell on Earth: The Devil's Engine #1. Thank you both so much for your time!
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