I guess it would be more accurate to say I enlisted with joy...more like running away to join the circus! But right now with BPRD Hell on Earth: New World #4 on the stands, I’m already working ahead on the next series; BPRD: Gods and always trying and catch up with John Arcudi who turns around scripts faster than I can draw them (and that’s not a bad thing at all). I usually don’t look back much and focus more on what’s coming up with work, but with Dark Horse publishing the new (and huge) first omnibus volume of Plague of Frogs, which reprints all the early BPRD stories and my first series I did with them, I was asked to look nostalgic on it and write some thoughts. My first thought was wow, it wasn’t that long ago to look back nostalgi and wow, I don’t remember a lot about it so maybe it was longer ago than I thought.One thing I’m always asked, usually at comic cons or interviews is “How did you get to draw BPRD”? This is usually coupled with “How did you meet Mike Mignola” which is not much of a story in itself, we met at a comic con years ago before BPRD and kept in touch to talk monsters and whatnot. See, not much of a story really and actually “How did you get to draw BPRD?” always seems like a question asked in amazement, like it involved some sort of black-mailed deal with the devil. But to make the “How I met Mike” story sound exciting, the only truthful aswer I can give about “How I got to draw BPRD” was just that Mike asked me. See, that’s pretty boring too.
But I remember at the time I had been doing my creator book The Marquis and Mike was always amazed that I wasn’t getting a lot of work-for-hire offers to do monster type books, especially considering the love we shared for horror/monsters. As I remember I was probably complaining about the same thing to him, when he out of the blue said he was thinking of spinning off BPRD into it’s own series without Hellboy and asked if I was interested in drawing it. You can imagine that I couldn’t say “YES” fast and loud enough. So after a tryout on Dark Waters (to make sure I didn’t fuck it up and Mike would refuse to take my phone calls in the future), I got to be series artist starting with Plague of Frogs.
Now, Mike was always adament that I draw BPRD like I would anything else...he wasn’t wanting me to ape his style of art, after all if he wanted it to look like that he could have just drawn it himself. But there were mistakes a plenty to be made, I was nervous as hell of wetting that sandbox that I was having a great time playing in and losing the job. So here’s some things I learned along the way while starting those early issues:
-Abe may be part fish, but don’t draw him with weird “fish lips”, only a big upper lip. And yes, I drew him “fish lipped” on the Dark Waters cover, and it does look weird!
-Drawing those markings on Abe’s head wrong, leads to getting cool freebie statues from Mike for reference!
-Drawing other things wrong, does not lead to getting cool freebie original art from Mike for reference!
-For some reason I thought a sleeve-less trench coat was a good idea for Abe to wear, something to do with his arm fins but it looked like the end of a Marx brothers skit where someone didn’t like his suit.
-Working with Mike will inevitably and subconciously lead to putting more solid black in your inks.
-Johann is easy to draw!
-Liz is not as easy to draw as Johann!
-Drawing Roger with the “warts and all” detail that I put into the Marquis will make Mike question about having him not wear pants.
-Getting faxes of scripts from Mike written in long hand with small thumbnail sketches here and there are the coolest looking scripts to work from!
-Convincing Mike to stop throwing out his design sketches so we can print them in the sketchbook section would take a few more years.
-Roger does not have back hair (don’t know what got me started on that one).
-There is no Crab Point, Michigan
And of course looking back some 53 issues later, the series is just as fun to draw as when I started and Mike and John are amazing collaborators and friends. So here’s looking to 53 more issues ahead!
Guy Davis
Crab Point, Michigan
