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Downloaded from
YTS.MX

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Official YIFY movies site:
YTS.MX

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You mentioned you might
do a quick sketch for us.

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Did I?

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Is that you wanted to shoot me drawing?

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If that's cool.

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Yeah, I can, I can do that.

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When you're done, just get give
us a quick look into the camera.

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Looking for approval and not finding it.

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Then everyone goes, "What an
asshole. He's always looking for sympathy."

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No, I'm just being
honest. I've done the math.

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I know I'm just some guy who gets
away with drawing monsters for a living.

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Who is Hellboy?

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What's Hellboy about?

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- Hellboy. -Hellboy.

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- Hellboy. -Hellboy.

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- Hellboy. -Hellboy.

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- Hellboy. -Hellboy.

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The one and only Hellboy.

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Hellboy is a demon brought into
our realm at the end of World War II.

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Now, he's an adult demon who's
a wisecracking, sarcastic fella.

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And because he was
raised by Professor Broom,

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he has a good moral compass
and higher standards to live by.

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Although Hellboy is supposed
to be the beast of the apocalypse,

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he doesn't want to be the
beast of the apocalypse.

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It's this nature versus nurture struggle.

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You are being sent to
Earth to destroy the world.

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It's either you or it,
what's it going to be, pal?

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We all have a devil inside,
and what do we do with that?

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He is not of us, but he'd
help us if we'd let him.

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He ends up devoting his life to
cleaning up supernatural messes.

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This little King of Hell is
just a regular blue-collar guy.

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His job just happens to be
paranormal detective kind of stuff.

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He's Mike Mignola, who created Hellboy.

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He's absolutely a genius.

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The way that he simplifies forms

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and the way that he plays
with light and shadow,

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it's so unique and so good.

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He sings with his visuals, with a
voice that you've never heard before.

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Mike's universe is like a doorway in

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for those readers who
are not immediately visible

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in the superhero world.

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After Marvel and DC, the largest extended
comic book universe is the Mignolaverse.

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Unlike Marvel and DC, it is
the vision of a single creator.

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It all began with just a guy sitting
down and just working on the book,

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and then it became this.

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I'm really just making up stories.

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I guess I never thought it
would get this out of hand.

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Because most of this is old stuff.

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For whatever reason,
I stall out around 1940

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as far as the stuff I read.

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I think I've got it covered
as far as ghost stories,

53
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I think I've probably got at
least all the really good old ones.

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Oh, M. R. James, the
greatest ghost story writer,

55
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except for maybe Sheridan Le Fanu,

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and the giant Ghost Story
Anthology edited by Boris Karloff.

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He did two of them.

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Look at that.

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But this is the greatest.

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There was a fantasy writer
named Frank Stockton.

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This is The Return of Frank Stockton.

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This sums up everything I've ever
wanted the Hellboy world to feel like.

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Yeah, I'm writing his stories for him

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because his ghost showed
up and told me some stuff.

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Stuff very much like this is in The
Witchfinder and the Hellboy stuff.

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These are the characters
that they're just footnotes

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in that Hellboy world.

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I was born in Berkeley. I
grew up in Oakland, California.

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I have two brothers, and we
were raised by a workaholic father.

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We grew up without a
mother, so it's just our dad,

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and he worked all day.

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So we were just pretty much on our own.

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Our dad was total blue-collar.

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He didn't understand anything about us.

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We were like space creatures to him.

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He couldn't say he loved us.

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No.

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You'd go to leave and
you'd say, "I love you, dad."

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And he'd just pretend he didn't hear you.

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But you knew it was in there.

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He was of that generation where
you can't speak your feelings.

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I think his father did
the best that he could,

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but it wasn't very warm and fuzzy.

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Mike, he was just a little, tiny kid.

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He wasn't particularly
well socialized, I don't think,

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because he didn't have a lot of friends.

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I was such a shy kid.

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I don't think any teacher even
knew I was in the classroom.

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It's not like I wore a
Halloween costume to class.

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I mean, nobody worried about it.

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It was a tough upbringing.

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He literally doesn't remember a lot of
it, which I think is a safety mechanism.

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He was very focused
on what he wanted to do,

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and he went home every day,
and he just buried himself in his art.

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I was a late reader. I was a slow reader.

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I had a wonderful teacher who
just pointed out to me one day,

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"What are you into?"

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She took me to the library and said,
"Here's books about the stuff you like."

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Then I turned into a big reader.

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I remember in elementary school,
books I used to check out of the library

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over and over and over again.

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One was on Norse mythology,
one was a book about true ghosts.

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That had a supposedly true
photograph of a ghost on the cover.

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So monsters, ghosts, as
far back as I can remember.

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No idea why.

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To me, it was normal, my
fixation on ghosts and vampires.

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Fortunately, I had two
brothers to be an outsider with.

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We had very similar interests,
and we did have complete freedom,

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so we would just do stuff together.

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I was just up the road from Berkeley.

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My brothers and I would take the bus
down to Berkeley almost every weekend.

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Berkeley in those days was
made of used bookstores.

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There was maybe four or five used
bookstores we would hit in a day.

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I was reading everything.

115
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We just had the places that we always went.

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I mean, Moe's, that one is the
one we spent the most time in.

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00:07:25,279 --> 00:07:27,657
You can actually see it in The Graduate.

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We would spend a full
day haunting the bookstores

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and the record stores and
ending up at the UC theater.

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It was such a big period
as far as education,

121
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being exposed to
foreign films, and old films,

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and authors I've never read before.

123
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Yeah, over there was supernatural,

124
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and over here was folklore,
Western religion, sexuality.

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Oh, they didn't have that when I was here.

126
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Dracula was my favorite book.

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I was really into Conan,

128
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which opened my eyes
to all the Weird Tales era

129
00:08:05,820 --> 00:08:07,780
'20s and '30s pulp magazine guys,

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which led to Lovecraft and everything else.

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I can never overstate how
big those few years were,

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where it seemed like everything I
read pointed me to something else,

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or I would get hooked on an
author and everything was there.

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In high school, he didn't
have a lot of friends.

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He was always sitting by himself at
lunch with a book in front of his face,

136
00:08:37,351 --> 00:08:39,812
and he'd go home, and he would just draw.

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At that point, I had a vague idea

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that someday I would
draw monsters for a living.

139
00:08:48,070 --> 00:08:51,365
But where do you go to
draw monsters for a living?

140
00:08:52,199 --> 00:08:55,119
My father was the one who
wanted me to go to art school.

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00:08:55,870 --> 00:08:57,621
I was in art school for two years.

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I was thinking, "I gotta figure
out how to make a living at this."

143
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Somewhere in there, I
started buying comics,

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and I thought, "Oh, I want
to do that kind of stuff."

145
00:09:08,090 --> 00:09:10,384
I'd never tried drawing comic book pages.

146
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I didn't think that was something
I would ever be able to do.

147
00:09:14,138 --> 00:09:16,182
I remember looking at Terry Austin.

148
00:09:16,474 --> 00:09:17,475
Terry was an inker.

149
00:09:17,767 --> 00:09:18,767
What is an inker?

150
00:09:18,893 --> 00:09:23,272
According to Chasing Amy, they're tracers.

151
00:09:24,065 --> 00:09:25,775
It's not tracing, all right?

152
00:09:26,609 --> 00:09:28,944
I add depth and shading to
give the image more definition.

153
00:09:29,236 --> 00:09:32,740
No, you go over what he
draws with a pen, all right?

154
00:09:33,032 --> 00:09:34,408
That's tracing.

155
00:09:34,700 --> 00:09:35,700
They are not tracers.

156
00:09:35,868 --> 00:09:42,124
Inkers are people who interpret
what the pencil has put down

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for reproduction.

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I thought, "Well, maybe I could do that."

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I ink my own work.

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I can use a brush, I can use a pen.

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I can break in as an inker,
and that'll be my main income.

162
00:09:58,099 --> 00:09:59,099
Back in the '80s,

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you needed to be in New York, in
the New York area to break into comics,

164
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at that point.

165
00:10:04,605 --> 00:10:05,645
That's where the work was.

166
00:10:05,898 --> 00:10:07,274
You can go to Marvel or DC,

167
00:10:07,566 --> 00:10:10,126
make friends with the editors,
and say, "Hey, I need rent money.

168
00:10:10,402 --> 00:10:11,802
Can you give me some work, please?"

169
00:10:12,071 --> 00:10:15,991
I met a guy in art school, and
his plan when he graduated

170
00:10:16,659 --> 00:10:18,494
was to move to New York.

171
00:10:18,786 --> 00:10:21,205
I went, "Cool. Is there
room for another guy?"

172
00:10:26,252 --> 00:10:27,586
It turned out,

173
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I don't want to say he was crazy,

174
00:10:31,966 --> 00:10:32,966
but he was,

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he didn't really plan
things very carefully.

176
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We land in New York, and this is '82,

177
00:10:40,850 --> 00:10:44,645
so New York was still a kind of a scary
place and it was one of those perfect

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00:10:45,229 --> 00:10:47,398
New York City days you would see in movies.

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Everybody is sitting on the stoops,

180
00:10:49,400 --> 00:10:52,611
and you're in the East
Village, and it was like, "Wow."

181
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I ended up in this loft, and I remember

182
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going into this dark corner
that turned out to be a kitchen.

183
00:11:07,626 --> 00:11:10,838
It was that classic skeevy New York thing,

184
00:11:11,130 --> 00:11:13,316
where apparently no one
there had ever washed the dish.

185
00:11:13,340 --> 00:11:16,218
They just piled them on
where the sink used to be.

186
00:11:16,510 --> 00:11:20,848
When you switched on the light,
everything started crawling really fast.

187
00:11:22,808 --> 00:11:26,103
I said, "Dude, I can't do this."

188
00:11:26,395 --> 00:11:30,357
I remember walking through
The Bowery, and this sounds fake,

189
00:11:30,649 --> 00:11:32,649
but I swear to God, this
is the way I remember it.

190
00:11:32,902 --> 00:11:37,239
There was a guy sitting in a
half-collapsed cardboard box,

191
00:11:37,531 --> 00:11:39,283
and he had a plastic leg,

192
00:11:39,575 --> 00:11:42,494
and his plastic foot was
pointed in the wrong direction.

193
00:11:42,786 --> 00:11:43,786
It's like this.

194
00:11:43,871 --> 00:11:48,083
In my mind, it was a G.I. Joe leg,
and his foot was pointed like that.

195
00:11:48,375 --> 00:11:49,043
I just thought,

196
00:11:49,335 --> 00:11:52,254
"I'm not tough enough to
live in a box with a plastic leg,

197
00:11:52,546 --> 00:11:53,756
so I'm just going to die."

198
00:11:58,177 --> 00:11:59,470
At the same time,

199
00:11:59,762 --> 00:12:02,514
I've gone up to Marvel thinking,
"Oh, I'm going to be an inker."

200
00:12:05,893 --> 00:12:09,688
My first inking job was five pages
of an issue of The Defenders,

201
00:12:10,272 --> 00:12:13,734
and I was working over
an artist who wasn't great.

202
00:12:14,068 --> 00:12:18,322
I inked five pages, and they were terrible.

203
00:12:19,615 --> 00:12:21,450
I made it look worse.

204
00:12:23,369 --> 00:12:28,666
But I remember Butch Guice did a
pin-up for the Micronauts, penciled,

205
00:12:29,166 --> 00:12:32,670
and I came in to pick
up this pin-up to ink,

206
00:12:33,629 --> 00:12:36,799
and the assistant editor
who nobody was afraid of,

207
00:12:38,217 --> 00:12:39,468
handed me that pin-up.

208
00:12:40,344 --> 00:12:41,595
I said, "When do you need it?"

209
00:12:41,887 --> 00:12:43,555
She said, "Take your time,

210
00:12:44,723 --> 00:12:47,977
because if you turn in another
job like that Defender's job..."

211
00:12:48,560 --> 00:12:50,229
And she didn't finish the sentence.

212
00:12:52,898 --> 00:12:55,401
That was the scariest moment of my life.

213
00:12:58,404 --> 00:12:59,863
I had no fallback plan.

214
00:13:04,952 --> 00:13:06,954
My portfolio was what my portfolio was,

215
00:13:07,246 --> 00:13:10,165
but my example of me really
working was being terrible.

216
00:13:11,917 --> 00:13:12,917
I'm in New York.

217
00:13:13,043 --> 00:13:15,379
I probably have no place to live.

218
00:13:17,172 --> 00:13:20,009
All your plans have all gone to shit.

219
00:13:22,636 --> 00:13:25,055
I thought, "I'm going to die here."

220
00:13:26,598 --> 00:13:29,101
I wrote letters to my dad.

221
00:13:30,436 --> 00:13:33,731
My brothers said, that my
father, who's a very tough guy,

222
00:13:34,106 --> 00:13:36,442
a couple of times he looked
like he was going to cry

223
00:13:36,734 --> 00:13:38,319
because New York just chewed me up.

224
00:13:41,947 --> 00:13:45,951
If he wasn't in New York
and he wasn't in the doorway

225
00:13:46,243 --> 00:13:48,537
the day Al Milgrom or somebody

226
00:13:48,829 --> 00:13:52,207
needed something inked that night,
it would have been hard to break in.

227
00:13:52,875 --> 00:13:56,003
So Mike got work just because
he was standing in doorways.

228
00:13:57,338 --> 00:14:00,049
Because I wasn't any good
and I was trying to get work,

229
00:14:00,341 --> 00:14:02,009
I would just hang out in the bullpen.

230
00:14:02,509 --> 00:14:03,820
That's how I eventually got work.

231
00:14:03,844 --> 00:14:06,138
Because somebody's like
that poor bastard out there

232
00:14:06,430 --> 00:14:07,473
is pretty terrible,

233
00:14:07,765 --> 00:14:09,641
but we need this book tomorrow,

234
00:14:09,933 --> 00:14:12,895
so if that guy can hold
a pen, give him work.

235
00:14:14,396 --> 00:14:17,649
Thank God, Marvel was
publishing so much back then.

236
00:14:17,941 --> 00:14:20,319
They just needed a warm
body who could hold a pen.

237
00:14:22,780 --> 00:14:25,157
And so my inking career started.

238
00:14:27,034 --> 00:14:28,410
I was in New York,

239
00:14:28,702 --> 00:14:32,373
so eventually a job showed
up, Master of Kung Fu.

240
00:14:33,207 --> 00:14:35,918
They just literally needed somebody,

241
00:14:36,460 --> 00:14:37,961
and I was there.

242
00:14:40,005 --> 00:14:42,966
Master of Kung Fu ended,
and they were rolling me over

243
00:14:43,258 --> 00:14:44,258
with that same artist

244
00:14:44,385 --> 00:14:45,385
on to Daredevil.

245
00:14:45,886 --> 00:14:48,889
I must have felt like, "Oh,
okay, we're up and rolling,"

246
00:14:49,223 --> 00:14:53,685
because I basically left New York
as soon as I thought I had a career.

247
00:14:55,145 --> 00:14:56,665
As soon as I moved back to California,

248
00:14:56,730 --> 00:15:01,151
the inking career pretty much dried
up because you're still not very good,

249
00:15:01,443 --> 00:15:04,029
and now, you're all the
way across the country and

250
00:15:04,321 --> 00:15:07,282
they don't see your sad face sitting
in the office every morning going,

251
00:15:07,574 --> 00:15:08,574
"Do you have any work?"

252
00:15:08,700 --> 00:15:12,788
I ran into my original editor, Al Milgrom,

253
00:15:13,163 --> 00:15:16,792
and he said, "So I notice
your inking career is over.

254
00:15:17,084 --> 00:15:19,211
Are you ready to try drawing comics now?"

255
00:15:21,463 --> 00:15:24,258
I said, "Yeah." I have
no skills of any kind

256
00:15:24,550 --> 00:15:27,136
other than whatever
little drawing ability I have.

257
00:15:27,428 --> 00:15:31,515
So that's how I became
a bad comic book artist.

258
00:15:33,725 --> 00:15:36,325
The first couple of things I did,
I did a couple of short stories

259
00:15:36,854 --> 00:15:38,439
really bad ones,

260
00:15:38,897 --> 00:15:41,316
and then I landed this Rocket Raccoon book.

261
00:15:43,777 --> 00:15:48,490
Rocket Raccoon had been drawn,
I think, only twice before I did it.

262
00:15:48,782 --> 00:15:51,410
So I did the biggest Rocket Raccoon thing.

263
00:15:52,661 --> 00:15:55,038
It doesn't bear any resemblance
to what's on the screen,

264
00:15:55,330 --> 00:15:57,124
but I was a link in that chain.

265
00:15:57,875 --> 00:16:00,955
Then from there, I went to the Hulk,
which was like, "Oh, the Hulk's monster,

266
00:16:01,211 --> 00:16:02,713
and he's in space."

267
00:16:03,422 --> 00:16:07,384
That's cool, except that my
second issue was all flashbacks

268
00:16:07,676 --> 00:16:09,511
of Bruce Banner in high school.

269
00:16:10,220 --> 00:16:13,223
I remember that just being one
of those, "I'm not going to survive."

270
00:16:14,266 --> 00:16:16,894
Comics, to me, obviously seem
like they were made out of stuff

271
00:16:17,186 --> 00:16:18,770
that I wouldn't know how to draw

272
00:16:19,146 --> 00:16:22,316
because I'm not cut
out to draw superheroes.

273
00:16:22,691 --> 00:16:25,235
How long am I going to
be able to hide in the fringes

274
00:16:25,527 --> 00:16:28,614
and get away with things like, "Oh,
it's a space book about raccoons?"

275
00:16:28,906 --> 00:16:31,026
Not that anybody told me I
had to draw a certain way,

276
00:16:31,241 --> 00:16:33,785
but there was a lot of pressure
about being at Marvel comics

277
00:16:34,077 --> 00:16:35,537
and doing those kind of characters.

278
00:16:35,829 --> 00:16:39,791
The way that corporate
giants like Marvel and DC work

279
00:16:40,083 --> 00:16:42,336
is more of a factory model.

280
00:16:42,628 --> 00:16:44,463
You may have as many as six or seven people

281
00:16:44,755 --> 00:16:46,256
who've had direct creative input

282
00:16:46,548 --> 00:16:49,384
into what you see on a single
page in a standard Marvel book.

283
00:16:49,676 --> 00:16:52,804
It's not the kind of system
where a single creator

284
00:16:53,096 --> 00:16:57,976
can have an auteurist vision
that they can bring to the page.

285
00:16:58,268 --> 00:17:01,313
At Marvel, you gotta know where you fit in,

286
00:17:01,605 --> 00:17:05,692
where you will be the
best piece of the machine.

287
00:17:06,360 --> 00:17:09,321
I was making a living, and I was doing it,

288
00:17:09,613 --> 00:17:13,784
but it was just fear
and panic and struggle.

289
00:17:15,035 --> 00:17:18,956
I was taking whatever jobs I
could get, and I was not very good.

290
00:17:22,167 --> 00:17:23,835
I couldn't work for Marvel anymore,

291
00:17:24,127 --> 00:17:26,213
or I didn't want to work
for Marvel anymore,

292
00:17:27,089 --> 00:17:28,257
and so I just left.

293
00:17:36,765 --> 00:17:38,183
I'm Steve Purcell.

294
00:17:38,475 --> 00:17:41,520
I'm an illustrator and
director and cartoonist

295
00:17:41,812 --> 00:17:44,773
and created Sam & Max: Freelance Police.

296
00:17:45,065 --> 00:17:46,665
That's probably what I'm best known for.

297
00:17:47,317 --> 00:17:49,653
My name is Arthur Adams. I draw comics.

298
00:17:52,739 --> 00:17:54,700
Steve and I were at art school together.

299
00:17:55,993 --> 00:18:00,747
Separate from that, Arthur
and I met at conventions.

300
00:18:01,039 --> 00:18:04,918
Arthur was one of the stars
of the local conventions.

301
00:18:05,210 --> 00:18:08,297
So sooner or later the three of us
ended up living in the same building.

302
00:18:08,589 --> 00:18:10,591
We'd just sit around, draw
comics, go see movies,

303
00:18:10,882 --> 00:18:13,010
and eat horrible pizza, or whatever.

304
00:18:13,302 --> 00:18:16,013
We were just hanging out, being idiots.

305
00:18:16,305 --> 00:18:19,308
Three guys who work at
home who would just wander

306
00:18:19,600 --> 00:18:22,019
in each other's apartment
and say, "What are you doing?

307
00:18:22,311 --> 00:18:24,831
Do you want to go get a pizza
or you want to go to the movies?"

308
00:18:24,855 --> 00:18:27,357
It was very much like the
Seinfeld show in those days.

309
00:18:27,899 --> 00:18:32,446
It's not fair to say Arthur was
Kramer, but I was clearly George.

310
00:18:34,114 --> 00:18:36,366
If anybody was a leader, it was Steve.

311
00:18:36,742 --> 00:18:37,826
Also, he had a car.

312
00:18:38,118 --> 00:18:42,372
I had the car, so I was the
ring leader of our hijinks.

313
00:18:43,790 --> 00:18:45,208
Our careers were getting going,

314
00:18:45,500 --> 00:18:47,620
but it wasn't like there
was any kind of competition.

315
00:18:47,836 --> 00:18:50,339
I'm a big fan of what Mike
does, but I don't want to do it.

316
00:18:51,131 --> 00:18:52,771
It's really funny because we would notice

317
00:18:53,008 --> 00:18:55,510
that we were taking about
as much time to draw a page,

318
00:18:55,802 --> 00:18:57,179
except I was adding more lines

319
00:18:57,471 --> 00:19:00,349
while he would spend
the day taking lines out,

320
00:19:00,641 --> 00:19:02,392
so making things very black and white,

321
00:19:02,684 --> 00:19:04,811
and I was trying to make
things a muddy mess.

322
00:19:05,228 --> 00:19:07,606
Mike was pointed at something

323
00:19:07,898 --> 00:19:13,528
and it seemed like he had something
in mind that he was looking for.

324
00:19:14,029 --> 00:19:16,406
It was almost like he's
planting seeds for something

325
00:19:16,698 --> 00:19:20,202
that you wouldn't see come
to fruition for another 10 years

326
00:19:20,494 --> 00:19:21,662
or something like that.

327
00:19:23,789 --> 00:19:27,417
I remember Mike and Arthur
and Steve would come over.

328
00:19:27,709 --> 00:19:30,545
I felt like I get to be an
honorary Mignola brother

329
00:19:30,837 --> 00:19:33,423
because we would all hang
out up at their dad's house

330
00:19:33,715 --> 00:19:38,595
and get into our hijinks up
there where we invented Fizzball.

331
00:19:38,887 --> 00:19:39,554
Fizzball.

332
00:19:39,846 --> 00:19:42,849
Fizzball started stupider than it finished,

333
00:19:43,475 --> 00:19:44,893
and it finished pretty stupid.

334
00:19:45,185 --> 00:19:50,190
Fizzball is what happens when Steve
and Arthur and me and my brother

335
00:19:50,482 --> 00:19:53,652
are in my dad's backyard
on Super Bowl Sunday,

336
00:19:53,944 --> 00:19:58,699
and my dad would buy
this cheap, shitty beer.

337
00:19:58,990 --> 00:20:01,118
I'm sure like a penny a case.

338
00:20:01,410 --> 00:20:03,161
It burns when it touches your lips.

339
00:20:03,453 --> 00:20:07,624
Somebody pitched the beer and
somebody hit it with this axe handle,

340
00:20:07,916 --> 00:20:10,919
and it somehow evolved
into doing that all day long.

341
00:20:11,211 --> 00:20:13,880
Ideally, if you could make the can explode,

342
00:20:14,172 --> 00:20:15,465
that was the coolest.

343
00:20:16,091 --> 00:20:18,468
I remember Arthur hitting this can,

344
00:20:18,969 --> 00:20:24,391
and it tore apart and just spun
around directly over his head

345
00:20:24,766 --> 00:20:28,270
like this slow-motion octopus of foam...

346
00:20:28,562 --> 00:20:30,564
Showering down this burning, acidic beer.

347
00:20:30,856 --> 00:20:33,275
I remember saying to Steve,
"You gotta put that in Sam & Max

348
00:20:33,567 --> 00:20:35,837
because that was the stupidest
fucking thing we've ever done."

349
00:20:35,861 --> 00:20:38,238
I thought it would be fun
to do a double-page spread

350
00:20:38,530 --> 00:20:40,949
that was how to play this goofy game

351
00:20:41,366 --> 00:20:44,911
and filter it through
Sam & Max's sensibility.

352
00:20:45,203 --> 00:20:48,290
What would they think about
it if they invented this game?

353
00:20:49,291 --> 00:20:51,209
After that came out,

354
00:20:51,501 --> 00:20:54,129
this thing gets picked up all
the way across the country.

355
00:21:08,268 --> 00:21:11,605
At the time, Mike's dad
was just watching us,

356
00:21:11,897 --> 00:21:14,191
and I remember him just
going, "Fucking idiots."

357
00:21:14,483 --> 00:21:17,360
Mike's dad, he was going,
"You guys are weird."

358
00:21:17,986 --> 00:21:23,074
Mike would tell people about
these activities that we would do,

359
00:21:23,366 --> 00:21:26,006
and they would say, "Oh, I didn't
know you guys grew up together."

360
00:21:26,244 --> 00:21:27,537
They thought we were little kids

361
00:21:27,829 --> 00:21:29,932
when we would do this stuff
and they'd hear these stories.

362
00:21:29,956 --> 00:21:32,959
But it turned out, "Well,
this was like two weeks ago."

363
00:21:38,089 --> 00:21:41,426
That apartment that we lived
at was just a couple of blocks

364
00:21:41,718 --> 00:21:42,718
from the cemetery,

365
00:21:42,969 --> 00:21:45,764
and so it was a short jaunt to go up there.

366
00:21:46,056 --> 00:21:47,776
One of the other few healthy things we did,

367
00:21:47,974 --> 00:21:49,684
we go for a nice walk up at the cemetery.

368
00:21:49,976 --> 00:21:50,976
It's beautiful there.

369
00:22:03,031 --> 00:22:04,031
Mountain View Cemetery,

370
00:22:04,282 --> 00:22:08,411
I think it's the largest above ground
cemetery in Northern California.

371
00:22:08,703 --> 00:22:11,873
It's designed by the same fellow who
designed Central Park in New York,

372
00:22:12,165 --> 00:22:14,167
so it's mostly just very pretty.

373
00:22:15,794 --> 00:22:16,378
I like cemeteries.

374
00:22:16,670 --> 00:22:18,397
If you look around, this
is the perfect cemetery.

375
00:22:18,421 --> 00:22:20,632
Everything is cocked at an odd angle.

376
00:22:20,966 --> 00:22:21,550
See?

377
00:22:21,842 --> 00:22:22,843
Not straight up and down.

378
00:22:23,134 --> 00:22:24,970
That's the way cemeteries should be.

379
00:22:25,470 --> 00:22:27,180
Why were we going to a cemetery?

380
00:22:27,472 --> 00:22:33,854
I think probably that goes back to
our mother dying when we were young.

381
00:22:34,145 --> 00:22:35,689
She had colon cancer.

382
00:22:36,565 --> 00:22:40,402
Having an early exposure to death

383
00:22:40,902 --> 00:22:45,907
and having to understand it, like
your mother's not coming back.

384
00:22:47,409 --> 00:22:49,202
What's the next step? The cemetery.

385
00:22:49,494 --> 00:22:52,122
My mother died when I was seven.

386
00:22:52,998 --> 00:22:55,750
On some level, that's influenced the work.

387
00:22:57,669 --> 00:23:02,507
That imagery Mike has used and
used, there's so much great statuary.

388
00:23:03,675 --> 00:23:04,675
There's so many.

389
00:23:04,759 --> 00:23:05,427
There's one.

390
00:23:05,760 --> 00:23:07,262
- I think it's that one. -No.

391
00:23:08,805 --> 00:23:13,226
I came back from New York
with my tail between my legs, '83.

392
00:23:13,518 --> 00:23:15,145
That's when I moved in the building.

393
00:23:15,562 --> 00:23:18,273
Around the time, I realized
I was running out of...

394
00:23:20,483 --> 00:23:21,818
I was running out of...

395
00:23:23,820 --> 00:23:27,866
I thought, "I don't know how I'm
going to be able to stay in comics."

396
00:23:29,409 --> 00:23:31,995
I'm not cut out to draw cars and buildings,

397
00:23:32,287 --> 00:23:34,205
most of the stuff that comics are made of.

398
00:23:35,957 --> 00:23:41,046
I think that Mike was ill-suited for
most of the work he was given in the '80s.

399
00:23:41,338 --> 00:23:44,716
Anytime that he was asked
to draw a superhero book,

400
00:23:45,008 --> 00:23:47,093
by and large, that was not a great fit.

401
00:23:47,719 --> 00:23:49,530
I wanted to be one of
those pretty picture guys.

402
00:23:49,554 --> 00:23:50,764
I wanted to be an illustrator,

403
00:23:51,056 --> 00:23:53,391
I wanted to be Frazetta,
and I wanted to be Wrightson.

404
00:23:53,683 --> 00:23:59,814
But when I did Cosmic Odyssey, I
was drawing a lot of Kirby characters.

405
00:24:00,565 --> 00:24:04,027
I mean, you look at early
1960s Marvel Comics,

406
00:24:04,319 --> 00:24:07,697
Jack Kirby created the look,
he created the characters.

407
00:24:07,989 --> 00:24:09,866
That guy is inventing everything.

408
00:24:10,158 --> 00:24:13,411
But I never really thought
of him as an influence

409
00:24:13,703 --> 00:24:20,001
because Jack's stuff was so exaggerated,
and I was still trying to be perfect.

410
00:24:21,503 --> 00:24:22,921
So when I did Cosmic Odyssey,

411
00:24:23,213 --> 00:24:28,593
I spent a solid year with Kirby
characters on my drawing table.

412
00:24:29,344 --> 00:24:31,513
That was the missing ingredient

413
00:24:31,805 --> 00:24:34,641
in turning me into
whatever the fuck I am now.

414
00:24:35,141 --> 00:24:36,476
The freedom to exaggerate

415
00:24:36,768 --> 00:24:40,855
was like zapping the Frankenstein
monster with electricity.

416
00:24:41,147 --> 00:24:42,857
And then stuff exploded.

417
00:24:43,942 --> 00:24:45,568
There were a couple of books,

418
00:24:46,277 --> 00:24:49,406
where he was able to
stretch his legs a little bit.

419
00:24:49,698 --> 00:24:51,618
There was an issue of
Legends of the Dark Knight

420
00:24:51,908 --> 00:24:54,077
that let him do a little
bit more of his stuff.

421
00:24:56,287 --> 00:24:59,582
The biggest breakthrough
thing for God knows what reason,

422
00:24:59,874 --> 00:25:01,418
Archie Goodwin said to me,

423
00:25:01,751 --> 00:25:04,379
"Well, you should try
writing an issue of Batman."

424
00:25:06,131 --> 00:25:08,842
I wish I could find the
mausoleum that I used in Batman.

425
00:25:09,342 --> 00:25:10,542
I don't know how to draw cars,

426
00:25:10,677 --> 00:25:15,807
but I can draw cemeteries and
spooky shit and Victorian-looking shit.

427
00:25:16,099 --> 00:25:20,562
I came up with basically a
straight vampire/ghost Batman story.

428
00:25:20,854 --> 00:25:22,689
Archie said, "Yeah, do that."

429
00:25:23,231 --> 00:25:24,691
That was huge.

430
00:25:25,233 --> 00:25:29,070
Not just because it was my
story, but it was all my visuals.

431
00:25:29,362 --> 00:25:31,448
It was the kind of shit
that was inside my head.

432
00:25:31,740 --> 00:25:33,450
It was the kind of shit I read.

433
00:25:37,620 --> 00:25:40,749
I thought, "If I could
do this, this will work."

434
00:25:42,083 --> 00:25:43,877
And it was awesome.

435
00:25:45,795 --> 00:25:46,795
It was awesome.

436
00:25:49,299 --> 00:25:53,470
Sanctum. Batman in a
graveyard, falls into the grave,

437
00:25:53,762 --> 00:25:55,513
blood everywhere, crazy things happen.

438
00:25:55,805 --> 00:25:57,682
That's when Mike becomes Mike.

439
00:25:57,974 --> 00:26:02,479
All of a sudden, he
goes full expressionistic.

440
00:26:02,771 --> 00:26:04,971
What I loved about the
Legends of the Dark Knight comic

441
00:26:05,023 --> 00:26:09,944
was it really brought the
Gothic side of Batman.

442
00:26:10,236 --> 00:26:12,322
He really got the sense
that this entire comic

443
00:26:12,614 --> 00:26:16,076
was lit by candlelight
because of so much black.

444
00:26:17,535 --> 00:26:21,164
His use of shadows and
silhouette are just fantastic.

445
00:26:21,498 --> 00:26:23,541
I think Mike is an amazing Batman artist.

446
00:26:23,833 --> 00:26:27,796
The way that he's all trunk,
he's just this big bruiser.

447
00:26:28,171 --> 00:26:32,217
It's frightening in how he clearly is
in touch with a lot of that darkness.

448
00:26:32,509 --> 00:26:34,528
A lot of people say that
was the first Hellboy story.

449
00:26:34,552 --> 00:26:36,012
It's a proto-Hellboy story.

450
00:26:36,304 --> 00:26:39,349
That's as close to a Hellboy
story, as you can imagine.

451
00:26:40,517 --> 00:26:43,394
I came out of that book
going, "That's what I do.

452
00:26:43,686 --> 00:26:45,563
That is my kind of story."

453
00:26:46,773 --> 00:26:51,319
I wasn't sure I could write my own
stuff, but I did like making up the stuff.

454
00:26:51,611 --> 00:26:54,572
Then the thought was, "Well,
do I do this with Wolverine?

455
00:26:54,864 --> 00:26:57,784
How many times are they going to
let me do a supernatural Batman story?

456
00:26:58,076 --> 00:27:01,204
How am I going to get away with
continuing to do stories like that?

457
00:27:01,871 --> 00:27:03,248
Who's my guy?"

458
00:27:07,210 --> 00:27:08,210
That was Hellboy.

459
00:27:19,472 --> 00:27:20,932
That's the original Hellboy drawing.

460
00:27:21,850 --> 00:27:22,970
The one that started it all.

461
00:27:23,017 --> 00:27:26,604
The one where I just drew a monster
and then stuck the name Hellboy on it,

462
00:27:27,856 --> 00:27:30,358
which I guess is a historical artifact now.

463
00:27:35,071 --> 00:27:37,323
There was no real idea for Hellboy.

464
00:27:37,615 --> 00:27:38,992
I was supposed to do a convention,

465
00:27:39,284 --> 00:27:42,704
and the convention asked for a
drawing to go in their program book.

466
00:27:42,996 --> 00:27:44,414
So I just drew a monster.

467
00:27:45,331 --> 00:27:46,666
When the monster was done,

468
00:27:46,958 --> 00:27:49,919
I'd given him this big
weird-shaped belt buckle thing,

469
00:27:50,545 --> 00:27:54,966
and I thought, "It needs
something," and I wrote Hellboy.

470
00:27:55,592 --> 00:27:56,843
I thought it was hilarious.

471
00:27:57,552 --> 00:27:58,552
And that was it.

472
00:28:01,014 --> 00:28:03,516
After I'd done this Batman
book that I plotted myself,

473
00:28:03,808 --> 00:28:05,810
I thought, "Oh, I want
to do more stuff like that.

474
00:28:06,102 --> 00:28:07,687
I just needed the main character."

475
00:28:07,979 --> 00:28:12,775
So I said, "Well, I want to draw a
book about a guy fighting monsters."

476
00:28:13,568 --> 00:28:18,656
And if the main character is a monster,
then I'm drawing monsters all the time.

477
00:28:18,948 --> 00:28:23,953
If I could get away with that,
that would be the end all, be all.

478
00:28:25,663 --> 00:28:28,708
I went in the studio, and
I came out later and said,

479
00:28:29,626 --> 00:28:33,087
"I'd figured it out and it's Hellboy."

480
00:28:33,379 --> 00:28:35,715
I just rolled my eyes and that was that.

481
00:28:36,007 --> 00:28:40,678
The look on her face said, "We're always
going to live in a studio apartment."

482
00:28:40,970 --> 00:28:44,098
I figured I could work
for the rest of our lives.

483
00:28:44,390 --> 00:28:47,060
I'm like, "If that makes you
happy, go ahead and do it."

484
00:28:49,729 --> 00:28:52,815
That's when I started
thinking about who Hellboy is.

485
00:28:54,692 --> 00:28:58,988
For Hellboy to be the kind of
person that I wanted him to be,

486
00:28:59,656 --> 00:29:03,117
I needed to give him a
certain kind of background.

487
00:29:03,409 --> 00:29:06,204
And that was, again, my father.

488
00:29:07,956 --> 00:29:12,919
His stories about the GIs and
the people he spent time with,

489
00:29:13,211 --> 00:29:16,172
the stories I would hear about
his army buddies and stuff,

490
00:29:16,464 --> 00:29:20,093
I said, "Yeah, that would create this guy."

491
00:29:21,427 --> 00:29:24,555
My father was a very tough guy.

492
00:29:24,847 --> 00:29:29,227
Not a mean guy, but he's
physically strong and tough.

493
00:29:29,519 --> 00:29:34,524
I remember, I think one of the
anecdotes of some of Hellboy's personality

494
00:29:34,816 --> 00:29:39,237
was Mike observing his dad
coming home from the cabinet shop.

495
00:29:39,529 --> 00:29:42,532
And he had a splinter coming
out of his head or something,

496
00:29:42,824 --> 00:29:46,536
and he pulled it out with
pliers, and say "ah, crap."

497
00:29:47,996 --> 00:29:50,206
He was a cabinet maker,
so he always came home

498
00:29:50,498 --> 00:29:52,625
scarred up and bloody,

499
00:29:52,917 --> 00:29:55,795
and his hands were dry and hard.

500
00:29:56,087 --> 00:30:00,383
His hands were always big and
cracked from the glue at the shop.

501
00:30:00,675 --> 00:30:02,435
They were like wood,
they'd just crack open.

502
00:30:02,593 --> 00:30:03,720
There wouldn't be blood.

503
00:30:04,012 --> 00:30:08,057
It really served me well knowing
what Hellboy's hand felt like.

504
00:30:08,349 --> 00:30:12,186
I knew Hellboy could
strike a match on his hand.

505
00:30:13,396 --> 00:30:16,399
My dad always had a cigarette
hanging out of the corner of his mouth,

506
00:30:17,984 --> 00:30:22,530
and he just had a very
casual way about injury, like,

507
00:30:22,822 --> 00:30:25,700
"Dad, why is there blood all over you?"

508
00:30:25,992 --> 00:30:28,494
"I've got my hand stuck in this machine."

509
00:30:28,786 --> 00:30:30,663
He's the toughest guy on Earth.

510
00:30:33,541 --> 00:30:37,337
And so that very much went
into what Hellboy was like.

511
00:30:43,760 --> 00:30:46,471
Hellboy is very much
like a blue-collar figure,

512
00:30:46,763 --> 00:30:48,389
and all of his buddies are blue-collar.

513
00:30:48,681 --> 00:30:49,681
It's a job.

514
00:30:49,932 --> 00:30:52,935
Monster hunting and occult investigation

515
00:30:53,227 --> 00:30:56,189
is not this rarefied thing
in the world of Hellboy.

516
00:30:56,481 --> 00:30:57,481
It's government work.

517
00:30:57,565 --> 00:30:58,816
There's no pretense about him.

518
00:30:59,108 --> 00:31:01,361
He really would rather
not go save the world.

519
00:31:01,652 --> 00:31:03,892
He really would rather sit
there and watch Three Stooges

520
00:31:04,113 --> 00:31:05,156
and Marx Brothers movies.

521
00:31:05,448 --> 00:31:08,368
I think one of his advantages
is that he is so basic,

522
00:31:08,659 --> 00:31:12,622
and he has very simple pleasures,
and just wants to live a simple life.

523
00:31:14,791 --> 00:31:16,667
This is the original Hellboy coat.

524
00:31:16,959 --> 00:31:21,547
The first couple drawings of Hellboy,
he was just a bare-chested thing,

525
00:31:21,839 --> 00:31:22,382
and it was fine.

526
00:31:22,673 --> 00:31:24,342
It was kind of Hulk-ish.

527
00:31:24,634 --> 00:31:28,221
He had little pants on and
stuff, but something was missing.

528
00:31:28,513 --> 00:31:29,513
I just went to my closet.

529
00:31:29,764 --> 00:31:32,100
I had bought this coat
a couple of years before

530
00:31:32,392 --> 00:31:34,769
because I love the
Western, the Long Riders.

531
00:31:35,061 --> 00:31:37,855
They all work those
thin, long duster coats.

532
00:31:38,147 --> 00:31:39,399
And that's what made him work.

533
00:31:39,690 --> 00:31:41,401
Putting the coat on him made it work.

534
00:31:44,237 --> 00:31:47,115
I thought, "What's the
next move going to be?"

535
00:31:52,495 --> 00:31:53,535
When I started Dark Horse,

536
00:31:53,621 --> 00:31:55,706
I wanted to start a comic
book publishing company

537
00:31:55,998 --> 00:31:58,584
that stood for creator
ownership and creative freedom.

538
00:31:58,876 --> 00:32:03,589
I had targeted a certain group of creators
that I wanted to come and work with us.

539
00:32:03,881 --> 00:32:05,925
I offered to let them own their work, too.

540
00:32:06,759 --> 00:32:10,638
In the '90s, Dark Horse
was one of a tiny handful

541
00:32:10,930 --> 00:32:13,057
of independent comic book publishers

542
00:32:13,349 --> 00:32:15,977
not owned by a large
corporation like Marvel or DC.

543
00:32:16,269 --> 00:32:20,189
Creators were realizing that
they could have more freedom

544
00:32:20,481 --> 00:32:21,983
working independently.

545
00:32:22,275 --> 00:32:24,986
The door of opportunity
has opened in a way.

546
00:32:25,361 --> 00:32:28,321
I chased Mike a couple of years, and
he used to say, "Why do you want me?"

547
00:32:28,573 --> 00:32:30,533
And that kind of stuff, very self effacing.

548
00:32:30,825 --> 00:32:33,265
One day, he just came to me
and said, "I've got this project.

549
00:32:33,369 --> 00:32:35,538
You probably won't
want it. It's called Hellboy."

550
00:32:35,830 --> 00:32:36,497
I said, "Let's do it."

551
00:32:36,789 --> 00:32:38,541
The way I remembered, he went, "Okay."

552
00:32:39,292 --> 00:32:40,835
I mean, who the fuck does that?

553
00:32:41,127 --> 00:32:44,464
You have no giant track record of success

554
00:32:44,755 --> 00:32:49,427
and you've just told us the
stupidest name for a character.

555
00:32:50,178 --> 00:32:51,262
Yeah, you can do that.

556
00:32:51,554 --> 00:32:54,974
To me, that was a watershed
moment in the comics industry.

557
00:32:57,560 --> 00:33:00,771
When I did that first Hellboy miniseries,

558
00:33:01,063 --> 00:33:03,232
I thought nobody was going
to buy this fucking thing.

559
00:33:04,775 --> 00:33:05,860
And I was right.

560
00:33:07,445 --> 00:33:10,406
On its initial release, Hellboy
was not a huge success.

561
00:33:10,698 --> 00:33:15,077
In fact, the first issue did not
even break into the top 300 books.

562
00:33:15,369 --> 00:33:17,788
But sometimes you got to
forget the commercial concerns

563
00:33:18,080 --> 00:33:19,665
and take the artistic risk.

564
00:33:20,541 --> 00:33:22,335
Eventually, people are going to catch up.

565
00:33:24,921 --> 00:33:27,173
Some people recognized
Mike's talent right away.

566
00:33:27,465 --> 00:33:28,799
He was unique and original.

567
00:33:29,091 --> 00:33:31,969
You'd see his art, you
recognize it as Mignola art.

568
00:33:32,345 --> 00:33:35,139
I remember right at the very
beginning of my comics career

569
00:33:35,431 --> 00:33:39,310
being asked who I wanted to
work with, and asking for Mike.

570
00:33:39,602 --> 00:33:44,941
He was simply the most
evocative artist around.

571
00:33:45,274 --> 00:33:49,487
There's something so
compelling about Mike's drawing.

572
00:33:49,779 --> 00:33:51,739
It was art house for comic books.

573
00:33:52,031 --> 00:33:54,951
He wasn't using the typical shapes
that you would see in a comic.

574
00:33:55,243 --> 00:33:57,703
The way a mouth was formed,
the rings under the eyes.

575
00:33:57,995 --> 00:33:59,455
Nobody else was doing that stuff.

576
00:33:59,747 --> 00:34:02,083
It's lit in these extreme ways.

577
00:34:02,375 --> 00:34:06,212
The use of the heavy chiaroscuro black ink,

578
00:34:06,504 --> 00:34:10,216
and the way that everything in
Hellboy is emerging out of darkness.

579
00:34:10,508 --> 00:34:15,263
I see the darkness in Mignola's art
as being very related to the sublime.

580
00:34:15,555 --> 00:34:18,349
It has more to do with the power
of what you're not able to see

581
00:34:18,641 --> 00:34:20,226
than spooky darkness.

582
00:34:21,102 --> 00:34:23,187
I think Alan Moore once described

583
00:34:23,563 --> 00:34:29,527
the Hellboy style as Jack Kirby lit
by German expressionist filmmakers.

584
00:34:30,278 --> 00:34:31,862
I've seen guys try to imitate,

585
00:34:32,154 --> 00:34:34,907
and I myself have tried
to imitate certain parts,

586
00:34:35,199 --> 00:34:39,328
but nobody can do what he
does, we can all just learn from it.

587
00:34:40,371 --> 00:34:42,873
Just as I went to
animation school at CalArts,

588
00:34:43,165 --> 00:34:46,168
I discovered Mike, and I was
in a character design class.

589
00:34:46,460 --> 00:34:47,712
I remember the teacher said,

590
00:34:48,004 --> 00:34:51,841
"Bring art from different artists
so that we can break it down."

591
00:34:52,133 --> 00:34:54,093
I brought a Hellboy comic in.

592
00:34:54,844 --> 00:34:58,014
The teacher did a whole class
on, "Look how smart this artist is,

593
00:34:58,306 --> 00:34:59,932
look how he's referencing Kirby,

594
00:35:00,224 --> 00:35:02,435
but at the same time,
he's being very cinematic.

595
00:35:02,727 --> 00:35:04,645
It was like German expressionism."

596
00:35:04,937 --> 00:35:08,024
Just hearing an art teacher
talk about a comic like that

597
00:35:08,316 --> 00:35:10,318
made me go, "Holy cow, this is incredible."

598
00:35:10,610 --> 00:35:13,529
I'm continually astounded
by how quickly my first pass

599
00:35:13,821 --> 00:35:14,530
through a page is,

600
00:35:14,822 --> 00:35:17,062
and then at the end of the
page, I'll pause and be like,

601
00:35:17,116 --> 00:35:19,660
"I got to go back and
look at this beat by beat.

602
00:35:19,952 --> 00:35:21,162
What a thing."

603
00:35:24,707 --> 00:35:27,168
Mike, the way he paces a page,

604
00:35:27,960 --> 00:35:30,504
the way he lays out the rhythm,

605
00:35:30,963 --> 00:35:32,798
and when he interrupts
with a little detail,

606
00:35:33,090 --> 00:35:36,260
it can be a robin in a branch, a flower.

607
00:35:36,552 --> 00:35:38,929
To me, he's one of the
great, great masters of that.

608
00:35:39,221 --> 00:35:40,348
It's just little snapshots.

609
00:35:40,640 --> 00:35:41,891
It's not like big panoramas.

610
00:35:42,183 --> 00:35:44,352
It's like, here's a little
bit of the environment,

611
00:35:44,644 --> 00:35:47,229
here's a weird headstone, or here's a crow.

612
00:35:47,521 --> 00:35:49,416
I would always come
back to those little panels.

613
00:35:49,440 --> 00:35:52,234
It feels like the panels themselves
are the dust hanging in the air

614
00:35:52,526 --> 00:35:53,566
that makes you stay there.

615
00:35:53,819 --> 00:35:56,539
None of those things are supposed
to work, but they completely work.

616
00:35:56,781 --> 00:36:00,368
And that really is him.
Nobody else can really do it.

617
00:36:06,749 --> 00:36:09,460
We usually come out here
every morning, or we used to.

618
00:36:09,752 --> 00:36:10,086
Yeah.

619
00:36:10,378 --> 00:36:12,338
Too bad you guys weren't
here a little while ago.

620
00:36:12,380 --> 00:36:14,507
The garden was fantastic.

621
00:36:14,799 --> 00:36:17,718
She also tends to plant stuff and
then not know what she planted.

622
00:36:18,010 --> 00:36:20,513
But I did it on purpose like a surprise.

623
00:36:20,805 --> 00:36:24,725
I'll just plant a variety of tomatoes
and not know what I'm going to get.

624
00:36:27,019 --> 00:36:29,271
Christine's a big part
of the Hellboy story.

625
00:36:29,897 --> 00:36:32,108
A lot of times, without
our significant others,

626
00:36:32,400 --> 00:36:34,485
we wouldn't really follow
our heart to do the thing

627
00:36:34,777 --> 00:36:35,796
that we're passionate about.

628
00:36:35,820 --> 00:36:37,488
We would do the most pragmatic thing.

629
00:36:37,947 --> 00:36:39,490
There's so many creators out there

630
00:36:39,782 --> 00:36:43,619
that don't want to take the
economic chance, the financial risk

631
00:36:43,911 --> 00:36:46,580
of trying to create something
and stick with in over time.

632
00:36:46,872 --> 00:36:49,625
I figured I would do Hellboy, and
then I would bounce back to DC

633
00:36:49,917 --> 00:36:53,129
and see if I could talk them into
doing another Batman or something.

634
00:36:54,046 --> 00:36:57,091
You could go do Batman, and you
could make probably more money

635
00:36:57,383 --> 00:37:00,219
per issue than you could for
doing your own creator own work.

636
00:37:00,511 --> 00:37:02,471
But I remember specifically my wife saying,

637
00:37:02,805 --> 00:37:06,934
"If you really want to
do this thing, do it again."

638
00:37:07,518 --> 00:37:09,603
My wife, who never
really tells me what to do,

639
00:37:09,895 --> 00:37:11,272
gave me that gentle little,

640
00:37:11,897 --> 00:37:15,109
"If you like doing it, why
don't you just keep doing it?

641
00:37:16,736 --> 00:37:20,656
Show the audience that
you care about this thing."

642
00:37:22,116 --> 00:37:25,244
We met in April of 1988.

643
00:37:25,536 --> 00:37:27,496
One of my friends was getting married

644
00:37:27,788 --> 00:37:30,166
and we took her out
for a bachelorette party.

645
00:37:30,458 --> 00:37:32,918
He was at a bachelor
party in the same restaurant.

646
00:37:33,210 --> 00:37:34,628
It was a Mexican restaurant

647
00:37:34,920 --> 00:37:36,881
and there was a lot of margaritas going on.

648
00:37:37,173 --> 00:37:41,343
The couple of women that
were still sober enough to walk

649
00:37:42,052 --> 00:37:46,098
came over to see what was this
gigantic table of guys wearing glasses.

650
00:37:46,390 --> 00:37:48,726
The whole restaurant
was basically one big party.

651
00:37:49,018 --> 00:37:50,186
That's where I met him.

652
00:37:50,603 --> 00:37:52,563
I guess Christine and I were talking.

653
00:37:52,855 --> 00:37:56,275
There's actually photos of when
we met, which is pretty funny.

654
00:37:57,193 --> 00:38:01,655
It boiled down to, "Will you just
get her phone number already.

655
00:38:01,947 --> 00:38:02,947
What's wrong with you?"

656
00:38:03,115 --> 00:38:04,342
Which is something I never would have done.

657
00:38:04,366 --> 00:38:06,160
I was too shy, too awkward.

658
00:38:06,452 --> 00:38:09,288
But I guess I'd had enough
drinks that I went, "Okay."

659
00:38:09,580 --> 00:38:10,956
And I did, and that was it.

660
00:38:11,248 --> 00:38:14,168
Basically, he moved in
with me three months after

661
00:38:14,460 --> 00:38:16,545
because I had air
conditioning and he didn't.

662
00:38:16,837 --> 00:38:18,464
Three years later, we got married.

663
00:38:20,716 --> 00:38:21,716
It was a good thing.

664
00:38:21,842 --> 00:38:23,552
And Christine is so level-headed.

665
00:38:25,304 --> 00:38:27,848
Mike, I feel, would have been successful.

666
00:38:28,140 --> 00:38:31,185
I don't think he would have been
as successful without Christine.

667
00:38:31,477 --> 00:38:36,524
She instilled that confidence in him
that he was not going to have on his own.

668
00:38:37,358 --> 00:38:38,358
And I pushed him.

669
00:38:38,567 --> 00:38:43,739
I said, "Create your character
and stick with it, get it rolling."

670
00:38:44,031 --> 00:38:47,284
He loved doing it, and everybody
can see how much he loved doing it.

671
00:38:47,576 --> 00:38:50,037
For him to give it up just
didn't make any sense to me.

672
00:38:52,957 --> 00:38:53,999
Almost everything.

673
00:38:56,627 --> 00:39:00,005
When I did that first Hellboy miniseries,

674
00:39:00,422 --> 00:39:04,969
I talked to John Byrne about scripting
my book because I'm afraid of writing.

675
00:39:05,261 --> 00:39:07,137
He wrote the first Hellboy series.

676
00:39:07,429 --> 00:39:11,559
He knew I should be doing it
myself, but I just wasn't confident.

677
00:39:12,810 --> 00:39:14,395
Because I never set out to be a writer.

678
00:39:14,687 --> 00:39:20,234
But there was a part of me
that said if I didn't start writing,

679
00:39:20,526 --> 00:39:23,612
I don't know how long I could
have kept drawing comics,

680
00:39:23,904 --> 00:39:27,157
just getting scripts from other people.

681
00:39:27,575 --> 00:39:29,869
His brain is constant.

682
00:39:30,160 --> 00:39:31,412
I mean, it's constant.

683
00:39:32,079 --> 00:39:36,000
He sees things differently
than other people.

684
00:39:36,292 --> 00:39:39,420
When I started writing,
it was like magic to me.

685
00:39:39,920 --> 00:39:41,547
Things just appear.

686
00:39:42,631 --> 00:39:45,009
Characters start talking to
each other, and you're like,

687
00:39:46,135 --> 00:39:47,720
"I didn't know that."

688
00:39:48,012 --> 00:39:50,031
I just got to sit back, and
let these characters talk,

689
00:39:50,055 --> 00:39:51,255
and then try to write it down.

690
00:39:51,432 --> 00:39:53,642
It's like it's coming from some place.

691
00:39:55,644 --> 00:39:59,106
I did still think I'm an artist
first before I'm a writer.

692
00:39:59,398 --> 00:40:02,109
I'm never going to be Ray Bradbury,
never going to be Neil Gaiman.

693
00:40:02,401 --> 00:40:05,571
So stick to what you do
and hide behind the artwork.

694
00:40:07,573 --> 00:40:10,326
I'm not going to try to describe
what the wind smells like,

695
00:40:10,618 --> 00:40:12,912
but I can draw leaves blowing.

696
00:40:14,371 --> 00:40:18,500
Once it started to work, it
was like you grew an extra arm.

697
00:40:19,043 --> 00:40:21,420
Suddenly you went, "I'm in control."

698
00:40:21,712 --> 00:40:23,213
It's a whole different thing.

699
00:40:23,589 --> 00:40:26,508
He'll be like, "I just came
up with a story in the shower."

700
00:40:26,800 --> 00:40:28,862
And he runs down and he
writes it up, and he's like,

701
00:40:28,886 --> 00:40:32,264
"Oh my God, I'm a failure.
Nobody's going to ever want it."

702
00:40:32,681 --> 00:40:37,019
The second one I wrote myself,
I figured that was going to blow.

703
00:40:37,603 --> 00:40:40,564
And then the third one I did was funny.

704
00:40:40,981 --> 00:40:43,150
That was a real breakout moment for me.

705
00:40:43,442 --> 00:40:44,944
I had so much fun drawing it.

706
00:40:45,235 --> 00:40:47,947
And then when it was
over, I looked at it and went,

707
00:40:48,238 --> 00:40:49,740
"Oh my God, it's unpublishable."

708
00:40:51,575 --> 00:40:54,244
And then everybody said, "It's
the best thing you've ever done."

709
00:40:54,536 --> 00:40:57,706
Hellboy: The Corpse is a
short, but it delivers a lot story.

710
00:40:57,998 --> 00:41:00,209
It's one of the best ones
we've ever done, honestly.

711
00:41:00,501 --> 00:41:02,836
This is when I thought it reach an apex.

712
00:41:03,128 --> 00:41:04,713
It's like a song.

713
00:41:05,047 --> 00:41:07,591
It's so perfect and concise.

714
00:41:08,384 --> 00:41:11,971
It's the best thing I've ever done,
and it's the most fun I ever had.

715
00:41:12,346 --> 00:41:14,306
I guess that's pretty good.

716
00:41:16,058 --> 00:41:18,394
I own a few pages of The Corpse,

717
00:41:18,686 --> 00:41:21,230
including the page that I
consider the most perfect.

718
00:41:21,522 --> 00:41:24,274
It took me a long, long
time to get that one.

719
00:41:24,942 --> 00:41:27,111
When Mike started writing,

720
00:41:27,403 --> 00:41:32,116
Hellboy became a much
better, madder, weirder book.

721
00:41:32,408 --> 00:41:35,411
And the book went on
to be hugely successful.

722
00:41:35,703 --> 00:41:38,956
That changed everything.

723
00:41:43,293 --> 00:41:46,588
Mr. Mignola, take us
around your lovely studio.

724
00:41:46,880 --> 00:41:48,048
More books.

725
00:41:53,262 --> 00:41:56,807
One of the things that distinguishes
Hellboy in the time that it appeared is

726
00:41:57,099 --> 00:42:01,103
the willingness on Mignola's part
to do something like actual research.

727
00:42:01,395 --> 00:42:04,064
There's so many books in his studio.

728
00:42:04,356 --> 00:42:06,942
He's, I almost want to say, a scholar.

729
00:42:07,234 --> 00:42:10,362
He's just really dedicated
to art and to mythology.

730
00:42:11,071 --> 00:42:12,239
This funky thing.

731
00:42:12,531 --> 00:42:13,699
A book on Norse mythology.

732
00:42:13,991 --> 00:42:15,784
The Norse had the best monsters.

733
00:42:16,076 --> 00:42:18,829
Mignola clearly loves
reading and reads deeply;

734
00:42:19,121 --> 00:42:20,432
different folklore, different traditions,

735
00:42:20,456 --> 00:42:23,125
Japanese, Middle
European, African, Icelandic.

736
00:42:23,417 --> 00:42:24,043
I think it's amazing.

737
00:42:24,334 --> 00:42:28,797
He's just created this beautiful
and tragic supernatural world.

738
00:42:31,842 --> 00:42:36,972
I never read anything that
analyzes fairy tales and folklore

739
00:42:37,264 --> 00:42:39,016
because I like the stories.

740
00:42:39,475 --> 00:42:46,398
I've tried to maintain and maybe focus
on the strange rhythms to those stories

741
00:42:46,690 --> 00:42:49,485
without overanalyzing.

742
00:42:49,777 --> 00:42:52,946
I just always love whenever
he's using folklore in his stuff,

743
00:42:53,238 --> 00:42:55,449
that there's never a
time where he says like,

744
00:42:55,741 --> 00:42:58,494
"Can we find out about Baba
Yaga when she was young,

745
00:42:58,786 --> 00:43:00,245
and who was mean to her?"

746
00:43:00,537 --> 00:43:03,582
He just doesn't do that. You're
just going to still go with it.

747
00:43:03,916 --> 00:43:05,556
Even if later, you go like, "Wait, what?"

748
00:43:05,834 --> 00:43:07,961
But it's too late. You
already enjoyed the story.

749
00:43:08,253 --> 00:43:10,839
Del Toro and I would always
refer to this fairytale logic,

750
00:43:11,131 --> 00:43:12,800
which I can't explain.

751
00:43:13,092 --> 00:43:16,720
But if you read enough of that
stuff, you go, "This feels right."

752
00:43:17,012 --> 00:43:18,972
As a kid from Tijuana,
I was raised Catholic,

753
00:43:19,264 --> 00:43:20,349
and so all that mythology

754
00:43:20,641 --> 00:43:23,268
and all the iconography
spoke so much to me.

755
00:43:23,560 --> 00:43:25,020
And I think Hellboy really speaks

756
00:43:25,312 --> 00:43:29,108
to a part of the world that
grew up with all those stories.

757
00:43:29,399 --> 00:43:30,859
I was raised Catholic,

758
00:43:31,151 --> 00:43:36,907
so the imagery, the ritual, and
the drama of it is super appealing.

759
00:43:37,199 --> 00:43:42,121
It's clear Mignola is very well-read
and very much in love with all this lore.

760
00:43:42,412 --> 00:43:45,624
Every demon from every
narrative you've ever imagined

761
00:43:45,916 --> 00:43:47,084
is part of this world.

762
00:43:47,376 --> 00:43:49,670
He uses all these stories
from all over the world

763
00:43:49,962 --> 00:43:53,507
and introduces characters
like the Baba Yaga or Camazotz

764
00:43:53,799 --> 00:43:55,551
to people like me who didn't know.

765
00:43:58,637 --> 00:44:00,222
Hellboy was always the kind of book

766
00:44:00,514 --> 00:44:03,600
that once people did
discover it, they stayed with it.

767
00:44:03,892 --> 00:44:09,648
So although it was not blowing
anybody's minds in terms of its sales,

768
00:44:09,940 --> 00:44:12,151
Hellboy had a loyal fan base.

769
00:44:12,568 --> 00:44:14,736
When I'd gotten Hellboy going,

770
00:44:15,028 --> 00:44:18,866
Dark Horse approached me
about optioning it for a film.

771
00:44:19,449 --> 00:44:21,076
I figured it was free money.

772
00:44:21,368 --> 00:44:24,454
A movie option just means
somebody can make a movie.

773
00:44:24,746 --> 00:44:28,375
So it was a no-brainer to say,
"Yeah, sure, I'll do the option deal."

774
00:44:28,667 --> 00:44:31,461
I thought, "Nobody's ever
going to make a Hellboy movie."

775
00:44:35,591 --> 00:44:39,344
I was a follower of Mike
since his DC Comics days.

776
00:44:40,137 --> 00:44:44,391
I knew he was the big
lips, little feet guy back then.

777
00:44:44,683 --> 00:44:48,270
And then Hellboy came
into my life in the mid-90s.

778
00:44:48,562 --> 00:44:50,397
I was preparing and shooting Mimic,

779
00:44:50,689 --> 00:44:53,358
and I would go to the comic
book shop in Toronto and say,

780
00:44:53,650 --> 00:44:54,650
"Is the new Hellboy in?"

781
00:44:54,860 --> 00:44:56,570
And it was like being a kid again.

782
00:44:56,862 --> 00:44:59,781
The possibility of a Hellboy
movie wasn't going anywhere,

783
00:45:00,073 --> 00:45:04,328
and then Del Toro came
to Dark Horse and said,

784
00:45:04,620 --> 00:45:06,205
"I'm the guy to direct that movie."

785
00:45:07,331 --> 00:45:11,460
I think it started with my gratitude
for saving my sanity during Mimic.

786
00:45:11,752 --> 00:45:15,214
I wanted to do a movie of
what I felt about the character.

787
00:45:15,505 --> 00:45:17,841
He was going through a
rough patch after Mimic.

788
00:45:18,133 --> 00:45:21,929
I think that might have been the reason why
he was so in love with the character.

789
00:45:23,388 --> 00:45:26,808
I took Guillermo to introduce
him to Mike up here in Portland.

790
00:45:27,100 --> 00:45:32,105
Richardson was very nervous
that I was going to blow this deal.

791
00:45:32,397 --> 00:45:34,191
Richardson was really worried

792
00:45:34,483 --> 00:45:37,277
because Mike is known to
have a very short temper.

793
00:45:37,694 --> 00:45:38,862
So Richardson said,

794
00:45:39,154 --> 00:45:42,699
"Don't do any nicknames
or be too childlike."

795
00:45:42,991 --> 00:45:45,577
And I was like, "All right."

796
00:45:47,037 --> 00:45:48,917
We're in Portland. Where
do you go in Portland?

797
00:45:49,164 --> 00:45:50,332
You go to Powell's.

798
00:45:50,707 --> 00:45:52,876
And I think as soon as
Richardson left us there,

799
00:45:53,168 --> 00:45:56,380
Del Toro says, "We have
to play a trick on that guy."

800
00:45:56,964 --> 00:45:57,506
And I said,

801
00:45:57,798 --> 00:46:01,301
"Why don't you call Mike Richardson
and tell him the meeting was horrible?"

802
00:46:02,052 --> 00:46:04,221
And he called Richardson and said,

803
00:46:04,513 --> 00:46:07,808
"You know what he wants to do?
You know who he wants to cast?"

804
00:46:08,100 --> 00:46:10,185
Then he just says, "No,
I'm joking. It went well."

805
00:46:11,728 --> 00:46:13,397
Del Toro thought it was hilarious,

806
00:46:14,189 --> 00:46:17,526
which also cemented the
relationship between me and Del Toro.

807
00:46:18,860 --> 00:46:21,363
We got along great.

808
00:46:21,655 --> 00:46:24,658
I think Mike and I intersect
on 90% of our tastes.

809
00:46:24,950 --> 00:46:29,830
We both love the same occult,
compendiums, and the same writers.

810
00:46:30,664 --> 00:46:32,499
When I go to visit somebody's house,

811
00:46:32,791 --> 00:46:36,920
I gravitate to the bookshelf, and I
know what person that person is.

812
00:46:37,212 --> 00:46:39,089
He would call me Magnus.

813
00:46:39,756 --> 00:46:43,677
Magnus, because of a short story
by M. R. James called Count Magnus.

814
00:46:43,969 --> 00:46:47,264
And then it took six years
to get the first movie made

815
00:46:47,723 --> 00:46:48,974
because it turns out

816
00:46:49,266 --> 00:46:52,227
wanting to make a movie
about a red monster with a tail

817
00:46:52,519 --> 00:46:57,607
starring Ron Perlman is not as easy
a sale as you would think it would be.

818
00:47:00,569 --> 00:47:03,155
Hellboy was a whole pilgrimage.

819
00:47:03,905 --> 00:47:08,368
To get the movie, we wrote the screenplay,
we did the designs, and everybody said no.

820
00:47:08,660 --> 00:47:13,457
Nobody wanted to greenlight a
biggish movie with Ron Perlman.

821
00:47:14,458 --> 00:47:16,460
I knew Ron had been
in Del Toro's first movie,

822
00:47:16,752 --> 00:47:18,253
and I couldn't imagine anybody else.

823
00:47:18,545 --> 00:47:22,632
The minute he downloaded me about
Hellboy, my mouth watered a little bit,

824
00:47:22,924 --> 00:47:25,724
but I didn't allow myself the luxury
of thinking I could ever play him

825
00:47:25,844 --> 00:47:29,389
because I understand that if you're
going to do a franchise movie for a studio,

826
00:47:29,681 --> 00:47:31,933
they want to hedge their
bet, and they want to get a guy

827
00:47:32,225 --> 00:47:34,561
who's got a track record and a name.

828
00:47:35,103 --> 00:47:38,607
They say, "Can The Rock be Hellboy?"
They said, "We'll greenlight with him."

829
00:47:38,899 --> 00:47:41,401
I said, "F♪♪♪ that," you
know. "I don't want that."

830
00:47:41,693 --> 00:47:47,824
Del Toro is stubborn and persistent
and charming and stubborn and persistent.

831
00:47:48,116 --> 00:47:49,826
It just went on for years.

832
00:47:50,118 --> 00:47:51,828
Whenever we were together, I would say,

833
00:47:52,120 --> 00:47:54,164
"Guillermo, go make
the movie with Nic Cage,

834
00:47:54,456 --> 00:47:58,043
or whoever you have to make it with.
Go make it. It's too good a project."

835
00:47:58,460 --> 00:48:01,922
But he never intended to do it
unless he could do it his way.

836
00:48:02,756 --> 00:48:04,341
Finally, my agent said,

837
00:48:04,633 --> 00:48:07,219
"If you want to do Hellboy,
you got to do Blade II

838
00:48:07,844 --> 00:48:11,431
because nobody is going
to think you can do Hellboy

839
00:48:11,932 --> 00:48:14,976
by seeing Cronos or Devil's
Backbone or even Mimic.

840
00:48:15,310 --> 00:48:17,562
You got to show what
you can do with action."

841
00:48:18,563 --> 00:48:24,444
I thought casting Ron as Reinhardt
would also position him as an action man,

842
00:48:24,736 --> 00:48:26,571
as a guy that fills the screen.

843
00:48:28,281 --> 00:48:29,281
I said to Mike,

844
00:48:29,449 --> 00:48:32,202
"Would you like to design stuff for Blade?"

845
00:48:32,494 --> 00:48:37,707
It's not what I do. I'm not a
film designer, but I said yes.

846
00:48:38,458 --> 00:48:45,632
I think I was there so Del Toro could
see if we could do Hellboy together.

847
00:48:46,550 --> 00:48:49,219
This was the first experience
I had working with Del Toro.

848
00:48:49,511 --> 00:48:52,597
I remember I was only in
the office for like a week,

849
00:48:53,181 --> 00:48:56,518
and he came into my office and said,

850
00:48:56,810 --> 00:49:02,149
"Magnus, next week we're going to
Prague. Do you have your passport?"

851
00:49:02,566 --> 00:49:04,818
I'm like, "What are you talking about?"

852
00:49:05,485 --> 00:49:09,573
"We're going to scout locations.
You better get some warm clothes too."

853
00:49:11,366 --> 00:49:12,366
"Okay."

854
00:49:12,784 --> 00:49:16,246
Went home, got my passport,
bought some winter clothes,

855
00:49:16,538 --> 00:49:17,538
went to Prague.

856
00:49:19,666 --> 00:49:22,502
Prague was still a little
bit like the Wild West.

857
00:49:23,378 --> 00:49:28,008
Mike and I scouted the
sewers, we scouted factories,

858
00:49:28,300 --> 00:49:33,263
and we tried to get into a
church that had a mummified arm.

859
00:49:33,638 --> 00:49:38,685
We would have our driver driving
us around to scout locations.

860
00:49:38,977 --> 00:49:41,605
And once, the driver, who
was a really scary-looking guy,

861
00:49:41,897 --> 00:49:44,900
drives out in the middle
of nowhere to some forest,

862
00:49:45,192 --> 00:49:46,627
and we thought we were going to die.

863
00:49:46,651 --> 00:49:48,945
We're in the back seat laughing.

864
00:49:49,654 --> 00:49:50,739
It was an adventure.

865
00:49:51,031 --> 00:49:53,116
And I think we spent more
time looking for puppets

866
00:49:53,408 --> 00:49:55,076
than we spent scouting locations.

867
00:49:57,704 --> 00:50:03,043
Blade was a great shoot. It was
fun. I loved it. And it opened very big.

868
00:50:03,335 --> 00:50:04,878
That was a huge weekend.

869
00:50:05,170 --> 00:50:07,214
On the Monday, after the opening weekend,

870
00:50:07,506 --> 00:50:11,259
everybody in town wanted to
jump on the Guillermo Del Toro train.

871
00:50:11,551 --> 00:50:17,015
And Del Toro called me and said,
"Blade is number one at the box office.

872
00:50:17,599 --> 00:50:20,852
If they don't say yes to
Hellboy now, they never will."

873
00:50:33,114 --> 00:50:36,576
In the early 90s, I was working
in Warner Bros. Animation Studio,

874
00:50:36,868 --> 00:50:42,207
and I remember seeing some
cover artwork that Mike had done,

875
00:50:42,499 --> 00:50:45,794
and I was captivated
by his use of silhouette,

876
00:50:46,086 --> 00:50:47,587
strong graphic design,

877
00:50:47,879 --> 00:50:52,509
where the lines are so crisp
and the shapes are so distinct.

878
00:50:53,802 --> 00:50:55,804
People say less is more all the time.

879
00:50:56,096 --> 00:50:58,098
Mike doesn't put down extra lines.

880
00:50:58,390 --> 00:51:01,059
He doesn't leave out lines that are needed.

881
00:51:01,351 --> 00:51:06,982
Mike was all about simplifying it down,
and you can watch it through his career.

882
00:51:07,274 --> 00:51:09,985
It's not easier. It's harder to do.

883
00:51:10,318 --> 00:51:11,398
This reminds me of a story.

884
00:51:11,528 --> 00:51:13,613
I had lunch with Mike,
and I remember asking him,

885
00:51:13,905 --> 00:51:16,700
"Hey man, your art, it goes to dark.

886
00:51:16,992 --> 00:51:19,911
I love the implication of what's not there.

887
00:51:20,203 --> 00:51:23,373
That the absence of things,
you're telling us things about that.

888
00:51:23,665 --> 00:51:24,958
How did you come up with that?"

889
00:51:25,250 --> 00:51:27,836
He goes, "I just didn't want
to draw the background."

890
00:51:28,128 --> 00:51:31,590
Mignola's simplified design
just translate so well to animation.

891
00:51:32,549 --> 00:51:37,053
I think it was 1997, I met
the romance model Fabio.

892
00:51:37,512 --> 00:51:39,639
He basically said, "I want
to do an animated series."

893
00:51:39,931 --> 00:51:41,308
I'm thinking about Thor.

894
00:51:41,600 --> 00:51:45,312
So the next thing I knew, we're
doing this animated series with Fabio.

895
00:51:45,604 --> 00:51:48,398
And in my mind, there's only
one person I wanted to design it.

896
00:51:48,690 --> 00:51:50,859
And Mike was like,
"Yeah, it sounds like fun."

897
00:51:52,319 --> 00:51:53,559
The series never went anywhere,

898
00:51:53,737 --> 00:51:56,489
but I always loved
Mike's work on the series.

899
00:51:59,200 --> 00:52:01,369
Fabio was not a fan of Mike's designs.

900
00:52:02,245 --> 00:52:04,998
He wanted something more
cartoony and more realistic

901
00:52:05,290 --> 00:52:07,292
because Fabio doesn't
know anything about art.

902
00:52:07,584 --> 00:52:07,959
But also,

903
00:52:08,251 --> 00:52:13,006
doing a show in Mignola's design
style in 1997 was way too early.

904
00:52:14,007 --> 00:52:17,761
It was very avant-garde and very daring.

905
00:52:18,219 --> 00:52:19,346
While the artists loved it,

906
00:52:19,638 --> 00:52:22,641
a lot of executives couldn't
grasp how awesome it was.

907
00:52:22,932 --> 00:52:23,308
However,

908
00:52:23,600 --> 00:52:26,560
all the artists at Disney feature
were definitely thinking the same thing,

909
00:52:26,603 --> 00:52:29,064
which is why they had him
working on Atlantis at the time.

910
00:52:30,315 --> 00:52:33,276
Atlantis was a movie that was
being made when I was in school.

911
00:52:33,568 --> 00:52:38,114
And we had teachers come in and go,
"We got Mike Mignola to design Atlantis."

912
00:52:38,406 --> 00:52:40,241
People were cheering and it was like,

913
00:52:40,575 --> 00:52:43,055
"It's going to happen. This
movie is going to look different."

914
00:52:43,203 --> 00:52:45,872
And they would bring all these
beautiful drawings he had done,

915
00:52:46,164 --> 00:52:48,124
and we were all like, "Ooh, aah."

916
00:52:49,125 --> 00:52:53,088
I actually had a lot to do
with the story on Atlantis,

917
00:52:53,380 --> 00:52:56,966
or at least the big final
arc was an idea I had.

918
00:52:57,258 --> 00:52:59,552
It was just one of those,
"Hey, what if this happened?"

919
00:52:59,844 --> 00:53:03,223
And suddenly, it's this big
epic conclusion to the film.

920
00:53:04,349 --> 00:53:05,600
And then opening night,

921
00:53:05,892 --> 00:53:09,396
I go to the movies, I get my
popcorn, and I watch the movie,

922
00:53:09,688 --> 00:53:14,943
and just like everybody, I was like,
"Where's the Mignola? What happened?"

923
00:53:16,653 --> 00:53:18,405
Huge missed opportunity.

924
00:53:18,697 --> 00:53:23,576
I'm sure everybody there agrees that
that movie should have looked better.

925
00:53:24,703 --> 00:53:28,540
We started to work on the Atlantis
series before Atlantis was finished.

926
00:53:28,957 --> 00:53:30,792
And I said, "This is fantastic.

927
00:53:31,084 --> 00:53:33,211
I'm never going to get
to do the Hellboy series,

928
00:53:33,503 --> 00:53:36,673
so this is going to be as
close as I can get to it."

929
00:53:37,048 --> 00:53:39,426
Atlantis came out, it didn't do well.

930
00:53:39,718 --> 00:53:42,887
For whatever reason, Disney
washed their hands of it immediately

931
00:53:43,179 --> 00:53:44,180
and took a loss on it.

932
00:53:44,472 --> 00:53:48,977
We ended up laying off 85
people on Friday the 13th.

933
00:53:49,269 --> 00:53:52,439
In retrospect, Disney's
Atlantis was a significant movie.

934
00:53:52,731 --> 00:53:56,192
You can still see its impact
in contemporary pop culture.

935
00:53:56,484 --> 00:54:00,447
And a lot of that is now attributed
to Mignola's contribution to the work.

936
00:54:01,364 --> 00:54:03,158
And that goes back to the basic idea

937
00:54:03,450 --> 00:54:07,912
that if you could capture Mike's
artwork and just animate it,

938
00:54:08,204 --> 00:54:09,831
it would have been a big hit.

939
00:54:10,331 --> 00:54:14,794
I'm Chris P and I run an
animation studio named Titmouse.

940
00:54:15,086 --> 00:54:19,507
One of the very early jobs we did
was The Amazing Screw-On Head,

941
00:54:19,799 --> 00:54:21,509
which was a Mike Mignola project.

942
00:54:21,801 --> 00:54:23,094
Get me Screw-On Head.

943
00:54:23,386 --> 00:54:25,889
Mike's work has been incredibly influential

944
00:54:26,181 --> 00:54:28,683
in the world of animation
because he cracked this thing

945
00:54:28,975 --> 00:54:32,061
that people who do
animation really zoned in on,

946
00:54:32,353 --> 00:54:36,065
the reduced style with the amount
of lines and the amount of colors

947
00:54:36,357 --> 00:54:37,066
and stuff like that.

948
00:54:37,358 --> 00:54:39,694
And that's why we were able to make

949
00:54:40,195 --> 00:54:43,198
this amazing Screw-On Head
look so much like the comic.

950
00:54:43,490 --> 00:54:44,490
Mr. Groin.

951
00:54:44,741 --> 00:54:45,784
Here, sir.

952
00:54:46,075 --> 00:54:48,475
I had read The Amazing Screw-On
Head when it first came out.

953
00:54:48,745 --> 00:54:52,791
I loved it. I loved those last three pages
of three horrible women and a monkey.

954
00:54:53,082 --> 00:54:53,708
Gorgeous.

955
00:54:54,000 --> 00:54:57,545
I just got asked to audition,
and I got the part of the butler.

956
00:54:57,837 --> 00:54:58,837
Good show.

957
00:54:59,047 --> 00:55:02,342
I didn't even know that Paul Giamatti was
going to be reading Screw-On Head.

958
00:55:02,634 --> 00:55:04,554
I am not comfortable
with this level of intimacy

959
00:55:04,594 --> 00:55:06,387
from someone in your position.

960
00:55:06,679 --> 00:55:07,680
Yes, sir.

961
00:55:07,972 --> 00:55:11,851
It was such a departure
for what anybody was doing.

962
00:55:12,143 --> 00:55:15,438
Nothing looked like that.
Nothing had a story like that.

963
00:55:15,730 --> 00:55:17,315
Nothing had characters like that.

964
00:55:17,607 --> 00:55:19,776
There wasn't even stuff
like that on Adult Swim yet.

965
00:55:20,068 --> 00:55:23,238
I'm so excited. I just made
water in my pantaloons.

966
00:55:26,366 --> 00:55:29,077
We're coming for you, America.

967
00:55:29,410 --> 00:55:30,995
It didn't end up getting picked up.

968
00:55:31,287 --> 00:55:32,767
It never went anywhere. It's too bad.

969
00:55:32,956 --> 00:55:34,916
I think it was a little
bit ahead of its time.

970
00:55:35,375 --> 00:55:38,169
Despite his genius, or
perhaps even because of it,

971
00:55:38,461 --> 00:55:40,338
animation didn't really work out for Mike.

972
00:55:40,630 --> 00:55:43,591
He was too far ahead
of his time for Hollywood.

973
00:55:45,176 --> 00:55:46,176
You're having it?

974
00:55:46,386 --> 00:55:47,637
Crowd murmur

975
00:55:47,929 --> 00:55:49,009
yeah, yeah. It's just like-

976
00:55:49,180 --> 00:55:51,391
Have you ever shared
the origins of the sword?

977
00:55:53,184 --> 00:55:53,726
It's so good.

978
00:55:54,018 --> 00:55:57,272
Reading Hellboy, I
felt that there's a power

979
00:55:57,564 --> 00:56:00,733
and being like "We're the underdogs,
and our comic is also an underdog."

980
00:56:01,025 --> 00:56:05,321
And the fact that Hellboy is
the hero but also a monster

981
00:56:05,613 --> 00:56:09,200
is just a beautiful touch
because Mike's universe offers

982
00:56:09,492 --> 00:56:12,161
a gateway for those kids, those adults

983
00:56:12,453 --> 00:56:16,124
who don't see themselves in Superman
and Batman and Captain America

984
00:56:16,416 --> 00:56:16,833
and all the rest.

985
00:56:17,125 --> 00:56:19,168
Because I don't understand them.

986
00:56:19,794 --> 00:56:21,671
You write what you know.

987
00:56:22,589 --> 00:56:26,843
As a kid, I was the only guy I knew
who liked what I liked and did what I did.

988
00:56:27,135 --> 00:56:30,597
I just read books and watched
old movies, and I was an artist.

989
00:56:32,974 --> 00:56:34,684
It was kind of isolating.

990
00:56:36,811 --> 00:56:42,775
Within a fandom like this, a lot
of misfits can find their people.

991
00:56:43,192 --> 00:56:47,780
The heroes that Mike Mignola
has created are flawed misfits.

992
00:56:48,072 --> 00:56:51,826
They have insecurities
about their looks, their powers.

993
00:56:52,118 --> 00:56:55,622
There's a lot of internal conflict in
these characters that he's created,

994
00:56:55,914 --> 00:57:00,084
and I think that audiences really
connect with that kind of character.

995
00:57:00,376 --> 00:57:02,587
The way that they're all trying to navigate

996
00:57:02,879 --> 00:57:04,439
who they are and feeling like monsters.

997
00:57:04,672 --> 00:57:05,672
When I was a teenager,

998
00:57:05,798 --> 00:57:08,718
I really felt like that, I didn't
know where I was supposed to fit.

999
00:57:09,010 --> 00:57:11,095
I think a lot of misfits
feel that way too, of,

1000
00:57:11,387 --> 00:57:15,850
"No, I don't fit into these categories,
but there has to be a place for me.

1001
00:57:16,142 --> 00:57:19,312
I can't escape this world, so
can't there be a place for me?"

1002
00:57:19,604 --> 00:57:21,564
I think that's part of
the brilliance of Hellboy,

1003
00:57:21,773 --> 00:57:25,693
it's that Hellboy's constantly
got to prove he's one of us.

1004
00:57:25,985 --> 00:57:27,528
He's here on our side.

1005
00:57:29,572 --> 00:57:32,492
The idea of the hero as monster

1006
00:57:32,951 --> 00:57:38,790
is something that only really decisively
enters the superhero genre in the 1960s

1007
00:57:39,082 --> 00:57:42,126
with the Hulk and the
Thing and Kirby's work.

1008
00:57:42,418 --> 00:57:46,589
That notion of the hero
as monster falls away

1009
00:57:46,881 --> 00:57:48,383
in the early days of the 90s,

1010
00:57:48,675 --> 00:57:53,137
where you have, instead, sort of the hero
as super jacked, Rambo-esque type,

1011
00:57:53,429 --> 00:57:57,850
but you don't have a
sense of shame, self-hatred,

1012
00:57:58,142 --> 00:58:00,395
a recognition of the idea
that one's own appearance

1013
00:58:00,687 --> 00:58:03,731
might actually terrify the
people that you're trying to help.

1014
00:58:04,023 --> 00:58:08,736
And Mignola rediscovered those
pieces of the superhero narrative

1015
00:58:09,028 --> 00:58:12,198
and then really detaching them from
a lot of the other superhero trappings.

1016
00:58:12,532 --> 00:58:15,034
The way he treats
monsters, specifically Hellboy,

1017
00:58:15,326 --> 00:58:18,746
I really believe it's the
ultimate immigrant story.

1018
00:58:19,038 --> 00:58:23,167
He's an immigrant from Hell, came to Earth.

1019
00:58:23,459 --> 00:58:26,421
People don't think he's a good
person. They think he's here to hurt us,

1020
00:58:26,713 --> 00:58:28,256
and he turns out to be a good person.

1021
00:58:28,548 --> 00:58:31,009
It was like, "That's an outsider like me."

1022
00:58:31,300 --> 00:58:33,220
And that's really what
I think Hellboy is about.

1023
00:58:33,469 --> 00:58:36,055
It's about the fact that
we all feel like misfits.

1024
00:58:36,347 --> 00:58:40,018
We all feel like we're trying to
cut off some part of our personality

1025
00:58:40,309 --> 00:58:44,522
which seems to describe our nature
that we don't want people to know about.

1026
00:58:44,981 --> 00:58:46,816
That's a universal feeling.

1027
00:58:48,526 --> 00:58:50,004
I remember there's one of the stories

1028
00:58:50,028 --> 00:58:53,406
where Hellboy is talking to
another character who says,

1029
00:58:53,698 --> 00:58:56,418
"Because you're going to wear
the crown and you're going to be this,

1030
00:58:56,451 --> 00:58:57,451
you're going to be this."

1031
00:58:57,493 --> 00:59:02,415
And the next panel, Hellboy
says, "I'm not. I'm never going to be.

1032
00:59:02,707 --> 00:59:04,751
And I never want to talk about this again."

1033
00:59:05,043 --> 00:59:06,043
Because that was me."

1034
00:59:06,919 --> 00:59:09,422
There's a lot of Mike in Hellboy as well.

1035
00:59:09,714 --> 00:59:12,425
It's some conglomeration
of Mike and his dad

1036
00:59:12,717 --> 00:59:14,635
together living in that character.

1037
00:59:15,094 --> 00:59:20,641
There was a bit of my father in
Hellboy, but Hellboy's personality is mine.

1038
00:59:20,933 --> 00:59:24,020
He is my stand-in for me.

1039
00:59:24,312 --> 00:59:27,190
We all feel that way to some
degree at some point in our life.

1040
00:59:27,482 --> 00:59:31,360
That's why Mike's universe does resonate.

1041
00:59:32,195 --> 00:59:34,072
That's the beauty of Hellboy.

1042
00:59:34,530 --> 00:59:35,573
It's one of those things

1043
00:59:35,865 --> 00:59:39,077
where people can find
out they're not in it alone.

1044
00:59:39,619 --> 00:59:42,789
My dad was the first
movie freak I ever knew.

1045
00:59:43,331 --> 00:59:48,377
And of all the things that I saw, the
one that was a dagger to the soul was

1046
00:59:48,669 --> 00:59:50,505
Charles Laughton at Hunchback of Notre Dame

1047
00:59:50,797 --> 00:59:54,509
because there he was, this
horrible, disfigured outcast

1048
00:59:55,009 --> 00:59:57,470
and the most beautiful
thing you've ever seen,

1049
00:59:57,762 --> 00:59:59,597
all in one being.

1050
00:59:59,889 --> 01:00:01,390
And I went, "Holy shit."

1051
01:00:01,724 --> 01:00:06,604
If I have a shot at being in a world
where I can make somebody feel

1052
01:00:06,896 --> 01:00:08,481
like this guy just made me feel,

1053
01:00:08,815 --> 01:00:11,025
I'm probably going to start crying.

1054
01:00:12,777 --> 01:00:16,531
But yeah, when you touch people who relate,

1055
01:00:20,326 --> 01:00:27,291
it's not quite as good as a
paycheck, but it's a close second.

1056
01:00:30,002 --> 01:00:31,129
Keep it moving.

1057
01:00:34,006 --> 01:00:34,507
Cut.

1058
01:00:34,799 --> 01:00:36,359
If you're in this business long enough,

1059
01:00:36,425 --> 01:00:38,845
you learn that everything
is going to fall apart,

1060
01:00:40,054 --> 01:00:41,097
because usually it does.

1061
01:00:41,389 --> 01:00:43,224
That's the way it fucking
works in Hollywood.

1062
01:00:43,516 --> 01:00:47,103
Any hope I had for the
Hellboy movie was gone.

1063
01:00:47,395 --> 01:00:49,230
Especially if the thing drags on for years,

1064
01:00:49,522 --> 01:00:51,322
you figure, "They're
never going to make it."

1065
01:00:51,399 --> 01:00:56,195
Blade II made so much
money the weekend it opened,

1066
01:00:56,487 --> 01:00:57,572
I said to Mike,

1067
01:00:57,864 --> 01:01:00,032
"If we don't get the green light on Monday,

1068
01:01:00,324 --> 01:01:01,617
we were never going to make it."

1069
01:01:02,034 --> 01:01:04,245
After Blade II, everybody said,

1070
01:01:04,829 --> 01:01:07,039
"In a perfect world, what
would you want to do next?"

1071
01:01:07,415 --> 01:01:08,499
He said, "Hellboy."

1072
01:01:09,041 --> 01:01:11,169
And only one guy in town, Joe Roth, said,

1073
01:01:13,713 --> 01:01:14,713
"Yeah, I can do that."

1074
01:01:23,306 --> 01:01:26,851
It's taken five years to get here,

1075
01:01:27,268 --> 01:01:30,021
and we're here with all the
people we wanted to be here with;

1076
01:01:30,855 --> 01:01:32,607
the director who wanted to do it,

1077
01:01:32,899 --> 01:01:35,985
we got the star that we agreed
on the very first time we spoke.

1078
01:01:37,445 --> 01:01:41,490
I look forward to having
an amazing time working

1079
01:01:41,782 --> 01:01:47,705
on a magical property and
the fantastic adaptation thereof.

1080
01:01:50,541 --> 01:01:56,964
I realized that pretty early on
that there's so many great things

1081
01:01:57,256 --> 01:01:59,008
about your thing being adapted,

1082
01:01:59,342 --> 01:02:02,428
but if your thing is even
moderately successful,

1083
01:02:02,762 --> 01:02:05,348
you're going to live in the shadow of that

1084
01:02:05,723 --> 01:02:10,102
because more people are
going to know it as a movie.

1085
01:02:10,394 --> 01:02:11,938
That's where Hellboy comes from.

1086
01:02:14,982 --> 01:02:17,902
It took years for me to get
the comic up and running.

1087
01:02:18,444 --> 01:02:20,780
I've just gotten to the point
where I'm starting to see

1088
01:02:21,072 --> 01:02:24,742
a bunch of different stories I want
to do and an arc for this character,

1089
01:02:25,117 --> 01:02:27,745
and now I have to run
the risk of them making

1090
01:02:28,037 --> 01:02:34,126
a terrible movie with this kid, Del
Toro, who is an up-and-coming guy,

1091
01:02:34,418 --> 01:02:36,504
but is a pretty untested guy.

1092
01:02:36,796 --> 01:02:40,299
You pattern that thing on Sammael
with some of these same shapes-

1093
01:02:40,591 --> 01:02:42,593
It going to be confusing. Is it a scar?

1094
01:02:42,885 --> 01:02:44,595
It's your confusing design.

1095
01:02:44,887 --> 01:02:46,555
It's your confusing movie.

1096
01:02:47,223 --> 01:02:51,018
There's a part of me that
said, "It's going to be terrible.

1097
01:02:51,310 --> 01:02:54,397
It's going to be terrible beyond
anything anybody can imagine,

1098
01:02:54,689 --> 01:03:00,152
and this movie will be
so colossally horrible

1099
01:03:00,528 --> 01:03:02,989
that I'll never be able
to touch Hellboy again.

1100
01:03:03,281 --> 01:03:07,285
I will have completely
ruined this thing I had going."

1101
01:03:08,452 --> 01:03:12,748
Being a huge Hellboy fan and
seeing those first publicity stills,

1102
01:03:13,040 --> 01:03:15,710
part of me was scared, to be honest,

1103
01:03:16,002 --> 01:03:20,548
because as an artist, I freaking
adore the way Mike draws.

1104
01:03:20,840 --> 01:03:23,301
So I went, "Oh, it's a movie movie.

1105
01:03:24,051 --> 01:03:25,611
It's not going to look like the comic."

1106
01:03:25,678 --> 01:03:29,015
So it took me a while
to get into that space.

1107
01:03:30,516 --> 01:03:31,916
Early on in pre-production, I said,

1108
01:03:32,059 --> 01:03:36,772
"I cannot make the comic work
just in service to the material."

1109
01:03:37,064 --> 01:03:41,777
The virtues of the comic are
not possible to do in the movie.

1110
01:03:42,403 --> 01:03:45,239
The depth of the universe
is impossible to replicate,

1111
01:03:45,573 --> 01:03:47,283
and I know this because I tried.

1112
01:03:47,825 --> 01:03:52,246
Mike's use of light is impossible
to replicate in the real world.

1113
01:03:53,622 --> 01:03:55,499
It was a major jumping off point,

1114
01:03:55,791 --> 01:03:58,294
going from a comic book
thing where you have

1115
01:03:58,586 --> 01:04:00,880
a character that speaks
in one-word sentences,

1116
01:04:01,172 --> 01:04:04,133
to creating a film where he's
speaking in full sentences,

1117
01:04:04,425 --> 01:04:06,185
and he's moving, and
he's three-dimensional,

1118
01:04:06,260 --> 01:04:08,060
and he's got blood
flowing through his veins.

1119
01:04:08,888 --> 01:04:12,641
I knew that if the
movie was true to itself,

1120
01:04:13,142 --> 01:04:14,685
the comic was safe.

1121
01:04:15,353 --> 01:04:17,355
It's not like we altered the comic.

1122
01:04:17,855 --> 01:04:21,734
When the film is over and done
with, the comic is what it was.

1123
01:04:22,026 --> 01:04:24,487
It's not like when the film is done,

1124
01:04:24,779 --> 01:04:28,616
suddenly I start drawing the film
version of the BPRD headquarters.

1125
01:04:28,908 --> 01:04:30,552
There were a couple of
things on the first Hellboy

1126
01:04:30,576 --> 01:04:31,576
that I didn't agree with.

1127
01:04:31,827 --> 01:04:35,498
Mike hated certain
things, hated certain things.

1128
01:04:36,040 --> 01:04:37,208
He didn't like the romance

1129
01:04:37,500 --> 01:04:39,919
because it was not true
to the canon of the comics.

1130
01:04:40,211 --> 01:04:45,091
And I remember I bribed Del Toro
to remove one scene from the movie.

1131
01:04:45,716 --> 01:04:49,887
A Gothic crib, like 10 stories high,

1132
01:04:50,179 --> 01:04:54,600
rocking softly in the wind, and
there was a little baby in the middle.

1133
01:04:54,892 --> 01:04:58,062
And Mike says, "No, that's so stupid."

1134
01:04:58,938 --> 01:05:01,482
I couldn't run the risk of
Hellboy showing up in a giant crib,

1135
01:05:01,774 --> 01:05:03,943
so I gave him a few pages from The Corpse

1136
01:05:04,402 --> 01:05:07,238
so that Hellboy wouldn't
show up on Earth in a giant crib.

1137
01:05:07,530 --> 01:05:10,950
I said, "I'll trade it for
four pages of The Corpse."

1138
01:05:12,493 --> 01:05:15,079
And he gave me four pages of The Corpse.

1139
01:05:16,038 --> 01:05:17,038
It was a party.

1140
01:05:17,289 --> 01:05:18,374
It was so much fun.

1141
01:05:18,666 --> 01:05:20,126
Laughed our asses off.

1142
01:05:21,877 --> 01:05:25,756
I kinda stay away from all of the
hype, and the marketing, and the bullshit.

1143
01:05:26,048 --> 01:05:28,384
When I did ask Guillermo,
"Is there a good buzz?"

1144
01:05:28,676 --> 01:05:30,556
He says, "My friend, let
me tell you something.

1145
01:05:31,345 --> 01:05:35,641
When I optioned Hellboy,
there were 6,000 readers.

1146
01:05:36,016 --> 01:05:39,895
Now the movie is about to
come out and it's up to 12,000."

1147
01:05:41,939 --> 01:05:43,858
I said, "Holy shit.

1148
01:05:44,150 --> 01:05:45,860
If you double it every five years

1149
01:05:46,152 --> 01:05:49,738
by Hellboy 7, we're going
to have some following."

1150
01:05:52,575 --> 01:05:55,202
Del Toro's Hellboy movie was a big success,

1151
01:05:55,494 --> 01:05:58,789
and the result was sales of
the Hellboy comic got boosted,

1152
01:05:59,206 --> 01:06:00,916
and this gave Mignola the chance

1153
01:06:01,208 --> 01:06:04,462
to expand his vision
and expand his universe.

1154
01:06:04,753 --> 01:06:07,089
When we came off the first
Hellboy movie, it was like,

1155
01:06:07,381 --> 01:06:11,469
"Well, if there's ever a time that
maybe we could see a spinoff book,

1156
01:06:11,760 --> 01:06:12,760
let's try that."

1157
01:06:12,887 --> 01:06:16,599
This was really the
launchpad for the Mignolaverse.

1158
01:06:19,435 --> 01:06:23,606
Mignolaverse is the comic book
universe that includes Hellboy

1159
01:06:23,898 --> 01:06:26,609
and all of his tie-in
characters and spinoff books.

1160
01:06:26,901 --> 01:06:28,402
It's his own universe, isn't it?

1161
01:06:28,694 --> 01:06:30,654
You have the Marvel
Universe, the DC Universe.

1162
01:06:30,946 --> 01:06:33,657
It's not a Dark Horse
Universe, it's a Mignolaverse.

1163
01:06:33,949 --> 01:06:35,109
I don't know who coined that.

1164
01:06:35,201 --> 01:06:36,368
Mike probably hates it.

1165
01:06:36,660 --> 01:06:37,661
He hates it.

1166
01:06:38,078 --> 01:06:41,540
Yeah, that just sounds weird.

1167
01:06:41,832 --> 01:06:43,751
I'm sorry Mike, but it's caught on.

1168
01:06:44,043 --> 01:06:45,544
We can't get away from it now.

1169
01:06:46,712 --> 01:06:49,006
The Marvel Universe, the DC Universe.

1170
01:06:49,298 --> 01:06:50,298
I think with Mignola,

1171
01:06:50,549 --> 01:06:52,309
it's a whole different
kind of storytelling,

1172
01:06:52,593 --> 01:06:54,833
that's why it doesn't feel
like some sort of equivalent.

1173
01:06:55,054 --> 01:06:56,639
You can't say there are these things

1174
01:06:56,931 --> 01:06:59,491
and then Hellboy is the third
rung down the ladder or something.

1175
01:06:59,683 --> 01:07:02,895
It's another building,
it's like another thing.

1176
01:07:03,479 --> 01:07:05,314
That the characters were strong enough

1177
01:07:05,606 --> 01:07:08,734
to sustain these spinoffs
in multiple directions.

1178
01:07:09,026 --> 01:07:10,611
It's just a remarkable success story

1179
01:07:10,903 --> 01:07:14,031
because he wasn't the only person
who was trying to do that kind of thing,

1180
01:07:14,323 --> 01:07:16,909
but he seems to be maybe the
only one who really succeeded.

1181
01:07:17,785 --> 01:07:19,537
And now the Hellboy Universe is

1182
01:07:19,828 --> 01:07:23,082
the largest creator-owned
comic universe that's ever existed.

1183
01:07:23,374 --> 01:07:25,084
It is so, so many books.

1184
01:07:25,376 --> 01:07:27,776
We're talking about a world
with a whole bunch of characters

1185
01:07:28,003 --> 01:07:30,440
that can all stand on their own
and all have their own books,

1186
01:07:30,464 --> 01:07:31,944
and they all do have their own books.

1187
01:07:32,091 --> 01:07:36,220
Abe Sapien, Lobster Johnson, all
of these characters that he's created.

1188
01:07:37,388 --> 01:07:39,014
We've done a Rasputin book.

1189
01:07:39,306 --> 01:07:42,601
We have done The Visitor,
which is literally based on the alien

1190
01:07:42,893 --> 01:07:45,896
that we saw in a couple of
pages in Seed of Destruction.

1191
01:07:46,188 --> 01:07:47,189
Nothing gets wasted.

1192
01:07:47,481 --> 01:07:50,859
Mike is very good at picking up the
pieces that he's just thrown out there.

1193
01:07:51,151 --> 01:07:53,946
I'm always making up
stories or chewing over ideas

1194
01:07:54,238 --> 01:07:55,718
and trying to make them into stories.

1195
01:07:55,864 --> 01:08:01,120
Oh, here's an idea that
we didn't do, so let's do it.

1196
01:08:01,495 --> 01:08:04,748
One of my favorite characters
to draw, Gruagach, the pig guy.

1197
01:08:05,040 --> 01:08:07,293
He first appeared in The
Corpse and The Iron Shoes.

1198
01:08:08,586 --> 01:08:09,586
By his own admission,

1199
01:08:09,670 --> 01:08:12,506
Mike's made use of things
that he's just touched in the past.

1200
01:08:12,798 --> 01:08:15,878
and then, "Oh, I can use that here.
Yeah, that'll make me look much smarter."

1201
01:08:16,176 --> 01:08:16,885
And he does,

1202
01:08:17,177 --> 01:08:19,057
and everybody immediately
thinks he's a genius,

1203
01:08:19,263 --> 01:08:21,307
which he is, clearly.

1204
01:08:21,807 --> 01:08:24,727
One of the smartest,
accidental things I did

1205
01:08:25,019 --> 01:08:33,019
was have Hellboy appear on Earth in
1944 and then set his first story in '93,

1206
01:08:34,737 --> 01:08:37,948
so it gave you a big chunk of
time where as I make up stuff,

1207
01:08:38,240 --> 01:08:40,784
as I think of stuff, all this
stuff can happen in there.

1208
01:08:42,620 --> 01:08:47,124
But eventually, the whole
thing became more complicated.

1209
01:08:47,541 --> 01:08:48,959
It's not a one-man job.

1210
01:08:53,130 --> 01:08:57,259
Obviously, expanding a comic book universe
means bringing in more collaborators,

1211
01:08:57,551 --> 01:08:59,345
more writers, more artists.

1212
01:08:59,637 --> 01:09:02,806
For the first 10 years, Hellboy
was being drawn solely by Mike,

1213
01:09:03,098 --> 01:09:06,644
and so they started
bringing in writers, artists,

1214
01:09:06,935 --> 01:09:09,229
but he actually has
final say on everything.

1215
01:09:09,647 --> 01:09:11,607
One of the challenges
that they would have had

1216
01:09:11,899 --> 01:09:14,568
is that nobody can draw like Mignola.

1217
01:09:14,860 --> 01:09:16,300
There are certain things where I go,

1218
01:09:16,445 --> 01:09:18,906
"Well, only I could draw that.

1219
01:09:19,198 --> 01:09:21,450
Maybe I can find an
artist who can draw it."

1220
01:09:21,742 --> 01:09:25,746
The trouble is, it's hard
for me to trust other people,

1221
01:09:26,413 --> 01:09:30,042
so I might have, in the old days,
been very fussy about some stuff.

1222
01:09:31,335 --> 01:09:35,005
There's a thing in comics where
he's considered a curmudgeon.

1223
01:09:35,422 --> 01:09:38,258
Some people find him to
be like a grouchy old man.

1224
01:09:38,592 --> 01:09:40,219
He had a bad reputation for a while.

1225
01:09:40,511 --> 01:09:41,720
He does have a temper.

1226
01:09:44,431 --> 01:09:47,726
You don't create a multiverse
without breaking a few eggs.

1227
01:09:48,102 --> 01:09:49,462
What is it like working with Mike?

1228
01:09:49,645 --> 01:09:51,605
I'm not sure I'm allowed
to answer that question.

1229
01:09:51,897 --> 01:09:53,774
Mike will tell you exactly what he wants.

1230
01:09:54,066 --> 01:09:56,347
If he doesn't like it, he'll
tell you he doesn't like it.

1231
01:09:56,443 --> 01:10:01,407
Mike has strong preferences,
but I trust his opinions on things,

1232
01:10:01,699 --> 01:10:05,452
and it makes it a lot
easier to dive into anything

1233
01:10:05,744 --> 01:10:07,579
that he feels should be different.

1234
01:10:07,871 --> 01:10:11,542
He'll listen and he'll nod thoughtfully
and say, "Yeah, that's all wrong."

1235
01:10:13,419 --> 01:10:16,505
It doesn't make for the most
relaxing work experience.

1236
01:10:17,631 --> 01:10:21,719
It's whatever is important to try to
get what's in my head onto the page.

1237
01:10:22,678 --> 01:10:24,096
Mike just wants what he wants,

1238
01:10:24,430 --> 01:10:28,767
and if he knows you can do it,
then all the more reason to get it.

1239
01:10:29,059 --> 01:10:31,437
I see the way I would
draw these characters,

1240
01:10:31,729 --> 01:10:34,106
not how somebody else
would draw the characters.

1241
01:10:34,732 --> 01:10:37,443
It's not wrong, but it's
not how I want to do it,

1242
01:10:38,110 --> 01:10:41,196
and it's my book, which
he never actually said.

1243
01:10:44,825 --> 01:10:50,706
Hellboy was always meant to
be my thing that I get to draw.

1244
01:10:51,373 --> 01:10:54,752
You certainly didn't make up
something about a red character with a tail

1245
01:10:55,043 --> 01:10:59,006
and call it Hellboy because you
said, "Oh, there's my movie idea."

1246
01:11:02,176 --> 01:11:04,696
And it's funny because I never
thought the movie would be made.

1247
01:11:05,012 --> 01:11:07,765
But suddenly it was like,
"There's going to be a Hellboy II."

1248
01:11:10,642 --> 01:11:15,355
Hellboy was successful,
and very successful on video,

1249
01:11:15,647 --> 01:11:20,194
and then the studio was the
one that came back and said,

1250
01:11:20,486 --> 01:11:22,196
"We want a sequel. Can you do one?"

1251
01:11:24,323 --> 01:11:26,950
We had a lot of fun on Blade.

1252
01:11:27,743 --> 01:11:33,248
We had fun and were collaborative
on the first Hellboy movie,

1253
01:11:34,333 --> 01:11:36,668
but it was a much different dynamic

1254
01:11:37,044 --> 01:11:39,254
on the second movie
than it was on the first.

1255
01:11:40,339 --> 01:11:43,884
I lost all the battles I
fought on Hellboy II.

1256
01:11:45,719 --> 01:11:47,304
There was pressure on Hellboy II.

1257
01:11:47,930 --> 01:11:49,473
We felt like we got to top the first,

1258
01:11:50,015 --> 01:11:53,018
because usually on the second one
they're a little bit more scrutinizing.

1259
01:11:54,561 --> 01:11:58,649
We really quickly ran into the thing
of, we can't go back to the comic

1260
01:11:58,982 --> 01:12:01,527
because the character
has been changed so much.

1261
01:12:02,194 --> 01:12:04,988
I remember him calling me up and saying,

1262
01:12:05,322 --> 01:12:08,617
"Magnus, we're going to call it
Hellboy and The Golden Army."

1263
01:12:09,117 --> 01:12:11,620
And I went, what the
fuck is the Golden Army?

1264
01:12:12,621 --> 01:12:15,457
Because the original idea was
waking up the Angel of Death.

1265
01:12:16,250 --> 01:12:20,712
He said, "I took out the Angel of
Death and now it's gold robots."

1266
01:12:22,923 --> 01:12:24,683
It was going to go
where it was going to go.

1267
01:12:24,758 --> 01:12:26,638
Del Toro had a vision
for what he wanted to do.

1268
01:12:26,885 --> 01:12:28,387
There was no shaking that.

1269
01:12:31,056 --> 01:12:35,352
It's kind of like when your
kid grows up and moves away

1270
01:12:35,686 --> 01:12:38,605
and you no longer have
control over their life,

1271
01:12:39,147 --> 01:12:42,734
so it's this weird little thing that
you thought would be your little thing,

1272
01:12:43,026 --> 01:12:46,905
and at some point you go, "It's
not really my little thing anymore."

1273
01:12:50,367 --> 01:12:55,038
There was a defining moment
between me and Del Toro where I said,

1274
01:12:55,414 --> 01:12:56,623
"Hellboy wouldn't do that."

1275
01:12:57,332 --> 01:13:02,045
And he said, "Your Hellboy
wouldn't, mine would."

1276
01:13:03,881 --> 01:13:08,510
And it was one of those moments where
you have a flash of anger and then you go,

1277
01:13:08,844 --> 01:13:09,964
"Oh, he's absolutely right."

1278
01:13:12,264 --> 01:13:15,726
In my own stuff, I know the
biggest creative successes I had

1279
01:13:16,018 --> 01:13:19,730
was when I just relaxed
and did my crazy shit.

1280
01:13:22,232 --> 01:13:25,861
I knew Del Toro needed
to make that character his,

1281
01:13:26,737 --> 01:13:30,032
and I knew I had to help
him make that character his.

1282
01:13:31,283 --> 01:13:35,078
If this guy doesn't have room
to put his own juice in there,

1283
01:13:35,370 --> 01:13:37,456
his own ideas, it's not going to work.

1284
01:13:38,957 --> 01:13:42,502
At some point, you have to
trust other people with your stuff.

1285
01:13:44,922 --> 01:13:48,050
I said, "Hey, I did it my
way. You do it your way."

1286
01:13:48,759 --> 01:13:51,845
A hot weekend for Hellboy
II: The Golden Army,

1287
01:13:52,137 --> 01:13:53,764
the devilish Universal sequel

1288
01:13:54,056 --> 01:13:57,225
starring Ron Perlman battled
to the top of the box office.

1289
01:13:57,517 --> 01:13:58,101
I was blown away.

1290
01:13:58,393 --> 01:14:02,356
I was already a huge Guillermo
fan and then once the movie started,

1291
01:14:02,689 --> 01:14:05,108
I was like, "This isn't Hellboy-Hellboy.

1292
01:14:05,400 --> 01:14:08,070
This is Guillermo's
version of Mike's Hellboy."

1293
01:14:08,362 --> 01:14:10,656
I thought the Hellboy movies
that he made were amazing,

1294
01:14:10,948 --> 01:14:12,028
especially that second one.

1295
01:14:12,240 --> 01:14:16,161
The whole sequence where the
tree monster dies on the street.

1296
01:14:16,453 --> 01:14:20,707
It's a terrifying monster that dies
so beautifully and so tragically.

1297
01:14:20,999 --> 01:14:25,379
That, to me, is the essence of
Mignola and Hellboy right there.

1298
01:14:25,921 --> 01:14:28,215
I love what Guillermo did
with the Hellboy universe.

1299
01:14:28,507 --> 01:14:32,094
I love the beauty and the
elegance of some of the demons

1300
01:14:32,386 --> 01:14:35,180
who are terrifying to look at
and yet also really magnificent.

1301
01:14:35,555 --> 01:14:36,807
There's a majesty to them

1302
01:14:37,224 --> 01:14:40,018
that I think befits the
comic books really well.

1303
01:14:40,310 --> 01:14:43,146
Guillermo's first movie is what
got me into the Hellboy comics.

1304
01:14:43,438 --> 01:14:47,150
And then the moment I discovered
there was much more to this world,

1305
01:14:47,442 --> 01:14:51,530
I dove in and I have been buying
every BPRD Hellboy comic I could.

1306
01:14:52,739 --> 01:14:54,950
I'd love to think the
comic would still be selling

1307
01:14:55,242 --> 01:14:58,286
if there wasn't movies,
but I'll never know.

1308
01:14:58,704 --> 01:15:00,956
Clearly, in a Darwinian sense,

1309
01:15:01,331 --> 01:15:06,128
the synergy between the comics and
the movie allowed Hellboy to survive,

1310
01:15:07,045 --> 01:15:10,841
because if you look back at the
big titles for Dark Horse back then,

1311
01:15:11,258 --> 01:15:14,177
none of them stayed for this long.

1312
01:15:14,469 --> 01:15:16,680
That's definitely one of
the gigantic advantages.

1313
01:15:16,972 --> 01:15:20,100
It's a great marketing tool for the comic.

1314
01:15:20,392 --> 01:15:25,480
If the movie is a neon sign
saying, read this, read this,

1315
01:15:25,772 --> 01:15:29,818
it's a huge advantage for the
culture and for people to discover

1316
01:15:30,110 --> 01:15:32,863
this amazing set of
characters that Mike created

1317
01:15:33,405 --> 01:15:34,906
and I borrowed for a spin.

1318
01:15:35,323 --> 01:15:38,035
And now I feel like the
parking guy on Ferris Bueller

1319
01:15:38,535 --> 01:15:41,705
when he gives them the
keys and you go [car noises].

1320
01:15:42,330 --> 01:15:43,330
Oh, my God.

1321
01:15:43,457 --> 01:15:46,460
To be the recipient of
that kind of largesse,

1322
01:15:46,752 --> 01:15:50,213
that was a complete change
in the trajectory of my career.

1323
01:15:50,505 --> 01:15:54,259
I've been on a roll ever since
Hellboy II that still hasn't dissipated.

1324
01:15:54,634 --> 01:15:55,802
It was a game-changer.

1325
01:15:56,803 --> 01:16:00,974
Getting the chance to play Abe
Sapien has been life-changing for me.

1326
01:16:01,308 --> 01:16:05,020
I owe Mike Mignola and
Guillermo Del Toro everything

1327
01:16:05,312 --> 01:16:09,441
for letting that moment happen for me
that then helped propel me into my future.

1328
01:16:09,816 --> 01:16:12,319
It was a curious time
because after Hellboy,

1329
01:16:12,611 --> 01:16:14,988
I got offered a ton of movies.

1330
01:16:15,280 --> 01:16:16,782
I got my pick of the litter.

1331
01:16:17,074 --> 01:16:20,827
And the Oscar goes to The Shape of Water.

1332
01:16:22,454 --> 01:16:26,166
Guillermo Del Toro and
J. Miles Dale produces.

1333
01:16:27,000 --> 01:16:28,019
What was really interesting was,

1334
01:16:28,043 --> 01:16:32,130
Abe Sapien was his rough
draft for The Shape of Water.

1335
01:16:32,422 --> 01:16:34,508
It's like you're watching him working

1336
01:16:34,800 --> 01:16:37,761
on where The Shape of
Water would end up going.

1337
01:16:38,887 --> 01:16:41,348
Everyone that is dreaming
of using genre fantasy

1338
01:16:41,640 --> 01:16:44,643
to tell the stories about the things
that are real in the world today,

1339
01:16:44,935 --> 01:16:45,935
you can do it.

1340
01:16:46,061 --> 01:16:50,607
I have enormous love for
what Mike does and him.

1341
01:16:51,233 --> 01:16:52,692
I don't think he would go back

1342
01:16:52,984 --> 01:16:55,695
at collaborating in
conceptuals or this or that,

1343
01:16:55,987 --> 01:16:58,031
but I would love to find something.

1344
01:16:58,615 --> 01:17:00,615
I would love it if there
was something I could do.

1345
01:17:01,118 --> 01:17:01,827
We're friends,

1346
01:17:02,119 --> 01:17:05,288
but we've both been
through a lot in our lives,

1347
01:17:05,580 --> 01:17:07,916
and I think we clearly
went in different directions.

1348
01:17:08,834 --> 01:17:13,296
I think friendship is not
something that works all the time.

1349
01:17:13,755 --> 01:17:17,425
There's a kinship there,
and neither of us is perfect,

1350
01:17:17,926 --> 01:17:18,926
and I like that.

1351
01:17:20,720 --> 01:17:23,390
I'll never be able to be
objective about the movies,

1352
01:17:23,682 --> 01:17:29,855
but I love that people love the movies,
and I love a lot about the movies.

1353
01:17:30,147 --> 01:17:31,982
Everything we had went into those movies.

1354
01:17:32,274 --> 01:17:35,068
We left our blood and
sweat on the dance floor.

1355
01:17:35,360 --> 01:17:36,440
When I think of the movies,

1356
01:17:36,486 --> 01:17:39,447
I think of the experience
of working on the movies.

1357
01:17:40,073 --> 01:17:41,116
We're all far from home

1358
01:17:41,408 --> 01:17:43,528
and we're all hanging out
at the hotel bar and stuff.

1359
01:17:43,827 --> 01:17:45,078
It was fantastic.

1360
01:17:45,912 --> 01:17:48,039
No one can take those days away from us.

1361
01:17:48,790 --> 01:17:49,950
We had a hell of a good time.

1362
01:17:50,417 --> 01:17:51,543
It was an adventure.

1363
01:18:00,302 --> 01:18:02,429
That's the big evolutionary process,

1364
01:18:02,721 --> 01:18:09,561
is realizing that if you can't
control it, you can't control it.

1365
01:18:10,854 --> 01:18:14,107
But, yeah, when I started, when I
was working with Duncan Fegredo,

1366
01:18:14,566 --> 01:18:18,403
I actually drew thumbnails
for the first couple issues.

1367
01:18:18,820 --> 01:18:22,699
And when Duncan took over the book,
I sent all those thumbnails to Duncan.

1368
01:18:22,991 --> 01:18:25,118
But I realized that I was tying his hands,

1369
01:18:25,619 --> 01:18:29,289
and I never want the
artist to feel a wrist.

1370
01:18:29,581 --> 01:18:31,981
I don't want to work with guys
who are just trying to do me.

1371
01:18:32,250 --> 01:18:37,214
I want guys to come in and do what
they do. As long as they get it right.

1372
01:18:44,095 --> 01:18:48,016
My brother and I were
really huge Mignola fans.

1373
01:18:48,308 --> 01:18:49,351
For a long time,

1374
01:18:49,643 --> 01:18:54,105
we thought he was the only
one who could tell those stories.

1375
01:18:54,397 --> 01:18:57,484
But then when they started
doing those BPRD books,

1376
01:18:57,901 --> 01:19:02,030
different books that could have
their own voice and their own look,

1377
01:19:02,447 --> 01:19:04,157
that made us think that,

1378
01:19:04,449 --> 01:19:10,580
"Okay, maybe we won't screw up if
we do something on the Mignolaverse."

1379
01:19:11,164 --> 01:19:15,669
It's my world, but within that,

1380
01:19:15,961 --> 01:19:19,881
I want people to come in
and do what they want to do.

1381
01:19:20,465 --> 01:19:25,136
Working with Mike is very freeing
because he just provides this support

1382
01:19:25,428 --> 01:19:29,557
to do things that are crazier
than you might otherwise do.

1383
01:19:29,849 --> 01:19:31,476
Everybody working on the Mignolaverse,

1384
01:19:31,768 --> 01:19:36,690
they are interested in creating
this universe, this experience,

1385
01:19:36,982 --> 01:19:40,902
this feeling of horror and
terror and astonishment.

1386
01:19:41,319 --> 01:19:43,905
Now, it's a snowball rolling downhill.

1387
01:19:44,197 --> 01:19:46,533
At some point, it got away from me.

1388
01:19:46,825 --> 01:19:49,828
I'd love to think I created a world

1389
01:19:50,120 --> 01:19:53,665
where a lot of people could
either add pieces or play with pieces

1390
01:19:53,957 --> 01:19:56,293
that I put in there.

1391
01:19:56,584 --> 01:19:58,461
The expansion of the Mignolaverse means

1392
01:19:58,753 --> 01:20:01,464
that it becomes a
space to foster new talent

1393
01:20:01,756 --> 01:20:05,552
allowing new creative voices to be heard.

1394
01:20:07,679 --> 01:20:11,474
I was a huge fan of Hellboy
and everything Mignola did

1395
01:20:11,766 --> 01:20:13,268
when I was doing Abe Sapien.

1396
01:20:13,560 --> 01:20:16,271
Looking at how he sees
panels and how he sees pacing

1397
01:20:16,563 --> 01:20:18,189
was a huge learning experience.

1398
01:20:18,481 --> 01:20:21,860
Mike is also a consummate professional.

1399
01:20:22,152 --> 01:20:25,155
Layouts-cool, pencils-tight,
all that kind of thing.

1400
01:20:25,447 --> 01:20:26,448
I am not.

1401
01:20:26,740 --> 01:20:28,950
At one point, the editor had told me,

1402
01:20:29,242 --> 01:20:31,745
"Mike hates how you work,
but he loves what you do."

1403
01:20:33,663 --> 01:20:34,998
At Rose City Comic Con,

1404
01:20:35,290 --> 01:20:38,626
I was innocently sitting at my
table, and Mike Mignola came over

1405
01:20:38,918 --> 01:20:42,255
and started praising my work
and asked me to work with his team.

1406
01:20:42,714 --> 01:20:47,594
It was really cool to feel validated
by one of my comic book heroes.

1407
01:20:48,428 --> 01:20:52,265
I do feel really happy to be
working on Sarah Jewell in particular,

1408
01:20:52,557 --> 01:20:55,685
because not only is she this
really powerful adventurer lady,

1409
01:20:55,977 --> 01:20:57,562
but she's also late middle-aged.

1410
01:20:57,854 --> 01:20:59,606
And we don't see that in comics

1411
01:20:59,898 --> 01:21:02,359
where there aren't a lot of
books about older people.

1412
01:21:04,361 --> 01:21:08,448
We're very lucky that we've gotten
to work with so many great people,

1413
01:21:08,740 --> 01:21:13,286
writers, artists, colorists, letterers,
cover artists, all of the editors,

1414
01:21:13,578 --> 01:21:15,497
the designers, the digital art technicians.

1415
01:21:15,789 --> 01:21:16,414
It's a lot.

1416
01:21:16,706 --> 01:21:19,376
It's a really, really big
team over the years.

1417
01:21:19,667 --> 01:21:22,962
I feel like I built the Hellboy machine.

1418
01:21:23,838 --> 01:21:27,967
I don't need to keep feeding
it or being the main guy.

1419
01:21:28,259 --> 01:21:33,640
I'm trying to hand over as much
of it to other people as possible.

1420
01:21:34,599 --> 01:21:36,810
Mike has established
a place in the industry

1421
01:21:37,102 --> 01:21:38,853
where the young creators look up to him,

1422
01:21:39,145 --> 01:21:41,314
and I think he enjoys
helping young artists.

1423
01:21:41,606 --> 01:21:43,316
I think he likes being a mentor.

1424
01:21:46,319 --> 01:21:49,406
He's open to passing
whatever he can on to them.

1425
01:21:50,532 --> 01:21:52,659
We were at an original art show.

1426
01:21:52,951 --> 01:21:55,787
There were a lot of
people there to see him.

1427
01:21:56,079 --> 01:21:58,998
Mike did a master class
on composition to this guy

1428
01:21:59,290 --> 01:22:02,010
who asked him, "You know what?
I want to do this cover of so and so.

1429
01:22:02,293 --> 01:22:03,312
How would you approach it?"

1430
01:22:03,336 --> 01:22:05,880
He sat with him for 15, 20 minutes.

1431
01:22:06,714 --> 01:22:10,552
He just loves seeing art from
a range of really great artists,

1432
01:22:10,844 --> 01:22:13,179
and he wants to share that with the world.

1433
01:22:13,638 --> 01:22:18,518
When it came time for me to
do my first creator-owned book,

1434
01:22:18,810 --> 01:22:20,562
and I was like, "Do you have any advice?

1435
01:22:20,854 --> 01:22:21,896
I'm a little nervous."

1436
01:22:22,188 --> 01:22:24,023
His response, I'll never forget it, was,

1437
01:22:24,315 --> 01:22:26,359
"Nobody needs another fucking Batman book.

1438
01:22:26,776 --> 01:22:27,819
See what your ideas are.

1439
01:22:28,111 --> 01:22:30,447
See if they've got legs
and throw them out there."

1440
01:22:31,739 --> 01:22:33,450
This is going to get too personal.

1441
01:22:34,534 --> 01:22:38,121
But when I got to visit his
studio, I was just starting Steven.

1442
01:22:38,413 --> 01:22:39,038
I was on the pilot.

1443
01:22:39,330 --> 01:22:41,250
I wanted to come get his
advice about mythology,

1444
01:22:41,332 --> 01:22:44,043
so I pitched him the idea of Steven.

1445
01:22:44,461 --> 01:22:48,756
I asked him, "Is there any
sort of ancient goddess,

1446
01:22:49,048 --> 01:22:51,634
anything that could have to
do with some of these themes

1447
01:22:51,926 --> 01:22:53,678
that I'm trying to work into the show?"

1448
01:22:54,929 --> 01:22:58,683
He pulled out a book
and opened it up to Ishtar.

1449
01:22:58,975 --> 01:23:03,104
She's the goddess of love, and
war, and passion, and everything.

1450
01:23:04,022 --> 01:23:08,109
I started to really think, "What
kind of symbol do I want to be

1451
01:23:08,401 --> 01:23:10,904
the symbol of this whole show?"

1452
01:23:11,738 --> 01:23:13,531
Ishtar is stars and lions.

1453
01:23:14,866 --> 01:23:17,535
Before that, Steven didn't
have any sort of symbol.

1454
01:23:17,827 --> 01:23:19,329
He just had a pink shirt on.

1455
01:23:19,871 --> 01:23:23,249
The star comes directly from Mike Mignola.

1456
01:23:24,626 --> 01:23:29,506
As I went on working on the
show, I really wanted to dig

1457
01:23:29,797 --> 01:23:32,717
into my own experience as a queer person,

1458
01:23:33,218 --> 01:23:35,470
and I really didn't want
to be afraid to do that.

1459
01:23:35,762 --> 01:23:40,266
I was, but I wanted to make
that deep in the DNA of the show.

1460
01:23:41,559 --> 01:23:43,978
I just think that Hellboy had so much to do

1461
01:23:44,270 --> 01:23:47,524
with his relationship
with his own identity.

1462
01:23:47,815 --> 01:23:50,860
I found it so exciting
to be reading a comic

1463
01:23:51,152 --> 01:23:52,946
that was really, at its core,

1464
01:23:53,238 --> 01:23:57,534
about someone who was
really afraid of who they are.

1465
01:23:58,535 --> 01:24:02,539
It was really relatable
and inspiring to me.

1466
01:24:03,831 --> 01:24:06,391
If Steven is doing something
similar for the people watching it,

1467
01:24:06,668 --> 01:24:08,211
then I would be so honored.

1468
01:24:18,638 --> 01:24:21,724
Now, this would be a really
good place to say, "Now stop."

1469
01:24:22,016 --> 01:24:25,478
Because there is the constant
worry about "When did he lose it?

1470
01:24:25,770 --> 01:24:27,855
At one point, he had nothing else to say,

1471
01:24:28,147 --> 01:24:33,278
and he just became some terrible
hack who is doing all terrible work.

1472
01:24:33,778 --> 01:24:35,655
So maybe you should just retire."

1473
01:24:36,364 --> 01:24:40,034
Then I start going, "Well, what am
I gonna do with the rest of my life."

1474
01:24:40,910 --> 01:24:44,205
Mike's work ethic is
definitely his father's.

1475
01:24:44,497 --> 01:24:48,751
He wakes up in the morning
and he works 'til the wee hours.

1476
01:24:49,043 --> 01:24:51,713
I don't know what to do with
myself when I'm not working.

1477
01:24:52,005 --> 01:24:55,258
I'll say to Christine, "I would love
to just sit and read a book today."

1478
01:24:55,550 --> 01:24:57,260
She'd say, "Well, you can."

1479
01:24:57,635 --> 01:25:00,888
But if I'm home, the studio is where I sit.

1480
01:25:01,264 --> 01:25:03,975
It's very much like a safe space for him.

1481
01:25:05,310 --> 01:25:05,977
Just recently,

1482
01:25:06,269 --> 01:25:09,897
Mike and I collaborated on a book
called The Quarantine Sketchbook.

1483
01:25:10,189 --> 01:25:13,026
That book never would have
happened without Christine,

1484
01:25:13,318 --> 01:25:16,195
because the sketches started
out to be something I just did

1485
01:25:16,487 --> 01:25:18,615
so I wouldn't go crazy
when the pandemic started.

1486
01:25:18,906 --> 01:25:21,534
I said, "Let's do a book
and just donate the money

1487
01:25:21,826 --> 01:25:24,829
to José Andrés' World Central Kitchen."

1488
01:25:25,121 --> 01:25:28,499
It's raised around a half million
dollars, and it's still making money.

1489
01:25:28,875 --> 01:25:31,127
It felt good. It felt really good.

1490
01:25:31,502 --> 01:25:34,255
It was nice to feel like we
were able to do something.

1491
01:25:34,547 --> 01:25:37,425
Because I'm a comic book
artist. I got nothing else to do.

1492
01:25:37,717 --> 01:25:38,968
This is what I do.

1493
01:25:40,261 --> 01:25:44,807
A lot of people are very surprised
that I've only read one Hellboy comic.

1494
01:25:45,099 --> 01:25:47,352
I'm not even sure she's read one Hellboy.

1495
01:25:47,644 --> 01:25:51,147
She probably read The Magician
and the Snake because Katie wrote it.

1496
01:25:51,898 --> 01:25:57,070
When I was seven, my dad took
my story and made that into a comic.

1497
01:25:57,487 --> 01:26:01,115
I went to pick her up from school one day,
and I said, "What did you do at school?"

1498
01:26:01,407 --> 01:26:04,702
She goes, I drew a picture
of a snake on a rooftop

1499
01:26:04,994 --> 01:26:08,414
being furious at some geometric shapes."

1500
01:26:08,706 --> 01:26:09,832
I said, "Stop.

1501
01:26:11,584 --> 01:26:13,795
All right, you're going
to have to explain that."

1502
01:26:14,087 --> 01:26:17,465
I just made up the story
as we were walking.

1503
01:26:17,757 --> 01:26:18,757
It's great.

1504
01:26:18,966 --> 01:26:22,720
It's so odd, and it feels
like it's about something.

1505
01:26:23,388 --> 01:26:26,099
Then he turned it into a comic.

1506
01:26:26,683 --> 01:26:29,352
I tried to change the ending
and Katie wouldn't have it.

1507
01:26:29,644 --> 01:26:32,814
I wanted to do a Victorian stage magician,

1508
01:26:33,106 --> 01:26:37,235
and she said, "No, he's going to
have the robe and the pointed hat."

1509
01:26:37,527 --> 01:26:39,696
It did surprisingly well.

1510
01:26:39,987 --> 01:26:41,739
Well, she won an Eisner Award.

1511
01:26:42,657 --> 01:26:44,450
Youngest Eisner Award winner.

1512
01:26:44,742 --> 01:26:47,036
I still think it's the best
thing I've ever done.

1513
01:26:48,079 --> 01:26:49,539
He loves that one,

1514
01:26:49,831 --> 01:26:54,752
and that's why even the imagery from it
shows up over and over again in his work.

1515
01:26:55,044 --> 01:26:59,173
There's a lot of family dynamic
that figures into my stuff.

1516
01:26:59,465 --> 01:27:01,467
Even though he's become really well known

1517
01:27:01,759 --> 01:27:05,471
in his industry, he's
still just our brother.

1518
01:27:05,763 --> 01:27:07,181
He's still just Mike.

1519
01:27:08,641 --> 01:27:10,643
My brothers and I spent
a lot of time together

1520
01:27:10,935 --> 01:27:12,645
around the time of my father's funeral.

1521
01:27:12,937 --> 01:27:14,397
I remember one night,

1522
01:27:14,689 --> 01:27:19,318
sitting in a hotel bar and I said, "You
guys should write something for me."

1523
01:27:19,610 --> 01:27:21,028
And Todd did.

1524
01:27:22,864 --> 01:27:25,158
It was great to be able
to do something together.

1525
01:27:26,993 --> 01:27:32,582
Scott has written any number of
novels, but his Pinocchio sequel was great.

1526
01:27:32,874 --> 01:27:35,793
We had always loved Pinocchio
ever since we were little kids.

1527
01:27:36,085 --> 01:27:43,092
I think it started with the Disney movie
and moved on to the insane Collodi novel.

1528
01:27:43,384 --> 01:27:45,219
And so I wrote a novel.

1529
01:27:45,511 --> 01:27:49,891
He did an e-book of Pinocchio
and an e-book of the sequel,

1530
01:27:50,183 --> 01:27:51,768
and I did covers for those.

1531
01:27:52,185 --> 01:27:56,147
We dedicated it to our
dad, who was a woodworker.

1532
01:28:00,526 --> 01:28:03,279
Our dad was a guy who was a cabinet maker,

1533
01:28:03,571 --> 01:28:06,741
and built stuff with his
hands, and grew up on a farm.

1534
01:28:07,450 --> 01:28:09,130
Of course, he was also of that generation.

1535
01:28:09,160 --> 01:28:13,122
He could never say he was proud of you.
It would've killed him to tell me that.

1536
01:28:14,415 --> 01:28:18,002
He knew he was proud of
him, but he never told Mike.

1537
01:28:18,294 --> 01:28:21,255
He would express it in these strange ways.

1538
01:28:21,547 --> 01:28:25,176
When the movie came out, he took people.

1539
01:28:25,468 --> 01:28:27,279
Yeah, he took a lot of
friends to the theater,

1540
01:28:27,303 --> 01:28:28,423
and he wore his Hellboy hat.

1541
01:28:28,679 --> 01:28:30,681
They gave him a poster in the theater.

1542
01:28:31,224 --> 01:28:33,392
Then he was really sick
in a hospital one time.

1543
01:28:33,684 --> 01:28:35,853
It was just he and I in the room,

1544
01:28:36,145 --> 01:28:38,189
and he's staring at
this painting on the wall,

1545
01:28:38,481 --> 01:28:40,316
and he's like, "It's like a cartoon."

1546
01:28:40,608 --> 01:28:42,068
I was like, "What kind of cartoon?"

1547
01:28:42,360 --> 01:28:44,362
He said, "Like a Hellboy cartoon."

1548
01:28:44,654 --> 01:28:47,156
I was like, "All right, call Mike."

1549
01:28:48,699 --> 01:28:50,117
I can translate that.

1550
01:28:50,409 --> 01:28:52,078
I know that means you're proud of me.

1551
01:28:54,664 --> 01:28:57,083
My father did say at one point,

1552
01:28:57,458 --> 01:29:01,087
"You should at least try to
do what you love for a living,

1553
01:29:01,379 --> 01:29:03,315
because you got to do
it for a really long time."

1554
01:29:03,339 --> 01:29:06,968
That's why I say to people, "At
least try doing exactly what you want.

1555
01:29:07,260 --> 01:29:09,929
You don't know. Maybe
somebody will like it."

1556
01:29:10,471 --> 01:29:13,015
I just wanted on my deathbed to say,

1557
01:29:13,307 --> 01:29:19,063
"At least once I drew something
that had some of my shit in it."

1558
01:29:19,438 --> 01:29:21,983
Now I just can't seem to stop it.

1559
01:29:24,110 --> 01:29:26,320
A lot of people know who Hellboy is.

1560
01:29:26,612 --> 01:29:30,908
More and more, as I try to step back
from Hellboy to concentrate other things,

1561
01:29:31,200 --> 01:29:35,079
you kind of go, "Well, I
can't stop the machine."

1562
01:29:35,371 --> 01:29:37,331
The thing takes on a life of its own.

1563
01:29:37,623 --> 01:29:39,125
Hellboy's going to outlive us all.

1564
01:29:39,625 --> 01:29:42,753
It's interesting to see new
generations discover him,

1565
01:29:43,045 --> 01:29:45,089
not from the comics, but from other things.

1566
01:29:45,381 --> 01:29:47,734
I went to a friend's house, and
they were playing a video game

1567
01:29:47,758 --> 01:29:49,238
where Hellboy is one of the fighters.

1568
01:29:49,427 --> 01:29:50,427
The name is Hellboy.

1569
01:29:50,678 --> 01:29:53,532
A lot of people know who Hellboy is
who have never even read the comics.

1570
01:29:53,556 --> 01:29:56,392
Now, Mike is basically an industry.

1571
01:29:56,767 --> 01:29:58,436
He's a huge brand.

1572
01:29:58,728 --> 01:30:04,442
Dark Horse was making the Hellboy figures
and Mike asked for me to do a variant.

1573
01:30:04,734 --> 01:30:09,906
I was so honored to make a really
badass Hellboy figure, but make it my own.

1574
01:30:10,197 --> 01:30:11,198
I was a Hellboy fan.

1575
01:30:11,490 --> 01:30:12,617
I just loved the work.

1576
01:30:12,909 --> 01:30:15,870
Then I got a chance to do
a new version of the work

1577
01:30:16,162 --> 01:30:19,206
as a series of animated Hellboy videos.

1578
01:30:20,166 --> 01:30:22,251
That is Hellboy, David Harbour

1579
01:30:22,543 --> 01:30:24,503
Is it intimidating to
step into a role like that?

1580
01:30:24,670 --> 01:30:25,087
Rebooting a movie?

1581
01:30:25,379 --> 01:30:27,924
Yeah, there are two movies
that have gone before.

1582
01:30:28,215 --> 01:30:30,134
It's not weird anymore.

1583
01:30:30,426 --> 01:30:33,262
The weirdest thing is
the stuff you get used to.

1584
01:30:33,554 --> 01:30:36,474
That Patton Oswalt knows
who Hellboy is, is weird to me.

1585
01:30:36,766 --> 01:30:39,894
I had a dinner with David K. Harbour,
and Ron Perlman brought them together.

1586
01:30:40,186 --> 01:30:41,354
It was a delightful evening.

1587
01:30:41,646 --> 01:30:43,981
I thought he also did an
amazing job as Hellboy.

1588
01:30:44,273 --> 01:30:45,273
Holy, crap.

1589
01:30:45,524 --> 01:30:48,569
I just hope it all leads
back to the source.

1590
01:30:48,861 --> 01:30:51,864
They can do movies and
cartoons, and they can do toys,

1591
01:30:52,156 --> 01:30:53,532
and they can do all that stuff.

1592
01:30:53,866 --> 01:30:57,244
But his Hellboy comics
are his Hellboy comics,

1593
01:30:57,536 --> 01:30:58,996
and they can't be changed.

1594
01:30:59,288 --> 01:31:02,708
Hellboy is published in so many
countries, so many languages.

1595
01:31:03,000 --> 01:31:06,545
It's really incredible to see
how wide the reach really is.

1596
01:31:06,837 --> 01:31:09,317
Hello Mike, we would like to
greet you from the Czech Republic

1597
01:31:11,425 --> 01:31:12,585
We publish Hellboy in Spanish

1598
01:31:13,636 --> 01:31:17,640
For the 25th anniversary, we put together
a Hellboy Day to celebrate the character.

1599
01:31:17,932 --> 01:31:19,517
Mike: Happy Hellboy Day

1600
01:31:20,935 --> 01:31:22,895
I think Hellboy has
definitely lasted this long

1601
01:31:23,187 --> 01:31:25,523
because of his wonderful storytelling.

1602
01:31:25,815 --> 01:31:28,609
He's definitely one of the
greatest comic artists ever.

1603
01:31:28,901 --> 01:31:30,337
I think you've got to go back to the start.

1604
01:31:30,361 --> 01:31:31,441
I think it's revolutionary.

1605
01:31:31,654 --> 01:31:33,239
What I think is most interesting,

1606
01:31:33,531 --> 01:31:39,245
and the thing that makes Mike so important
is he's been doing this for 35 years.

1607
01:31:39,537 --> 01:31:40,705
He hasn't stopped.

1608
01:31:40,997 --> 01:31:42,039
I've always loved Hellboy.

1609
01:31:42,331 --> 01:31:43,791
He's like my favorite character.

1610
01:31:44,083 --> 01:31:47,378
Hellboy draws from our
authentic Slavic mythology

1611
01:31:49,338 --> 01:31:52,341
Jeez, I can't imagine not having Mike here.

1612
01:31:52,633 --> 01:31:54,802
I mean, it's part of our identity.

1613
01:31:55,094 --> 01:31:57,555
You can see all the nails, and bricks,

1614
01:31:57,847 --> 01:32:02,852
and parts of it coming
together to build this empire.

1615
01:32:03,144 --> 01:32:08,024
It has been an honor to translate
your work into Portuguese here in Brazil.

1616
01:32:10,735 --> 01:32:14,864
It took years for me to feel like, "Oh,
maybe this Hellboy thing isn't going away.

1617
01:32:15,156 --> 01:32:16,615
Maybe this thing will work."

1618
01:32:19,326 --> 01:32:22,830
Hellboy represents so many different
facets to so many different people,

1619
01:32:23,122 --> 01:32:26,917
and I love that the Hellboy universe
is big enough to accommodate that.

1620
01:32:27,209 --> 01:32:32,006
I don't think there's anybody who has
done the body of work that he's done,

1621
01:32:32,298 --> 01:32:35,843
and it's also worked with
as many collaborators

1622
01:32:36,343 --> 01:32:40,056
while maintaining that
level of consistency.

1623
01:32:43,768 --> 01:32:46,568
We truly believe that you created
one of the most amazing comics ever.

1624
01:32:46,937 --> 01:32:53,486
Those pages are a testament to the
genius because it is genius what Mike does.

1625
01:32:53,778 --> 01:32:55,279
He really touches something about

1626
01:32:55,571 --> 01:32:59,241
the deepest, most seminal
parts of the human condition.

1627
01:32:59,575 --> 01:33:03,079
The problem with the
greats who keep doing it

1628
01:33:03,370 --> 01:33:06,290
and remain consistent is
we take them for granted.

1629
01:33:07,374 --> 01:33:11,378
In Mike's case, he probably
won't get a fair assessment

1630
01:33:12,213 --> 01:33:14,090
of what he did and what he made

1631
01:33:14,673 --> 01:33:19,512
until long after he's finished
making it, because it is so huge.

1632
01:33:20,262 --> 01:33:23,140
I got away with something
there on a spectacular level.

1633
01:33:23,766 --> 01:33:26,727
Hellboy is franchised
and he's made all that,

1634
01:33:27,019 --> 01:33:30,147
but Mike just loves comics,
and he loves making this stuff.

1635
01:33:31,190 --> 01:33:36,195
[Chorus of voices]

1636
01:33:36,487 --> 01:33:37,947
I've said it a million times.

1637
01:33:38,239 --> 01:33:40,324
I just wanted to draw
monsters for a living.