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Mike Mignola
Interviewed by Christopher Brayshaw,
excerpted from The Comics Journal #189

Breaking Away

CHRISTOPHER BRAYSHAW: What brought you to the point where you were dissatisfied enough to say, "Okay, I'm not going to be doing work for hire anymore. I'm going to break away and do a continuing set of stories on my own?"

MIKE MIGNOLA: I had toyed at various points in my career of doing my own thing. I saw the friends of mine who were doing it -- Steve Purcell was living a couple doors down from me when he started doing Sam and Max and Steve Moncuse was making a fortune doing Fish Police, and was encouraging us to do our own stuff. I thought about it then, and then something else came along that looked good. A couple of years later I thought about it again, and something else came along that looked good. And I realized that there would come a point where nothing else would be all that appealing to me. There were stories I'd been wanting to do which I knew would never sell well, but I wanted to do in some way... so I thought, when everything else has lost its appeal, when there's no part in me that says, "You know, you've never drawn Iron Man...?" When that little voice is dead, then I'll have no choice, and I'll do my own stuff. Hopefully, I'd have built some kind of career by then, so the weird stuff I wanted to do would have some kind of audience.

BRAYSHAW: When you talk about stuff that looked good, is that work that was financially appealing?

MIGNOLA: Financial was the least of considerations, as anyone who looks at my career can tell. There are very few things that were purely commercial decisions. I can only think of one book off the top of my head where I said, "I'll hate doing it, but I'll do it for the money." So yeah, it was something like, a writer would come up to me and I'd think, "I've never worked with this guy," so I thought that would be fun. Or in some cases it was a type of book that I had never done before, and that was appealing. I'd mention it to an editor, and he'd say, "That'd be great." It just got to the point in the last couple of years where I looked around... I was finishing up the Dracula book which was such a weird experience -- I thought, "Where do I go from here? Do I go to DC and say, "Let me do some kind of a Batman project." Or... where do I go?" Anything I came up with just seemed like I'd be repeating myself unless I did my own thing. Also I'd just done this Batman book for DC, and it was pretty much a straight horror story, and I thought, "That really felt good, that's what I want to do, that's what I've always wanted to do. But what if I came up with my own character rather than come up with stories like this and try to shoehorn guys like Batman into them, because I don't know anything about Batman, and I don't really care about Batman."

BRAYSHAW: What in particular do you think it was about the kind of stories you're telling now that made you hold off on presenting the work to a publisher for as long as you did?

MIGNOLA: The stuff I'm doing with Hellboy right now is actually more commercial than the original material I wanted to do. I wanted at one point to do just pretty much adaptations of old folk tales and fairy tales and --

BRAYSHAW: Charley Vess beat you to that?

MIGNOLA: Actually Charley hasn't done... With that Book of Ballads and Sagas, he's doing a whole different thing than I would do, although certainly it's around the same kind of material. But there's just so much of that stuff out there, and it hasn't been done that much in comics. So that's the kind of stuff I always wanted to draw. When I came up with Hellboy, I found a middle ground: Here's a recurring character, and if that catches on, I can shoehorn all this kind of subject matter in there. I mean, there was one issue of Hellboy that was pretty much a straight adaptation of Irish folklore. I also have such a short attention span, I wanted to make up a character that if I changed my mind -- like if suddenly I didn't want to do folktales, I didn't want to do H. P. Lovecraft-type horror stuff, and suddenly I wanted to do an outer space thing -- the character is vague enough that I could stick him into that kind of a story also.

BRAYSHAW: One limitation you might find working with a continuing character is that the character gains more popular appeal or more commercial appeal than the artistic value of the material. Do you feel Hellboy has in any way compromised the source material that you wanted to work with? Take something like The Corpse, which starts out like an Irish fairy tale: by including Hellboy in it, does that bring it closer to mainstream comics than you would like?

MIGNOLA: That's a good observation. I think there may be stories I would run into where I'd say, "I can't pollute it with Hellboy." Certainly that's what I'd like to do: I'd love to do straight adaptations of certain things. But if that arises, I'll leave Hellboy out of it. But The Corpse works fine. The nice thing about having Hellboy in there is, I have such a tendency -- because right now I'm listening to Shakespeare -- and I have such a tendency to go off and take this stuff way too seriously, and write these big speeches and stuff. And with Hellboy, I've got a character whose job is to say, "Shut up!" The biggest problem with Hellboy is, a story can end up being more about Hellboy. Now, The Corpse was just popping Hellboy into the story, it had nothing to do with him. It could have been a different guy in that story. But there are other things that are done -- the mini-series I'm doing right now, for example -- it started out just being an adventure, and at some point it became about that character. When I originally started Hellboy I wanted to do a quick little story, eight pages or something, and that's all we'd ever see of this guy's past. We'd never explain why he's got this weird hand, and where he comes from, and little by little that stuff became so interesting to me, that now, certainly in the bigger mini-series kind of things, everything kind of relates to him. So I'm already starting to toy with the idea of a couple other characters I want to do, and like you said, some stories could pretty much stand up on their own, and wouldn't necessarily be Hellboy stuff. But Hellboy has been relatively commercially successful for me. So I don't want to drop him too soon... He's a great way to do most of the stories I want to do right now.

BRAYSHAW: Working with a genre character and then incorporating other story materials that come from very different sources, did you discover anything new about, say, the Irish folklore material? Is there anything about it that changes or became more interesting to you when you place a character who is very far removed from that kind of storytelling form into a story like that?

MIGNOLA: Not really. It didn't really alter the way I was handling the material. Because we didn't bring in a clash of cultures. We didn't say, "Well, he's from hell, so how would he relate to the King of Fairy Land?" Maybe there's a story there, maybe there's not. In the things I've done so far, that doesn't come up. I think of Hellboy as not having a lot of baggage. So I tend to just drop him into the material and let the material work around him. I don't want to mention every 30 seconds, "I'm from hell!" or "I have this weird hand!" or, "Oh no, if only this character could solve the puzzle of where I come from!" I definitely never wanted to do that. So if it's a story where I want to do an Irish folktale, that's what it will be, and Hellboy will keep his mouth shut. The nice thing about Hellboy is, he knows a little bit about stuff, so I can have him occasionally say, "Why, this is just like..." and he'll mention some little Irish thing or something, but he's not so knowledgeable about things that he's going to bore the reader to death with a bunch of extraneous stuff.

BRAYSHAW: When you were initially thinking of working with the adaptations of folktale material, did you show any of that work to any of the publishers you had done work for?

MIGNOLA: I don't think I did, mostly because when I looked at what other publishers were doing I didn't see a place to put it. I knew the material couldn't support its own book: Mike Mignola's Adaptations of World Folktales! I couldn't see that as a title coming out of a publisher. Going way back, when Epic Illustrated was going, I kind of thought that would always be there, and I thought, When I grow up and figure out what the hell I'm doing, this will be a wonderful place to drop my stories. It's still one of the things I miss about there not being a lot of anthologies out there, because I'd love to be able to have a place to drop these stories. Again, when I get more of the Hellboy stuff out of my system, I'd love to do that, drop little unrelated stories, or stories about other characters, things that would be small, and drop them into other anthologies if they'll have them.

Hellboy In Development

BRAYSHAW: Tell me about the evolution that led from the folktale material to the creation of Hellboy.

MIGNOLA: Its pretty simple. I always had this material in my mind. I've always had folklore and mythology, and there's just such a wonderful cast of characters, and I think of it like toy soldiers, you know? I need a guy to go and fight all those toy soldiers; the best set of toy soldiers a kid could ever have: you've got Hercules, you've got Thor, you've got Odin, you've got all those guys. I've got to make one original toy soldier, so he can go out and fight all those other ones. And that's about as simple as my thought process was. Again, I was very nervous making up Hellboy because I thought, "I know I have such a short attention span, I don't want to come up with something I'm going to be real bored with." So again, I'm making him as vague as humanly possible, and I designed the character to be something that I thought would at least be fun to draw. I get tired drawing a regular guy, I get tired of whatever haircut or nose or whatever I gave this guy, so... Also, I'm not the best guy at keeping a particular human character looking the same. So I thought, if I make this guy distinct enough, even if I do a really strange or crappy drawing of that character, you'll pretty much know it's him. So I made him a monster. Also thinking that he's a guy who investigates monsters, who fights monsters, even if he's in a room talking, at least I'll get one monster to draw: it'll be him.

BRAYSHAW: Was the mini-series that Byrne scripted the first thing that you had done? Or do you have other trunk work?

MIGNOLA: I did a few pin-up kind of shots, some of them were printed in the trade paperbacks, some weren't. The first things I actually drew story-wise were two little four-page things. One ran in the San Diego Comic, and one ran in an insert in the Buyer's Guide. They're both in the trade paperback.

BRAYSHAW: Having done those four-page pieces, did you shop those around to publishers on your own?

MIGNOLA: I did absolutely no shopping at all. I'm trying to remember whether I'd ever even drawn Hellboy once before there was a publisher... I finished Dracula, I was living in San Francisco at the time. Art Adams and I got together, we started talking, he wanted to do something with a giant gorilla, I wanted to do some kind of monster paranormal investigator, and I don't think I'd done even one real drawing of the character. I had this title that I kind of liked, a name that I had made up a year or so earlier, and I thought, "Here's something that's just so stupid that I won't be too embarrassed saying it. If I do Demon Claw, I'd be pretty embarrassed. [laughter] Hellboy is goofy enough, that's fine." What happened is, somehow Art Adams was talking to Walt Simonson, and Walt was talking to Frank Miller, all these people were talking, and it seemed like a lot of people were going to be doing creator-owned material, and somebody came up with the idea of doing an imprint thing. We met at San Diego, talked about it. I had already asked John Byrne if he would script this thing.

BRAYSHAW: Why did you pick him?

MIGNOLA: Because I'd had a very good experience working with John in the past. We'd worked on a couple of things together, he was the only person who ever gave me a plot over the phone. It was very, very comfortable. I wanted somebody who'd I'd have that kind of comfort with, because I wanted somebody who would also accept that it was my character, you know? It's hard to pin down. I just had a good feeling about working with John. I thought it would be comfortable: he does good old-fashioned Marvel monster kind of comics and he would understand the kind of material I wanted to do. So I had already spoken to him about doing this, and he had said yes.

BRAYSHAW: What material did you show him?

MIGNOLA: I never showed him anything. I just explained to him what I wanted to do. And even early on with John I was thinking, "I'll tell John Byrne that I want to draw a Frankenstein monster. Give me a four-issue mini-series with a Frankenstein monster." I really didn't know how much of the plotting I would end of doing. But actually, I ended up doing most of it.

Anyway, we got this group of guys together, talked about doing an imprint, that didn't really happen, but it happened enough. We talked enough that, I believe it was within a couple of days of that, Frank or somebody went up to Mike Richardson and said, "If all these guys got together and they all had this stuff to do, would you guys want it?" And Dark Horse said yes. I'll always be grateful to Dark Horse for saying yes to creator-owned material from me, which they'd never seen. I think I told them the title, but they just said, "Fine." So, that was pretty good. Also, at that time, and maybe even now, I'm not Frank Miller, I'm not John Byrne, I'm not a big, bankable name.

BRAYSHAW: Here comes a snotty question: With John's name on the project, did it ever strike you that enough people might not necessarily pick up Mike Mignola's Hellboy, but they might pick up John Byrne and Mike Mignola's Hellboy? Was there a sense that John might provide the project with enough name recognition that would get it finished?

MIGNOLA: I don't think that was a concern pitching the project to Dark Horse, but when it came to getting people to buy the comic, I was hoping that would be the case. Anything that would get people to buy that book, that's what I wanted. If people bought it for John Byrne and they liked it because of John Byrne, that's great -- at least it got them in there and got them interested in the material. Same with having Art Adams do the backup feature. While that wasn't purely a commercial decision, I was sitting back looking at this package saying, John Byrne, Art Adams, and... who? I'm along for the ride on this thing! But again, once people saw the material, I really did get I think the bulk of the recognition. Of course it also made me nervous when it came time for me to do it all on my own. Because then I'm thinking, "Well, did they only like it because John wrote it?" So that was the spookiest thing, when it came time to do it all myself. Because I did have so many crutches the first time.

BRAYSHAW: John implied in one of the notes that ran along with the first mini-series that he was technically the scriptor but in fact felt he'd done not very much at all. Is that just him being complimentary, or did you in fact do the bulk of the work on the mini-series yourself?

MIGNOLA: I hate to say he's right. Because, one thing that has to be said is, I could never have done this book without John. I didn't have enough confidence... I kind of needed to see someone else do it to see what I wanted to imitate, and what I wanted to do differently. But the way John and I ended up working, again originally I thought I would give him half a plot and he would finish the plot, he would add a bunch more stuff. Well, as I recall, I would call him and say, "I'm going to do this and this." And I'd call him a couple of days later and say, "Oh, and I'm going to do this, this, and this." And by the time I was actually drawing pages, I never sent him a plot. I don't know that I'd ever explained the whole plot -- I know I told him vaguely what I was going to do -- but I never sent him a plot. So I did finished artwork, pencils, and then I had it sort of scripted so he'd have some idea of what the hell people were saying. So I found, yeah, certainly in some places I was doing almost word for word dialogue. John did create some of the names for the characters. But I think the script is mostly mine. Most of the copy, Hellboy's thoughts, that's all John. I wanted that, but that's real writing to me. That's not what I do. So I left it for John to do all that stuff. Ultimately, I would decide that I didn't want that. Seeing it done, I said, "I don't want to get inside this character's head. I just want guys talking to each other." So when I began doing it all myself, I dropped all that kind of stuff.

BRAYSHAW: Did you think it was necessary to get a look at the finished product to know what you wanted to edit further or to tighten further or to change once the series came together?

MIGNOLA: Yeah. Probably I'd make a good art director. I don't know what I want, you turn it in, and I'll tell you if it's right or not. Yeah, I thought at various times that I've known what I wanted, and then once I see it I go, "Well, that's not quite what I wanted." John wasn't far off, but seeing it done made me think, "Okay, I would have done this a little different, and I would have had her say..." In a lot of cases it was just one word... "That would have had more punch if it had been this." And actually I hate to say it, but towards the end of the mini-series, I was doing a lot of editing of John's script. Thank God John put up with this.

BRAYSHAW: How did he react to your changes?

MIGNOLA: I don't know whether he ever made a comment. Which again, that's why it was great working with John on this. Because John kind of checked his ego at the door on this one. He really did treat it as if he was just scripting Mike Mignola's comic. He didn't go in there -- I know other writers would have tried to steamroll and put in their own ideas and their own personality. And John pretty much stayed out of that stuff. So, I think towards the end, John was lettering the book with the computer, so it was all in these little adhesive things, and he's just send me sheets of these adhesive word balloons. I would go through it and say, "Okay, here are four paragraphs, four captions. That's too much. If I take the first caption and the third caption, while it reads a bit more awkwardly, that's the kind of awkwardness I think I kind of want. It's a little bit too slick if I include all this stuff." So I would edit out chunks of copy.

BRAYSHAW: Were there any other kinds of "slickness" that you changed?

MIGNOLA: I think that's the overall effect John created. John has written a million comics. Originally I thought, "That's what I want. I want somebody who has written a million comics so this thing won't be too weird. It will be a professional comic." And once I saw it written as a professional comic, I said, "You know... maybe that's not what I want. Maybe I want a clunkier, more awkward-sounding comic... .And by God, I bet I can deliver that!" [laughter] I was reading things like Madman at the time, and I thought, this doesn't really sound like the kind of slick comics I was used to.

BRAYSHAW: Had that kind of slickness been something that had prompted you to start moving your own stuff up in that list of priorities you talked about before? That is, were there formal considerations in the work-for-hire material that you were starting to chafe against?

MIGNOLA: I don't recall that being a real conscious thing. Because with the work-for-hire stuff, my concern was always, "What kind of imagery do I get to do?" It generally wasn't "What will the script be like?" It was, "What will these jobs give me a chance to draw?" But yeah, suddenly plotting this stuff, I started really for the first time seeing that I was starting to have some idea of what I want as far as stories. And having them too polished, that's just something I didn't want. I wanted something clunky.

BRAYSHAW: One change I'm thinking of in particular is the difference between Marvel-style pacing and your own style of pacing. In "Wake the Devil," or even in some of the black and white stuff that ran in Dark Horse Presents, the pacing seems much slower. There are a lot of silent panels thrown in to interrupt bits of dialogue or to provide an extra beat to a scene, and I'm not sure whether you could have got away with that in the work-for-hire material. Are those things Marvel would have struck out?

MIGNOLA: No, I never had an experience like that. With most of the work-for-hire stuff I did, again, I didn't care much about the story; I wasn't seeing that story in my head so I wasn't adding those bits. But of course with the Hellboy stuff, working completely from just a blank piece of paper -- no script, no nothing -- I allowed myself to wander a lot more and treat it in some places almost like a truly visual thing -- yes, spending a page just wandering around the room and do little pictures of still lifes. I had done a little bit of that on the Batman job I did in Legend of the Dark Knight. But generally you just didn't have room. You had a plot that called for X-number of things on a particular page, and your job was to get all that on the page. Whereas with Hellboy: "Does this have to be a page, or can this be three pages?" It was something I thought about a lot, and I did wrestle with, "How much story am I supposed to cram into one particular issue of this comic?" Or, "Does it need to have a particular amount of story? Or is it just that if it's interesting visually, will that be enough?" Around that time, I was also really looking at Jim Woodring's Frank, and things like that, where you just had a whole story that was just a bizarre visual thing, and I thought, "Geez, I never really thought about that kind of stuff and about working that kind of way. But I sure would like to... " So I was starting to think a little bit that way.

BRAYSHAW: On one hand you have story being paramount, and on the other hand, you have to weigh how the book looks, and how the images flow, and the way the pages are designed. What side of the equation do you think you finally came down on?

MIGNOLA: I think I'll fall more on the visual and the pacing. When I start settling into the Hellboy stuff, I started thinking... I knew going into it that I wasn't going to be the greatest writer, but visually and storytelling-wise, there were things I could do that other people weren't doing. So it was kind of trying to find one's own niche in this stuff and saying, "Then I'll be a mood guy." Berni Wrightson has done some wonderful horror stories, but most of them I don't recall being slow and meandering. I wanted to give myself the room to do this odd stuff, where we really do build a mood. I also thought a lot of about whether that will work in comics. Because I've known people who say, "Horror can't work in comics, for various reasons."

BRAYSHAW: Do you accept the argument that there are particular genres that you can't do in comics, or particular kinds of stories that you can't do?

MIGNOLA: No. I think when people make a statement like that, they're comparing it directly to film. And okay, there are effects you can get in a film that you can't get in a comic, but it's a different thing. It can be treated differently. The way I would do mood in a comic is certainly not the way a filmmaker would do a mood, but again I had the luxury of cobbling together a string of images - close to what MTV video directors do -- but I also had the luxury at the end of having all that stuff composed on one page, so you get this abstract sequence or pattern that works as a whole page. And as you read across it, it does create some kind of mood.

But anyway, I kind of settled into this place where I would concentrate my efforts because I'd come to the realization years ago that I certainly wouldn't be the best draughtsman in the business, and not the slickest inker, and I'm never going to be competing against Neil Gaiman as a great writer, but if I take what I can do, and really push into this direction, and not a lot of other people are working with this kind of mood, pacing stuff, that will be what I do.