United Airlines’ Hemisphere magazine has a longish interview with Mike Mignola focusing on 15 years of Hellboy:
When I started Hellboy, I guess I knew I wanted to draw on some of that stuff [folklore and mythology]. I didn’t realize that it would become the heart of the comic. I would’ve done a regular human occult detective, but I came up with Hellboy because I knew I’d get bored drawing a person. And the idea was going to be: Here’s a character, he’s fun to draw, he’s red. It’s kind of a joke that the good guy looks like the devil. And then I would never deal with the character, other than having this situation with the Nazis and an old church in England and — boom — he shows up, and then we just go into this series of adventures that have nothing to do with him. But by the end of the first storyline, that had changed. By the end of the storyline, I was suddenly saying this character is this, and this character is that, and I’m hinting about the origins of this character. That was not my original intention. So the character of Hellboy took over that book and then certain English and Irish folk tales that I’d always wanted to do as comics I ended up turning into Hellboy stories, and suddenly, Hellboy’s origins were tied to these old folk tales and things. So yeah, that stuff kind of crept in there and took over.
Mignola also reveals that, sadly, there likely won’t be a third Hellboy animated direct-to-DVD feature: “It sounds like it’s pretty dead, which is disappointing, but I guess they didn’t do the kind of numbers that they’d hoped to do with the first two. I’m not exactly sure what decisions were made or weren’t made, but that ship has sailed.”
(Via Sean Kleefeld)
