Mike Mignola is one of the hardest-working
comic-book creators around. And he owes it all to one character. By
Bryan Reesman
Mike Mignola is one of the most distinct and recognizable
comic-book artists/writers today. Starting his career in 1983, the
Eisner Award-winning creator of Hellboy cut his teeth illustrating
famous series like
Wolverine for Marvel
Comics, and
Batman and
The
Phantom Stranger for DC Comics. By 1994, he had plunged into
the world of his original creation, which he writes and draws in a
gothic, expressionistic style.
Mignola's amiable but glib monster creation - a demonic creature
that has a giant fist and which was summoned for nefarious purposes
by Rasputin for the Nazis but now serves the U.S. government,
fighting for the greater good - is where his fame and fortune
lies.
Hellboy has been turned into a movie
directed by Guillermo del Toro (
Pan's
Labyrinth) and into an animated series (
Sword of Storms and
Blood and
Iron are in stores now, and
The Phantom
Claw is in development), and its spin-offs include the
BPRD,
Weird Tales,
and
Hellboy Junior comics series, as well
as the novel
The God Machine, which Mignola
created with Thomas E. Sniegoski. You also may have seen the
animated adaptation of Mignola's quirky and hilarious
The Amazing Screw-On Head on the Sci
Fi Channel recently (think cyberpunk in 1862, with vampires,
zombies, and Abraham Lincoln), for which he was a
consultant.
With 10 years of Hellboy stories already plotted out and with new
live-action and animated movies coming, we wager that Mignola never
sleeps.
What's in store for the second live-action movie,
Hellboy 2: The Golden Army? It's a
much better story. It has the benefit of not having to do with the
origins, because all that stuff got taken care of in the first
picture. Guillermo and I sat down and came up with the story
together, so he was not kind of saddled with adapting my material,
and I think it's very close to the spirit of
Pan's
Labyrinth, dealing with that kind of subject matter.
Hellboy 2 continues the story of Hellboy
and Liz Sherman, but it's much more folklore oriented than the
first film. Also, the scale is twice as big as the first film!
Some liberties were taken in adapting the graphic
novel's dramatic arc for the first movie, but I can understand why
those changes were made. Guillermo, for whatever reason,
really glommed on to Hellboy and really took that character very
personally. I think it turned into a vehicle for a lot of his
themes, so the whole father/son relationship, which I did very
little with in the comic, and the love interest were clearly Toro
themes that he attached to my character, and they fit really well.
It just made it a slightly different character.
Many of us have grown up with superheroes, and now
those heroes are receiving their own live-action adaptations. The
special effects have gotten slick enough to be able to present a
lot of these characters on-screen, but do you think they are living
up to the original stories? Sometimes they do, and sometimes
they don't. We're dealing right now with a generation of
filmmakers, many of whom grew up reading comics, who view comics as
a viable thing for serious films. Whereas it wasn't that many years
ago when if somebody was doing a comic-book film, there was always
a tongue-in-cheek camp quality to it. Now you have guys who view it
as serious literature.
It used to be that every article about comics led with, "Wham! Pow!
Comics aren't just for kids anymore." They would talk about how
much an old comic sold for. Again, we have directors who are of the
generation that grew up reading comics and grew up reading
The Dark Knight and
Watchmen, so they grew up in an entirely different
atmosphere of comics. We also now have journalists who are of that
same age and who want to write a serious article about Frank Miller
or
Alan Moore. This other generation is changing the perception of
comics.
Is there a particular story you would like to
adapt for comics? There are a lot of old fairy tales and
folktales that I include and will continue to include as Hellboy
stories. I would like to someday take one or two old horror stories
and turn them into my own interpretation.
What did you think of the first animated Hellboy
film, directed by Tad Stones? I thought it was great. Again,
you wish you had a lot more money and a lot more time, but I
thought that Tad did a really good job.
What's in store for the third animated
installment, Hellboy: The Phantom
Claw? Part of
The
Phantom Claw is a retelling of Hellboy's origin. It will be
slightly different than the movie and the comic-book version and
will involve Lobster Johnson.
Do you think BPRD [Bureau
for Paranormal Research and Defense] will be adapted into animated
form? I think that if we continue to do animated Hellboy
films, we will see more of the BPRD there, but I don't think
there's an interest in the stand-alone.
How hard is it going to be to work on movies and
the comic book simultaneously? Unfortunately, I'm primarily
writing now, and not drawing. I'm writing or cowriting five
different comics at the moment. I've cowritten a Hellboy novel, and
I'm working on the animated films and on the live-action films, so
I'm spread pretty thin. But I enjoy the writing. I've got a lot of
stories that I want to do, but if I had to draw them myself, they
would never get done, so writing has liberated me a lot.
There will be a new Hellboy series, which is an extremely long,
involved Hellboy story. I think, well, it's not going to be 100
percent me, but either we get it done a little bit differently by a
different artist, or we don't get it at all. And I'd rather have it
out there in some form than not see it ever. I plotted a graphic
novel that was going to be 300 or 400 pages, and I realized that
I'd never get it done. Eventually, I went to a writer friend of
mine, and we did it as a novel. It's a radically different form
than it was intended to be, but it exists.
Perhaps you need to clone yourself. I've
got these two great artists I would like to clone five or six
times. There's Guy Davis, who's been doing
BPRD and can draw anything, and Duncan Fegredo, who is
drawing Hellboy. I'm working with some really great artists right
now, but Duncan is doing such a fantastic job on
Hellboy: Darkness Calls.
Once the fans get used to the idea that I'm not drawing it and
relax and look at what Duncan's doing, within a few years, they
won't want me back. My stuff is so simplistic, and Duncan's work is
so rich and his character acting is so fantastic. I will always be
the creator of Hellboy, but Duncan has really picked it up and run
with it in a beautiful direction.
I've got a scene in the new Hellboy miniseries where there's an
entire army of skeletons fighting Hellboy. When I made up the
story, that scene was in there. But had I drawn it, I either would
have changed it or it would have been a bunch of little black lumps
with spears sticking out. But Duncan drew 45 running skeletons.
He's delivered everything the audience could possibly want, so I
couldn't be happier.
Grande Expectations: A Year in the Life of Starbucks'
Stock
By Karen Blumenthal
(Crown Business, $25)
As a veteran
Wall Street Journal reporter,
Karen Blumenthal probably understands the stock market better than
most people do. So she decided to do what most first-rate
journalists do: research a topic from the bottom up and then
publish what they've learned. To make the result palatable,
Blumenthal explains the macroeconomics of the market by focusing on
the microeconomic - the ups and downs of one company's stock. And,
in this case, that company is
Starbucks.
Blumenthal organizes
Grande Expectations -
not surprisingly, and certainly effectively - by month. The
February chapter, for example, focuses on Starbucks' annual meeting
for investors. May is devoted to an explanation of why Starbucks
executives purchased some of the company's own stock on the open
market (known as buybacks). November examines the thinking of a
stock-market analyst who helps her clients decide whether to sell
or to purchase Starbucks shares. But the book is really two sagas
in one: There's a clearly explained, well-written account of
stock-market vagaries, plus there's an examination of Starbucks'
founding and growth. Blumenthal skillfully weaves together the two
narrative lines so that they complement rather than clash with each
other.
The account is mostly favorable to Starbucks; Blumenthal's
reporting determined that the company is pretty much the good
corporate citizen its image portrays it as. But the book does not
constitute an unedited love letter. The author occasionally
demonstrates skepticism about the company. After recounting the
introduction of bottled water selling for the high price of $1.80
at Starbucks outlets, Blumenthal quotes a company executive using
financial jargon to justify that price. Then, parenthetically,
Blumenthal says, "My translation: Everything at Starbucks costs
more."
Grande Expectations is also no valentine
for the stock market. Blumenthal removes some of the mystery, but
she wants her readers to know that rationality won't always reign:
"One day seemingly good news can send a stock plunging; the next
day bad news can send it climbing again." - Steve Weinberg