To enter, visit one of our three Oregon locations the week of February 1! For every purchase you make, you’ll receive a raffle ticket just waiting for your name and email address! Deposit it in the marked container, and make sure to check your email to see if you’ve won. You can also enter online by signing up for our Newsletter. All newsletter subscribers will automatically be entered every week! Pretty sweet, huh?

Questions? Comments? What else would you like to see in our weekly contest? Post suggestions below!

To enter, visit one of our three Oregon locations the week of February 1! For every purchase you make, you’ll receive a raffle ticket just waiting for your name and email address! Deposit it in the marked container, and make sure to check your email to see if you’ve won. You can also enter online by signing up for our Newsletter. All newsletter subscribers will automatically be entered every week! Pretty sweet, huh?

Questions? Comments? What else would you like to see in our weekly contest? Post suggestions below!

To enter, visit one of our three Oregon locations the week of February 1! For every purchase you make, you’ll receive a raffle ticket just waiting for your name and email address! Deposit it in the marked container, and make sure to check your email to see if you’ve won. You can also enter online by signing up for our Newsletter. All newsletter subscribers will automatically be entered every week! Pretty sweet, huh?

Questions? Comments? What else would you like to see in our weekly contest? Post suggestions below!

High Excitement:
1. Hellboy (Dark Horse): I just finished “Wild Hunt” and I am totally stoked for the a-brewing war. I love how imaginative it has become, in its mix of traditional fantasy and steampunk, with its monsters-du-jour. And it’s still funny! Deadpanning reaches high levels when you are constantly asked to become the lord of all demons, and there’s going to be a huge war, and you’re just not feeling it.
2. Battling Boy (First Second): Paul Pope’s crazy action adventure graphic novel about uh, crazy action stuff, has been pushed back and pushed back—but I have faith that it will be on my shelf sometimes this year. It’s going to be a movie soon, for god’s sake! Brad Pitt is in it!
3. Pluto Vol. 7 and Vol. 8 (Viz): Urasawa’s surreal manga was so lovely that I couldn’t wait for the US release and finished the series online—but I really can’t wait to enjoy the series’ finale again in an analog format. Urasawa’s take on classic Astro Boy is elegant, grave, and very… full… To explain its merits in a blurb is impossible, but it definitely deserves to be read, and reread, seriously, attentively, without distraction.
4. Four Eyes (Image): I was introduced to Joe Kelly only recently, and I was absolutely surprised by my delight. He writes comics about little people. Not fairies, mind you. Children. His latest has (child) protagonist Enrico entering the world of dragon fighting during the Great Depression. The book has strong characters, thoughtful (and poignant) writing, cinematic art, and unfortunately, a real spotty publishing history. Come on, Issue 4!
5. Wednesday Comics (DC): My favorite comic publishing gimmick, soon to be in a giant gimmick book! What fun!
Steadfast Soldiers of my Pull List: Fables. Proof. Conan. The Goon.

Reserved Excitement:
1. Scott Pilgrim Vol 6 (Oni): A problem with comics when the characters never quite age as quicker as the reader—I really like Scott Pilgrim, which is good, but not great, considering I used to really love Scott Pilgrim. My anticipation for the final volume is middling for Scott, and great for Mal’s new projects. (Did you know Jon sent Mal a virus? Fo’ serious!)
2. House of Mystery (Vertigo) —I’m trying to spoil as little as possible, but man, I am really curious how things are going to work with [oh-you-know] being the new proprietor of the house. I mean, he’s crazy. It could be awful. It could be really awful. But, maybe not?
3. Day Tripper (Vertigo): Despite my love for brothers Ba and Moon, I am a bit nervous about Day Tripper being boring. But crazy-hip art can probably make even middle-age angst something fanciful and adventurous.
4. King City (Image): I don’t know anything about it, but it looks kind of awesome. The evidence? They have blue hair.
Catch-Up: Can you believe I been reading the Sinestro Corps Wars for like… the third year in a row now? I’d read a couple issues and not return to it until I have no memory of what I last read. It’s been defeating. When will I ever get to Blackest Night?

Lacking Excitement:
I been a sucker for the events, 2010 aren’t looking so wow in terms of mainstream superheroics. I guessed I missed Bruce, but the grave needs to be cold before a comeback (Return of Bruce Wayne). The world’s biggest boy scout going to another war (War of the Supermen) is underwhelming in spite of its overwhelming firepower. And Marvel’s Siege? Seems like little more than a drawn out I-told-you-so from the ill-premised Dark Reign.

All in all, okay-psyched. What is everyone looking forward to in the panels?

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Idle Eyes time-travels to the recent past and blogs on stuff that everyone else’s already seen, read, or heard. Hey, if Sirui missed it the first time around, who’s to say you didn’t?

Oh yeah! We packed a lot of awesome stuff into just over two minutes in this week’s Wednesday New Releases video blog! Thrill as you learn about Locke & Key: Crown of Shadows #1, Green Lantern Agent Orange HC, Booster Gold #26 w/Orange Lantern Ring, Rebels #10 w/Indigo Lantern Ring, Hellboy: The Wild Hunt #8, The Stand American Nightmares Premium HC, and Dark X-Men #1. Enjoy!

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We got to sit down with Mignola and ask him about the birth of Hellboy, the future of the B.P.R.D., and how he plans to continue to make the Hellboy universe accessible to future readers:

TFAW.com: When you started out with Hellboy 15 years ago, what did you think would happen with Hellboy, both the title and the character?

Mike Mignola: I had no great expectations. I thought, hopefully it would do well enough that I could keep doing it. But honestly, I thought I would do it once, and then limp back to doing regular Marvel or DC Comics stuff. It was clearly just something to try. I certainly couldn’t have anticipated anything that did happen.

TFAW.com: How do you think your vision for the comic and for Hellboy himself have evolved over time?

MM: Once it became clear that I was going to be able to keep doing it, and you see it a lot with the second miniseries, I threw a lot more ideas in there. The first one, even though it kind of hinted at a lot of stuff to come, once I did the second miniseries, I was clearly planning on being around for awhile, so I was able to say, “Okay, let me start creating and fleshing out this world.”

And once I charted out all those pieces, it did start to take on a life of its own, pretty much out of my control. The ideas started coming so fast. I mean, the more pieces you put out there, the more characters you put out there, the more they take on a life of their own, scurrying in different directions. There was never any shortage of material once the ball started rolling.

TFAW.com: Now it looks like Hellboy has two possible paths in front of him: either becoming the Beast of the Apocalypse or the King of England. Do you think these are inevitable? Will he have to choose between them eventually?

MM: Clearly, I know the answer to that! The beauty of the Hellboy situation in the last couple of years has been putting the guy in that position, and writing him into a corner in a way. To say, there is no choice–you’re going to be this, or you’re going to be that–yet trying to figure out a way to avoid those things. I mean, I can’t imagine Hellboy as the King of England. How the hell? What would that comic look like? But that’s been in the works for a long time.

I’ve had that vision for Hellboy for a long time, that he would end up in that spot. Same with the whole Beast of the Apocalypse thing, which came about as a surprise. That was not a plan for Hellboy, it just sort of came up one day. I was writing dialogue, and I had nothing for someone to say, so I had him say, “You’re that,” and I went, “Oh crap, really?”

I’ve created all these problems for Hellboy, and the trick has been to try to find a way out of this trap that he’s in. That is largely why B.P.R.D. became its own comic. The Hellboy character was never intended to be the center of the comic. Hellboy’s life was never meant to be the center of the comic, but once you create problems like that, it does kind of crowd out Abe Sapien and what he’s going through. What still makes Hellboy exciting is the fact that he’s in this gigantic no-win situation.

TFAW.com: So you separated Hellboy from the B.P.R.D. so you could more fully explore those other characters?

MM: Yeah. There was just no getting back to Abe Sapien and everybody else. The Hellboy situation became so big and so interesting to me, that the idea of doing anything like a team book or sending Hellboy on missions for the B.P.R.D.–which is all stuff I really like–I just didn’t have the space to do it. Hellboy’s situation was just demanding so much attention that there was no room left for me to do the other stuff.

TFAW.com: Do you think it was a crucial piece character of development for Hellboy, to separate him from his friends?

MM: Yeah. I had played this gag for awhile of Hellboy saying, “I don’t want to think about it, it’s better not to know, I’m going to bury my head in the sand and not deal with who I really am,” which was charming for awhile. That’s really what I intended for this character, that he never would look into his past, and he never would find out what he was, but after you’ve done that gag half a dozen times, you realize it’s turning into too big a character flaw and it’s getting cliché.

So I fully intended not to deal with that stuff, but every time I would make the decision not to deal with it, it seemed like in the next story, I would come up with some other mention about Hellboy’s fate or destiny. So on one hand, I’m saying “No, I’m not going to deal with it,” but on the other hand, it was, “Yeah, but what about this?” So eventually it was just, “Okay, I give up. I will deal with that stuff, not really head on, but I will cut him loose from the B.P.R.D. stuff.”

Also, part of it was when I did the Conqueror Worm miniseries, I felt I had done that “Send Hellboy on a mission thing” as well as I knew how to do it, and I preferred–as an artist–doing stories where Hellboy would just kind of wander off in the world. And I thought it was interesting to cut this character loose and see what happens to him.

What I discovered, and what I think this character has discovered, is that the B.P.R.D. life he was tied to, what passed for a normal life for this guy, once you cut him loose from that, he was kind of swept up in this whole other world, and again, as an artist, what interested me was the supernatural stuff–that blurry line between reality and the kind of fantasy world. So I wanted to have Hellboy kind of slide out of the real world, mostly because as an artist, that’s what I was more interested in drawing. So it’s worked out really nicely in the storyline, to see Hellboy just kind of lose his grip on what passes for the “real world” in the Hellboy world.

TFAW.com: Is Hellboy going to get any specific answers about his path by the end of The Wild Hunt? Will the readers see him make a decision?

MM: Well, there’s never really any definitive answers. There definitely is, more than there ever had been, coming out of The Wild Hunt and going into the next two books, a very specific direction, and his character has always avoided any kind of direction in his life. He’s just kind of rambled over the earth wherever, and now he has a very specific problem to deal with. But there’s never really a clear answer. He is always going to be a character who’s thrown from one situation to the other, and there is no definitive answer to any of the big questions. At least not yet.

TFAW.com: Are there any plans to bring him back into the fold with the B.P.R.D.?

MM: Uhhhhhhmmmmmm, that would be telling. I think there’s some really interesting stuff coming up. This year’s going to be really interesting for both Hellboy and B.P.R.D., and you’ll see some interesting hints about what’s going to happen in the future. Never say never.

TFAW.com: At the end of B.P.R.D.: The Black Goddess, Memnan Saa has been destroyed by Liz, and she seems to be back in her own brain. Where does she go from there?

MM: It’s nice to see Liz get back on her feet and be a normal team member again, but what tends to happen with all these characters is, once you start screwing with them, once you start giving them that much attention, they evolve, and once that ball starts rolling, they do tend to careen off in interesting directions. So interesting things will be happening with Liz.

I think as with real people, it’s really difficult to say, “Oh, now after you’ve gone through all this stuff, you can just go back to being this normal person.” And that’s something I didn’t really think about when I started this stuff. Even when I started with Hellboy, he was never meant to have a real arc to him as a character. He was just meant to be that guy who came in and solved problems. But all these characters, once we started doing stuff with them, they ended up going places.

The way [co-writer] John Arcudi and I work, and John does the bulk of the writing on B.P.R.D., is I kind of throw these problems at John, and then John handles the character stuff. I say, “Okay this stuff happens to this person,” and then John is going to show what that does to the person. It’s like I’m sitting at the top of the mountain throwing lightning bolts and blowing up things, and John is down on the ground cleaning up my mess. I’ll say, “Do this to this and do that to that,” and John says, “You do know what that does to these people, right? That’s going to screw up this guy and it’s going to affect his relationship with that person.” So that’s kind of an interesting way to work.

TFAW.com: Is Lobster Johnson returning to be a regular part of the B.P.R.D., or is this another temporary possession of Johann?

MM: It’d be kind of hard to pull off–I don’t know, maybe Marvel Comics could do it. But since he has basically shanghaied another guy’s ectoplasm to create a body for himself, I don’t see that working. I can’t imagine the B.P.R.D. saying, “Oh, great!” either. It’s one more problem for the B.P.R.D. to deal with. Lobster Johnson is around for awhile, but I wouldn’t look for him in the book five years from now.

TFAW.com: What can you tell us about the next arc for the present-day B.P.R.D.?

MM: The next miniseries is The King of Fear, which is really interesting. A lot of stuff that we’ve been building to–we’ve had this whole giant war with the frogs and all this other stuff–we kind of said okay, let’s clean up this mess. King of Fear is the biggest miniseries in that it’s the game changer. It’s the one in which we reset what our guys are dealing with and how the world works. So we’re making gigantic, sweeping changes to the Hellboy/B.P.R.D. world in that one. Yeah, that one I’m pretty excited about.

One thing I’ve been saying for a long time about both Hellboy and B.P.R.D. is that when we break stuff, we can’t always fix it. When we kill characters, we can’t bring them back. So it’s not like Marvel or DC Comics, where if we blow up New York City, we’ve gotta spend the next issue getting things back to normal. When we break stuff in the Hellboy world, it’s okay for it to stay broken, because it never has to get back to what it was. So the characters, and the world, and everything else, is evolving in a particular direction, and we’re going to be seeing that a lot next year.

TFAW.com: With B.P.R.D. 1947, you’re working with a brand-new team of artists, with Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon. How did you select them, and what’s it like working with a team of artists?

MM: I had that idea for a story for quite awhile, and the more I started playing with it and seeing how that story would work, one of the problems was that I felt like the book had to be drawn by two different people. The whole point of that story is that some of it takes place in the real world, and then we kind of drift back into this fantasy world, which happens in the first issue, and from then on we’re flashing back and forth between the real world and this fantasy, nightmare-supernatural world. So we’re either looking for one artist with two radically different styles, or two different artists.

The problem with two different artists is that we still have the same main character in both worlds, so is it going to match up at all? I think it was probably Scott [Allie, Hellboy editor] who suggested the twins. The fact that they are twins, and they work in the same studio, and over the top of each other’s work, and they have two distinctly different styles–I couldn’t imagine any other team being able to pull off what I was asking for.

And it’s worked beautifully. Even in that first issue, you see a transition in one panel from one world to another world, which you could only do if the two guys were working in the same room. It’s been fun, and fortunately, because Dave Stewart is a genius, Dave was able to have two radically different color techniques: one for coloring Gabriel’s stuff and one for coloring Fábio’s stuff, and he was also able to do a transition between those two different color treatments. It’s really worked out great.

TFAW.com: It looks like it’s Fábio doing the more supernatural part of the story, and Gabriel who’s doing the more grounded-in-reality stuff?

MM: Yeah, which makes perfect sense, because Fábio’s stuff is a little more soft and drifty and spooky, and Gabriel’s stuff is so hard edged and it’s got a real bounce to it, so again, having two guys who work together but are so distinctly different was great, but also to be able to do a transition period in there, where you can’t really tell which artist is doing what. I don’t know if Fábio laid that out and drew it, or if Gabriel drew some of it. The beauty is, I can’t really tell who did what on the ground level. Once the finish work is done, I can tell who finished the stuff, but the guys work together so beautifully as far as concept, that it really makes for a nice, unified piece.

TFAW.com: Is this the first time you’ve done a story based solely on vampires? I feel like I haven’t really seen that before from you.

MM: Probably. Considering that vampires are my favorite supernatural creatures, I’ve done very little with them. I’ve done some short stories, but I haven’t done anything where I really get to do the whole cliché old-school vampire thing. This story is the closest to that. The idea of guys going down into a tomb, to open up coffins to put stakes through vampires’ hearts, is something I hadn’t done. Hellboy did it once, but the story veered off in such radically different direction it didn’t really have that atmosphere and that old-school charm.

The appeal of doing the old B.P.R.D. stories, 1946 and 1947, was to do stuff that I didn’t feel would really work in the modern B.P.R.D. That vampire, old-school stuff is so quaint and old-fashioned by today’s standards, but I could do it if I did it in a story that took place in 1947. So this is the most old-school vampire story that I’ve done.

TFAW.com: It seems like the fate of the character of Simon is to be the sole survivor of these terrible situations. What can you tell us about his character?

MM: I wanted Simon to be–and I had no idea what his name was, that was Josh [Dysart, B.P.R.D.: 1947 co-writer]–but with that B.P.R.D. 1947 I wanted to create the beginnings of a team that would last for awhile, because in B.P.R.D. 1946, everybody got killed, except for Professor Broome. And I said, “Well, let’s begin to create the team.” So Simon goes through this horrible experience that I think turns him into an interesting character.

What I didn’t want to do was create a bunch of guys with superpowers, or supernatural powers, but I said, “Let me screw up a guy enough that he becomes a very interesting B.P.R.D. agent and hopefully becomes the first kind of star agent of the B.P.R.D. and then as we continue to do these flashback stories, we’ll have more guys survive, so little by little, we will build a team of guys.”

TFAW.com: You’ve also got Witchfinder, which is coming out right now, featuring Ben Stenbeck, an artist you’ve briefly worked with before. But this is the first series you’ve done with him. What attracted you to his work?

MM: There’s a real charm to Ben’s stuff. He is very solid, and he’s very detail oriented, but not in a fussy way. He is not a flashy, technique guy. There’s an old-school solidity to his work, and it’s very clear and readable, and it has a real charm to it. I think in comics these days, I see so many guys where it’s two or three tricks somehow turned into a style, and Ben can just draw, and he can just tell a story. And all the drawing serves to create that world and those characters and it’s not overly showy, it’s just solid.

Witchfinder has always been a problem–I’ve had that idea for the character of Edward Grey for a long time–and he’s been referenced before in Hellboy–but I needed somebody who could pull off a really detailed Victorian world, and would put in the work that the world required. So I needed a guy who was going to do reference, because I had to sell Victorian London, and if you get a guy who’s all flash, you’re not really going to get the atmosphere and the feel for that time period and that city.

When we worked together on the Ectoplasmic Man one-shot, he grounded that thing in such a reality that I thought, yeah, this guy could pull this off, and it had a mood and atmosphere. I was envisioning Victorian London, and how it’s going to have fog, and coaches, and all that kind of stuff, and I knew I could see that in The Ectoplasmic Man. So I’m very happy that he took the job.

TFAW.com: As you said before, Sir Edward Grey has been flitting around the Hellboy universe here and there. What made you decide to do a series about him now?

MM: Everything I like, I need to create my version of it in Hellboy, and I’m a big fan of old Victorian supernatural fiction and Victorian occult detectives, so I knew I needed one of those guys in the Hellboy world. Just like Lobster Johnson represents the ’30s-’40s pulp magazine characters, I needed a guy who would represent the 1880s Victorian occult detectives.

So I mentioned this guy way back in the second Hellboy miniseries, and then when I did this Abe Sapien thing a couple of years ago, I put this guy in the opening sequence–I did a 10-page sequence with Sir Edward Grey. And once I’ve given a character a little bit of room and a little bit of attention, he doesn’t want to get back in the box. Then it’s like, okay, we can’t really go back now. Now we need to give this guy more room, give him some attention. Hopefully, when you do a 10-page sequence with the character, if you do it well, people are saying, “Who is this guy, we want to see more of him.”

What also happened is, John Arcudi and I started talking about the possibility of doing a Western. He wanted to write a Western. And I said well, we could do a Western if we tied it into the Hellboy universe. And while I haven’t done anything with the American West, I do have this character who’s running around in the 1870s, 1880s. If we take that Victorian occult detective and throw him in the Old West, then we can do a Western set in the Hellboy universe.

So we started talking about doing that project, and then I thought, okay, is that a really good introduction to a character who’s an English occult detective? So while the Western started first, I realized that it had to be the second book. The first book needs to create the world and the normal setting for this character. Then we can throw him in the Old West. So the first Witchfinder book, the one I wrote, is really trying to just establish that Victorian England world.

TFAW.com: Hellboy originally started out with you doing the art and the writing, but now you have this family of amazing writers and artists working with you. How do you select them, and what do you look for?

MM: I’m picky. I’m a pain in the ass. Especially with something like Hellboy. It’s really difficult. To go back to B.P.R.D., Guy Davis was the easiest part to select. I’ve always loved Guy’s work, he creates amazing creatures, he can draw anything, and I thought, man, if we can get this guy, that would be perfect. Since Guy said yes to doing it, B.P.R.D. has been such a pleasure to do. Both John and I are in love with what Guy does, so it’s just a game of, ooh, it’d be cool to see Guy draw this, it’d be cool for Guy to draw that. That part was easy. Had he said no, god knows what would have happened.

Getting an artist for Hellboy was really difficult. I didn’t want someone to just imitate my work, but because Hellboy was so established in my style, I needed somebody who had some of the same stylistic things that I did. I needed somebody who could spot black, and that’s a lot trickier. Our first artist didn’t work out, so the fact that Duncan was available was perfect. But finding somebody to draw Hellboy is always going to be harder. B.P.R.D., because it doesn’t involve that character, is a lot more open, and we’ve had that flexibility to use different artists and different styles. Hellboy needs to have my kind of atmosphere.

TFAW.com: Going straight from that, are there any stories you’re saving for yourself to draw? Are you going to be doing any interior work?

MM: Yes. I’m constantly making up Hellboy stories and putting them on a shelf. And there’s two different mental shelves: one that’s, “Ooh, that’s so much fun, I’ve got to do that one myself,” and the stuff that piles up on my shelf, every once in a while, those slide over onto the other shelf. But there are definitely stories I have to do. There’s one about Hellboy in Mexico that I’ve been planning for years, and little by little putting together the reference. Mostly because it’s such a weird story, I wouldn’t even know how to write the plot for it for somebody else.

Because I’ve gotten most of my writing done, now that Witchfinder’s done and I’m not taking on any more writing jobs, except for the Hellboy ongoing series with Duncan, and the one-shots I’m doing with Richard Corben, my focus is going to be writing and drawing my own stuff. So I’ve got a couple of different projects I have to get working on, hopefully early next year, if not the end of this year.

TFAW.com: You also have The Amazing Screw-On Head coming up. What can you tell us about that?

MM: That’s the first thing I have to start on, and I guess I should be starting on it next month. I’m running out of things to do, so I have to stop talking about it and actually do it. The Amazing Screw-On Head comic is unfortunately only 30-some-odd pages. I’ve always wanted a nice collection of that, but it’s hard to do a collection when it’s only one comic. So for years I’ve been saying that I want to do a collection called The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects.

The problem is, I haven’t got the other curious objects. So I’m going to sit down and do at least one story that will be the same length, if not longer, than The Amazing Screw-On Head, and a couple of shorter things. And it’ll be a very odd collection. There’s another story of mine that’s never been collected, a story I plotted with my daughter, The Magician and the Snake, which is my favorite thing I’ve ever done.

So that goes into this collection, and then all of the other stories in the collection, although none of them use the Amazing Screw-On Head character, all somehow either relate to The Amazing Screw-On Head or to The Magician and the Snake. A lot of it will be purely visual clues, to tie them into the same kind of world. It’s nothing a logical as “Oh, this is the Screw-On Head universe,” it’s just unrelated stories kind of reference some of the same locations. I think the lengthy story I’m doing uses one of the characters from The Amazing Screw-On Head, but not one of the main characters. It’s going to be a really fun book, once I sit down and actually do it.

TFAW.com: Well, you’ve also got two one-shots in the Dark Horse One-Shot Wonders collection. Were those designed to be accessible to new readers?

MM: Yeah. One of the things with Hellboy and B.P.R.D. these days, is I’ve begun to be nervous that they’re not accessible to new readers. We’ve had this frog thing going on for years now in B.P.R.D., and in Hellboy we’ve had this Arthurian English folklore thing going on for awhile, and I want to make sure we always have some comics you can give to somebody who is not well-versed in the world.

Fortunately, with Hellboy, we do have three collections that are all short stories, which are good intros to Hellboy. And we did The Crooked Man last year, which is a great stand-alone Hellboy story. So part of the Hellboy plan is always to come up with these stories. B.P.R.D. is a little bit trickier. But before there was any organized plan from Dark Horse to do this one-shot program, I had already come up with this one-shot for Richard Corben to draw, and there was already talk about the Abe Sapien story.

The Abe Sapien story I had very little to do with. It’s very strange, that these characters are kind of John Arcudi’s characters. I had written the Abe Sapien miniseries The Drowning, set real early in Abe’s career, and I said to John, “If you wanted to build on that, if you want to do more stories with Abe, there’s about 20 years where we don’t know what the hell he was doing.” So there’s a lot of space to fill in. And since John is the character guy, my feeling is, if you want to flesh out the character, you’ve got these 20 years to drop in story–to do stand-along adventure stories, but also, it gives you an opportunity to flesh out that character a little bit more.

TFAW.com: As you know, this interview is going up for horror month. What do you think are the essential pieces of a good horror tale?

MM: For me, I’m a mood-atmosphere guy. I don’t know that I’m really a horror guy, not the way people think of horror these days. I’m not a big fan of what passes for horror these days. There’s not a lot of real violence in the Hellboy stuff. Instead, there’s this kind of cartoon-monster violence. The whole slasher thing unfortunately seems to be what people think of these days as horror, either zombies or slasher stuff, and neither one is terribly appealing to me. I’m very into the old-school atmosphere–that’s the stuff that interests me.

TFAW.com: So you’re not running out to see Twilight?

MM: Twilight is a whole different horror thing. That’s not even horror–it’s a romance story with vampires. Again, not terribly appealing to me, but there you go.

TFAW.com: What are you most excited about coming up, in the Hellboy universe?

MM: This next year, between The King of Fear and coming out of The Wild Hunt and going into The Storm, we’re really going someplace with Hellboy. A lot of stuff I’ve been thinking about for the last 10 years, suddenly, I’m writing those stories.

It’s the same with B.P.R.D. I’ve always said, “One of these days, we’ll get around to doing this kind of thing.” Well, we’re there now. So this next year has got such big changes in both those books, I’m excited about that. It does shake things up quite a bit. So yeah, I’m really happy with how both these books are coming along, and the way the characters have evolved, and how this world is getting fleshed out, with the addition of something like Witchfinder, and we’re talking about doing a Lobster Johnson book next year, so just the way we’re filling some of the gaps in the Hellboy world, I think it’s going very nicely.

Make sure to check out our Hellboy/B.P.R.D. theme page to check out the most complete collection of Mike Mignola’s work on the Internet!

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Are we excited! Dark Horse has partnered with GelaSkins to bring us some super-cool protective skins for laptops and iPhones, featuring titles like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Umbrella Academy and Hellboy, and artists like Amano and Dan Goodsell. What’s even more exciting? You can get them here at TFAW.com, about two months before you’ll be able to get them almost anywhere else! We got our hands on some samples, and brought you an up-close look at these beauties in the video below:

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Studio: Universal Studios
Running time: 120 Minutes

Lost in the 2008 comic book movie shuffle is one of the best comic book films, Hellboy 2: The Golden Army. Hellboy might not be as widely known, but he is just as noticeable. Director, Guillermo del Toro once again directs the sequel to the mildly successful Hellboy with all of the principle characters back with him. The first film was about big red thinking he’s human, hating creatures and wanting to fit in with humans but in The Golden Army, he’s not accepted by the humans with open arms and becomes more comfortable being a outsider.

Our story opens up with a Young Hellboy learning the story of the Golden Army through a bedtime story told by his father, Professor Broom (John Hurt). Seen through the imagination of a young Hellboy, the tale is told through puppets of how a goblin blacksmith created an indestructible Golden Army for the Elves as a weapon against the humans. King Balor slaughtered the humans with them and called a truce, never to activate the army again. He breaks his crown that controls the army, in three pieces and separates one piece so no one can find it. He keeps one for himself and gives the other to his daughter, Princess Nuala (Anna Walton). Her twin brother Prince Nuada (Luke Goss), doesn’t trust the humans and runs away vowing to return to exact revenge in the distant future.

The bedtime story remains as such, until the lost piece is tracked down at an auction by Nuada who then wages war against the human race by unleashing a horde of ravenous Tooth Fairies, then by killing his father for the second piece of the crown. Meanwhile Hellboy (Ron Perlman) and his girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair) work out commitment problems while investigating the auction house, but Hellboy is outed to the general public and the secret BPRD, is no longer a secret. Now, with only one piece missing, Nuada hunts his sister down who is in care of the BPRD (Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense) and more specifically, Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). Hellboy steps up to the task to battle a Forest Elemental, the last of its kind set free by Nuada, and in wounding it he discovers that he may have a bigger destiny than just trying to fit in with the humans who reject him. Even the BPRD has turned on him trying to reign him in under the control of Agent Johann Krauss (voiced by Seth MacFarlane) and Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor). In an act of heroism, Hellboy saves Nuala and Abe when Prince Nuada infiltrates the BPRD Headquarters but gets mortally wounded in the process. To save Hellboy, Liz, Abe, and Johann take him to Northern Ireland, the resting place of the Golden Army with the final piece of the crown in hand setting up one helluva finale.

This is the second collaboration between Guillermo del Toro and Hellboy creator, Mike Mignola. Del Toro understands Mignola’s product and gives him the latitude to expand on it even more, going bigger, and executing better. The story is tight and the pacing is right, never repeating the conventions of the first film. The action is non-stop and feels realistic and the grand epic looms behind every dark shadow. Still, Hellboy never loses its sense of humor cracking jokes, coddling cats and getting Abe drunk, leading to the film’s funniest moment, but (unlike Spider-Man 3) staying in its context.

Luckily for Mignola, his world is also the same one del Toro loves play in. Rush out to see Pan’s Labyrinth if you haven’t already. The style and techniques born in that Oscar-winning film flourished in this sequel. What del Toro does better than anyone is show both the beauty and the horror of these worlds leaving viewers conflicted. So beautiful–and so haunting at the same time. This is why this is del Toro’s film; his mind exploded on the screen. Locations and action sequences of his wildest imagination will be forever be etched in our minds like the Tooth Fairy sequence or the Troll Market–the Cantina Bar of this generation. Go through all of the extras to see just how involved del Toro was in every single aspect but remember that without Mignola, there is no Hellboy. Celebrate this original film they’ve created together and if we’re lucky, may we continue to reap the benefits of their friendship in the near future.

A GOLDEN BUY – OVERALL SHOCK VALUE: A

Hellboy 2: The Golden Army takes you to several new worlds and lets us step into the imagination of Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola, whose collective effort brings us a fun and fantasy-rich film proving that sequels can be better if the right people are involved. It’s paced better, looks slicker, and is more ambitious and fun than its predecessor. Being able to compare the two formats I couldn’t help but be drawn more to the blu-ray. The vivid color palette and textured world was magnified in the 1080p transfer. And despite the lack of HD extras, it’s got plenty of supplements that will keep you in del Toro and Mignola’s fantasy world for hours long after and is sure to get multiple spins in your player.

DVD VS BLU-RAY

Choose your format and read on for extensive disc by disc analysis — presentation, audio, video, extras & exclusives!

• HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY — 2 DISC BLU-RAY REVIEW
• HELLBOY 2: THE GOLDEN ARMY — 3 DISC DVD REVIEW

Witches all across the world seek out Hellboy, but this time, they’re not just after revenge.

The long-awaited follow-up to 2005′s The Island, the six-issue miniseries Darkness Calls sees Mike Mignola pushing his greatest creation, Hellboy, toward the next major turning point in his life, with haunting art by Duncan Fegredo (Enigma, Ultimate Adventures).

Publication Date: May 02, 2007
Format: Full color, 32 pages
Price: $2.99

Coinciding with the DVD release of the first Hellboy animated film, Hellboy Animated Volume 1: The Black Wedding brings the animated version of the character full circle, to the comics pages, in these two original tales.

In the lead feature, “The Black Wedding,” written by Jim Pascoe (Kim Possible, Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and drawn by Rick Lacy (Venture Brothers), Liz Sherman is kidnapped by an ancient cult, dragging the entire Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense into a horrifying tale of witchcraft and possession.

Hellboy Animated co-creator Tad Stones and Fabio Laguna (X-Men Unlimited) team up in “Pyramid of Death,” in which radio hero Lobster Johnson inspires a young Hellboy to inflict some imaginary justice of his own.

With a cover by Jeff Matsuda (producer/art director of Batman) and a pinup by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola, this book is the perfect bridge between the comics and cartoon worlds of the World’s Greatest Paranormal Detective.

• With a pinup by Hellboy creator Mike Mignola!

Publication Date: Jan 31, 2007
Format: Full color, 80 pages, TPB, 5 1/4″ x 7 1/2″
Price: $6.95
Age range: 8+

In the final days of World War II, a demon was summoned from the fiery depths of Hell to wage war. This child of darkness was rescued by the Allies. Dubbed “Hellboy,” he was raised to serve the cause of good versus evil. From the mind of Michael Mignola comes a new animated feature that continues the comic book and motion picture saga, Hellboy: Sword of Storms. The movie will air Saturday, Oct. 28, at 9:30 p.m. (ET, PT) during Toonami.

When a university professor opens a forbidden scroll, he is possessed by the twin demons of thunder and lightning who seek to return to the world to wake their brothers, the dragons. Hellboy, along with a folklore expert and a psychic, travels to Japan to investigate. There, Hellboy finds the sword of storms, the only weapon that can defeat the demons, and he is transported to a world where he encounters several creatures of Japanese folklore. He learns the sword is the only weapon that can defeat the demons, but it also holds the magic that will return them to Earth.

In Hellboy: Sword of Storms, several actors from the 2004 Guillermo del Toro-directed live-action movie lend their voices to this feature, including Ron Perlman (Hellboy), Selma Blair (Liz Sherman) and Doug Jones (Abe Sapien). Mike Mignola co-wrote the movie’s story. Phil Weinstein and Tad Stones direct the movie. Guillermo del Toro and Mike Mignola are creative producers. Hellboy: Sword of Storms is produced by Film Roman, a Starz Media Company and is distributed worldwide for television and on DVD/video by Starz Media, LLC. Starz Media, LLC has licensed all animation rights to the Hellboy franchise from Revolution Studios. In partnership with Revolution Studios, Film Roman is developing and producing animated content for television and home entertainment as well as a full range of integrated marketing applications across all categories.

Ron Perlman returns to the title role as Hellboy, a humanoid creature born in the flames of Hell and brought to Earth as an infant. Selma Blair will also reprise the role of Liz Sherman, a pyrokinetic human who is HB’s colleague and love interest. We’ll have more on Hellboy 2 as it breaks.