Mike Mignola Talks Hellboy 2
 

Hellboy has conquered comics, animation and Hollywood, but the spotlight falls on creator Mike Mignola when his first prose novel—Baltimore, or The Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire, co-written with Christopher Golden and courtesy of Bantam Books—hits bookstores today.

The fledgling novelist just returned from a trip to Prague and Budapest, where filming for “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army,” directed by Guillermo del Toro and starring Ron Perlman as the eponymous hero, is under way. He opened the book for Wizard Universe on what he saw behind the scenes of the movie and talked a bit about his first foray into prose fiction with the Gothic vampire thriller (which, by the way, is a must-read for Mignola fans and lovers of authentic horror in the vein of Bram Stoker’s Dracula).

WIZARD: You just got back from your time in Budapest on set of “Hellboy 2: The Golden Army”; how’d your trip go?

MIGNOLA: It was great—and you pronounced “Budapest” correctly, which I usually don’t do. I’m constantly amazed at what del Toro’s doing. The film really looks two or three times bigger than the first picture. And since he doesn’t have two or three times as much money, I have no idea how he’s doing it. But everything looks better. The funny stuff is funnier; the creepy stuff is creepier. It’s just a beautiful-looking movie. It’s very odd, but it’s a beautiful movie.

How much of the production has been completed?

MIGNOLA: They’ve been shooting for a couple of months now, and they’re going until December, so they’re about one-third through. But I saw a lot of footage, because he edits as he goes, so I saw some kind of put-together footage. And the fact that the stuff looks as amazing as it does without all the creature effects and the CG stuff added, it’s really quite amazing.

Any plans on heading out there again before shooting wraps?

MIGNOLA: I would love to be able to go again, but I’ve got such a pile of Hellboy stuff that I’ve got started that needs to get finished that I don’t think I’ll be able to bring my head up for air before the end of the year.

What was your professional capacity on set this time around?

MIGNOLA: Mostly taking up space. Trying not to get in people’s ways. It’s always one of those things where everybody’s really nice to you, but once you leave, they’re thinking, “Thank God, one less guy who’s taking up space.” It’s so much like an army camp—everybody’s running around, everybody’s doing stuff, and you’re sitting there going, “I serve no purpose here whatsoever except to say, ‘Wow, that looks so cool.’”

Okay, let’s switch gears and talk about the book: How did Baltimore come about?

MIGNOLA: This one came about very different than most things I’ve done. This is gonna sound weird. I was actually watching a really boring movie, my mind wandered and I made up probably two-thirds of this story in five minutes. Between the time I got bored with the movie and the time my wife and I walked out of the movie, I had made up most of the story. The movie took place in this Italian village, so it had these beautiful villas with amazing architecture with great old stone crumbling walls. And I thought I wanted to do something cool in that setting. And it just…thwppp…came out.

Within a couple days, I’d hammered out the rough spots of the story. I wanted to do it as a graphic novel, but it became real clear as a couple of years went by that I was never gonna have the time to do it as a graphic novel; the story just got too big. It just kind of sat there in the back of my head. I thought it would never get done. I got so frustrated one day, so I spoke with Christopher Golden, who’d written some of the Hellboy prose novels, and talked about collaborating on it as a novel. There’s one chapter in there that was as a Hellboy story, but the ending didn’t work for Hellboy. When we came up with the format and structure of the book, each of the characters would tell his own story, and I wanted that rambling feel in a lot of old Gothic horror stories, where one character walks in and starts telling this mea