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Hellboy Heads to Mexico for Encounter with Vampires
 Brian Truitt - USA Today
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May 05, 2010
| | The cover to Hellboy in Mexico, drawn by creator Mike Mignola. | |
Mike Mignola's new Hellboy story features detailed Mexican landscapes and Mexican wrestlers, even though Mignola admittedly knows nothing about Mexican landscapes or Mexican wrestlers.
The vampire turkey, though? Totally legit.
Written by Hellboy creator Mignola and drawn by Richard Corben, the one-shot Hellboy in Mexico by Dark Horse Comics takes the horned and devilishly charismatic demon man-child — and most famous member of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense — all the way to a small Mexican town in the 1950s, which is being overrun by vampires until he teams up with a trio of lucha libre wrestlers and has to tussle with a friend in order to save the day. And fittingly, because today is Cinco de Mayo, Hellboy imbibes a lot of tequila along the way.
The tale originates from a random drawing Mignola did of Hellboy and some wrestlers years ago, and he had included a date of 1956. And of all the people in the town being victimized by vampires, witches and other bad things attracted to the hell hole in the ground, the big red guy with the large stone right hand befriends the masked grapplers — who, if anybody has read Hellboy comics for any length of time, knows they're exactly his kind of people.
"With the way it was drawn, it was kind of the only people who were left alive," Mignola says, chuckling. "I liked the idea that he would spend a lot of time with these guys drinking and fighting and just having a crazy fun time so that when the tragedy happens, it's really his first loss of a close friend. On one hand, it is the goofiest story, but on the other hand, it goes have this element of tragedy in it."
Mignola just hopes that no Mexican historians take umbrage with his creative freedom. "I know nothing about Mexico," he says. "It's my fantasy version of Mexico the way when I do Eastern Europe or any other place, it's almost like the Universal monster movie version of Eastern Europe.
"It is nice to not know about anything," Mignola quips. "The more alien the culture is, the harder it is for me to do. I've only done one story in Japan because the culture is so entirely alien. I had to do research on what a door looks like in one of these traditional Japanese houses. Mexico, I've seen enough movies that I get kind of a sense of it. But again, it's the Mexico that I've seen from old movies, and especially Mexican horror films, which are pretty surreal."
Because it was a vampire story, Mignola did do some homework about Mexican folklore pertaining to vampires and found almost nothing except one very interesting tidbit: Vampires can turn into turkeys. So he had Corben include a turkey — a wrestler calls it "El Diablo" — that Mignola says was more of a "rangy, Mexican bush turkey" than a healthy, Thanksgiving-ready one.
"It is a particularly mystifying sequence, and I even said to the artist at some point, 'I'm getting a little nervous about the whole turkey thing. If that doesn't work, and you want to change it to a vulture or something, that's fine.' I wanted to have that one bit of authenticity. I was hoping to find something a lot spookier, but that's what I found."
Mignola, who debuted Hellboy in 1993, originally had planned to draw and write Hellboy in Mexico himself, but in recent years he hasn't had the time to do both — he says it has been a major problem since they began doing the Hellboy movies in 2004. "Having to hand over the art chores on Hellboy to other people, it was really the toughest decision I ever had to make."
Mignola does find that drawing a Hellboy story helps him to tell it better. "When I'm just writing, I'm always working with one hand tied behind my back," he says. However, he knows he can't micromanage an artist like Corben or Duncan Fregredo, the artist on Dark Horse's ongoing Hellboy series. "I just saw pages this morning for the book Duncan Fregredo's doing, and there's this whole romance sequence, which is so beyond my ability to do. I wrote it for him because I know he can do that like crazy. It's great for me to write things for other artists that I can't do."
Mignola promises that he will return to drawing Hellboy for what he calls the "last chapter of Hellboy's life." There's some time before that happens, though. He and Fregredo must first wrap up a three-book epic delving into Arthurian mythology and English folklore with the three-issue miniseries The Storm, beginning in July, and then finishing it off with The Fury.
"I'll start this year while Duncan's still working because I'm slow and I want to take my time with it, but it won't come out until Duncan's third book finishes and I just don't know when that will be," Mignola says. "Many big changes are happening in the current Hellboy storyline and the current B.P.R.D. storyline. In this year and rolling into next year, both of these books as a world are going to go through such drastic changes, I really can't say anything about what that third stage of Hellboy's going to be like."
While it was never Mignola's goal to create this giant universe with its own history, fans have really embraced Hellboy, B.P.R.D., Witchfinder, Lobster Johnson and all his books. It does take some brainpower to manage it all, though, and that's why Mignola created The Hellboy Companion in 2006 — so he at least could give himself a timeline to keep everything straight.
"Actually that's why I don't know my own phone number. We're adding so much so fast, that timeline is already wildly out of date. Every once in a while, we just have to make notes for ourselves of what happened," says Mignola, who will be releasing a non-Hellboy collection, The Amazing Screw-On Head and Other Curious Objects, in the fall.
"My wife entirely runs our real life. She keeps track of when doctor and dentist appointments are and things like that, and mostly what's in my head is this stuff." |
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