Look into my eyes, the eyes, the eyes, not around the eyes

Judge Anderson is an anomaly in the world of Judge Dredd. Moral, emotional, occasionally zany, and resolutely human, she offers a social conscience that sits in stark contrast to the head-cracking grimness of the monolithic Dredd.

As befitting a sometimes screwball character, what we have here is an oddball collection. Instead of Rebellion’s usual chronological fare with major characters, Shamballa offers a kind of ‘best of’, compiling stories illustrated by definitive Anderson artist Arthur Ranson (whose artwork also graced the excellent Button Man).

Although initially a foil for Judge Dredd, unnerving the square-jawed one with her flippant manner, Anderson moved in an overtly serious direction under Alan Grant, exploring the difficult subjects of child abuse and religion. The bulk of the ‘think of the children’ arcs are missing in this book, which instead largely concentrates on Anderson’s gradual understanding surrounding religion and faith—powerful ideas that the Judges seek to quash in the Godless world of Mega City One.

Within this book’s pages are Anderson’s two best tales. Shamballa chronicles Anderson leading a team of scientists beneath the Himalayas to try and stop cataclysmic supernatural events that are threatening the existence of the world. And Satan pitches Anderson against an evil, ancient being that at least thinks it’s the devil. However, because this collection cherry-picks Anderson’s adventures, it’s incomplete.

With a character like Judge Dredd, this might be less of a problem. But in this book, events are regularly witnessed out of context, and dialogue refers to things that you’ve not seen. A good example is lead story Shamballa: much of the emotional impact of the events resonates from the suicide of Anderson’s close friend Judge Corey. However, with the Corey story yet to see reprint, newcomers and lapsed readers will likely miss the significance of chunks of this book.

Despite its flaws, Shamballa nonetheless cements itself a place amongst the best Dreddworld books in Rebellion’s line. It’s just a pity so much of the story is missing.

Judge Anderson: Shamballa is available now for £15.99. For more information about 2000 AD graphic novels, check out the 2000 AD Books website.

• My first audio piece for Cult of Mac, on Apple’s disastrous 20th Anniversary Mac: http://tinyurl.com/5loej3 #

Darkness calls

In a sense, you’re becoming a director for Hellboy, rather than having your finger in every single pie. How are you dealing with going from being in control of everything to being a scriptwriter?
Well, on one hand it’s great because you’re exposing Hellboy to a much wider audience—it’s the flip-side of this whole thing. More people are going to know the movie than are going to know the comic, but some of the people who see the movie will come and discover the comic. That’s one side of it—the great side. The other side is that a lot of those people are never gonna see what you do.

But at least you made up something that got out to the world—that’s pretty cool. And I’m one of those guys who erases ten lines for every line they draw, so for a while there, not drawing this stuff was actually kind of a relief… But what you start to miss is getting your hands in there, into everything. The thing that I’m constantly fighting against—right now fighting a losing battle, although hopefully I’m going to win it in the next year—is that you end up spending so much time overseeing so many different things that you don’t get any time to really focus on any one thing.

I’m writing Hellboy comics, co-writing a couple of other Hellboy-related things. I’ve worked on the animated films, and I was working on the live-action film. So I was spread pretty thin. I keep saying I’m gonna back off—I would love to get back to just going down every morning to the studio and writing and drawing something. But at the same time, I’ve kind of created this monster and have to keep feeding it. And if you have people saying they want the creator’s input, how can you say no?

Then you’ve got no real comeback if things don’t turn out the way you want.
The downside of that—and this is where I fully understand Alan Moore’s point of view—is that they say they want your input, but at the end of the day it’s their movie. So you might sleep a lot better saying “You want my input, but at the end of the day, you’ll change it, so why am I bothering?”

Fortunately, everything that’s been done with Hellboy has benefited from my input, because, in every case, a lot of people have listened to what I was saying. It wasn’t just that they wanted me as a marketing tool, to say the writer endorsed the property. But that’s because I’m working with creative people that respect what I do.

Where there’s another thing of mine that’s floating around in Hollywood right now, and if that lands with a director who I have no Del Toro-like connection with, I would probably do the same thing that Alan Moore does, although without saying to take my name off it. I’d say “Fine, it’s your thing. I did my version of it—the real version of it—and you’re going to go and make a film. It might be different to what I would have done, but go and do it. Give me the money and go and do it.”

The alternative is that you don’t let anybody play with your toys, you don’t let anyone have your property. But there’s always that chance of what if it works? What if they make a really great film?

Is it more important for you to just go for something, then, rather than perhaps regretting not doing so later? If something doesn’t turn out too well, I guess can always move on to the next thing, but without trying, you never know.
Well, as soon as Hellboy was optioned for a film, the first thing I did was go home and make up another character. This character was similar enough to Hellboy that if the film was so horrendous and people hated it so much that I could never go back to something called Hellboy—kind of like after Howard the Duck came out and it was like, “Oh no, you’ve poisoned this thing forever!”—I’d have had something to fall back on.

I had all these stories I wanted to do, and I needed a character where I could roll all those characters and stories over to this other character. But some mystery writer is credited with saying this thing about Hollywood where a reporter said “How do you feel that every time Hollywood makes a film out of one of your books, they ruin it?” and he replies “No, they didn’t—the books are just fine”. That’s the thing you cling to—the book’s on the shelf, and I’m looking at it right now.

This is why I can’t imagine just writing a screenplay and turning it over to Hollywood, because then no-one will know what you really wrote. Once it goes through the process, chances are it’s gonna change. I mean, a buddy of mine is just going through this in animation. He spent a year creating something for animation and it stalled someplace and it’s not being made. And I said to him, why don’t you do it as a comic first? You’re an animation guy, you can draw fast. Take a couple of months, draw a graphic novel or a couple of comics, and have them published. If the animation either doesn’t work out very well or it doesn’t happen at all, at least you’ve got something out there where you can show people something you made up. But making something up and being completely at the mercy of Hollywood—either to put it in a drawer or turn it into something else—is horrifying to me.

So what’s the future for Hellboy and for Mike Mignola?
Theoretically, what I keep saying is that next year I’m gonna get back to drawing some of my own stuff. And what I will keep doing is writing the Hellboy comic. Hopefully, I’ll be able to step in every once in a while and do five pages, but I’ve got my own stuff right now that I want to draw, a vague idea of what I want to draw and make myself.

I co-wrote and illustrated a novel [Baltimore: Or, the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire], and that worked out well, and so a couple of these other things I’ve made up along the line—things that would be a 200-page graphic-novel that I’m just not in a position to sit down and do—I like the idea of writing them up, handing them over to Christopher Golden and collaborating on more novels that I’d illustrate. And, yeah, I’d like to be able to focus my energy a little bit more and show people some new work that’s entirely by me.

Hellboy has a future. I’ve plotted it out to more or less the end of the series—or what could be the end of the series. My entire goal with Hellboy is to get to do the whole story. I’m not getting any younger! If I was trying to draw this thing myself, we’d never see the end of this story! Hopefully, I can get Duncan Fegredo to stick around to the bitter end of this thing. God knows if he’ll do it, but I’m really happy with the collaboration I’m having with him on the Hellboy stuff. So, yeah, I just want to finish that story.

That’ll be a somewhat rare thing to see in the world of comics: a lengthy story with a beginning, middle and end.
It’s one of the problems you run into in a mainstream comic—lots of them have the illusion of change, but because all these are huge properties owned by giant companies, they’re never really gonna let you keep a Superman dead, never gonna let you cut a Batman in half and keep half of him alive. But because I own Hellboy and control Hellboy—at least the comic-book version—I can make definite changes with that character, and they’re happening right now.

It’s actually very strange. After ten years of fumbling round in that Hellboy world, it’s now set on a certain course, and I’m starting to turn corners where once I’ve done that, I can’t go back. So it’s exciting—the story is going someplace. But it’s a little daunting when you go OK, we’re not going back there anymore!

The weird thing will be if Del Toro does a third Hellboy film, which would probably be the end of that film cycle. He would be doing the end of Hellboy ten years before I get to the end of Hellboy. The one thing I’ve got to be real careful of is that I don’t tell him how I plan to end the comic, because I sure as hell don’t want him to put it on film!

With thanks to Mike and Christine Mignola, and the guys at Dark Horse. The official Hellboy website can be found at hellboy.com.

Hellboy week navigation:
Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Blood and iron

Hellboy 2 noticeably moves towards the mythology angle evident in the comics, instead of concentrating on the action and ‘Lovecraftian’ elements of the first.
That was a conscious decision that Del Toro and I both made, because the one element that was not in the first film at all was the folklore and mythology stuff. There was Lovecraft-meets-pulp-magazine-mad-scientist stuff. And so we decided for the second film to do the other side of Hellboy, the folklore and mythology. If you look at the two films together, you kind of see the range of Hellboy.

I was very happy to go in this direction, especially once we’d seen Pan’s Labyrinth, which I hadn’t seen when we made up the story. And maybe it would have been difficult, but when we went in and explained it to the studio—because we’re pitching a story where Hellboy fights fairies and elves, and no matter how much we tapdanced around, sooner or later someone would have to mention fairies or elves, and the other guy would have to jump in and say “It’s not what you think! It’s going to be really dark and really scary”—after Pan’s, it was a lot easier. We could say it’s kind of Hellboy meets Pan’s and everyone knew what we were talking about.

And when I actually saw Pan’s, we were going through a phase where the studio that was going to do the picture wasn’t going to do the picture, and it looked like it wasn’t going to happen. So suddenly all these things that I was reading in the screenplay where I was going “this is cool, but I’ve never seen them doing anything like this,” and “I wonder what it could look like”, once I’d seen Pan’s, I was like “Oh my God—now I see the flavour of Hellboy 2”. To see Pan’s and think we’re not gonna get a chance to make Hellboy 2, that was kind of a rough evening.

It’s kind of funny having to excuse your inclusion of elves and fairies. If you read the old myths, they’re dark and evil creatures.
Del Toro and I understood that, but people either think of cute fairies down the bottom of the garden or they’re thinking Lord of the Rings. With elves, people think of pointy ears, and when you talk about fairies, they only know cute ones. Well, they’ll see a nasty kind of fairy in Hellboy 2! It’s just not what what the film audience is used to, and it’s certainly not a guy sitting in a studio office is used to!

Hellboy also had an animation spin-off, with two DVD features. Where did the idea of that come from?
Well, Del Toro had talked about an animation a lot, but I think it was Revolution Studios that set up the whole animation thing. I wasn’t the driving force behind it—I’m never the driving force behind anything other than the comic. And so when I heard they wanted to do animation, I knew that there was a Hellboy fan named Tad Stone who’d been at Disney for years, but who was now available.

The first thing I said was: “Listen, if you guys are gonna do animation, hire Tad Stone, so someone up there understands the comic.” Because, clearly, Del Toro wasn’t gonna have the time to devote to the animated thing, and I didn’t have time and I’m not an animator. I knew what I’d do story-wise, but again it’s a different medium than the comic, so we needed somebody up there who knew animation, and knew the material and I that I could work with.

Fortunately for me—although I think the fans feel otherwise—they also said they didn’t want it in Mignola style… That was a studio decision, which I was fine with, because if it was in my style, I’d sit there going “Oh, they don’t understand it, they’re not doing it right!” Like when I see people imitating my work, I just see the mistakes. So when they wanted a different style, I thought this was great—one more thing to distance it from the comic and make it an alternate version of Hellboy. Just like Del Toro’s Hellboy is the live-action Hellboy, the animated Hellboy is the ‘Tad Stone’ Hellboy. Both of them are really faithful to the spirit, and the animation is probably closer to the stories that I did, but they’re both their own thing.

How do you personally correlate all the different versions of Hellboy, and which for you is the definitive version?
For me, it’s the one that came first—the one that I do—that’s the definitive version. There are things that I got to do in the animated films that were actually cooler than what I came up with, especially in the third film that it doesn’t look like we’ll get to do, but which was written. It was kind of a retelling of Hellboy’s origin, and a fun opportunity to revisit my material and do it differently.

But the way I did it in the comic is the real Hellboy. It’s my version, and my version has a beginning, a middle and an end that I hopefully will get to one of these days! What’s weird and takes a lot of getting used to now—and this is a good warning for people who are going to go into having work adapted—is that the real version, my version, is the version that the general public will be unaware of. I said to Del Toro the last time I saw him, when we were discussing our various ‘legacies’, that when I die—if anybody remembers and if Hellboy’s still a going concern—and someone says the creator of Hellboy died today, they’ll show a clip from the movie! They won’t show a panel from the comic, because that’s not what the public will know.

It’s funny how many people still don’t see comics as just another storytelling medium. In the UK and USA, you get people flocking to comic-book movies—many of which are actually dumbed down—but they won’t pick up a comic book!
Yeah, there’s still a prejudice against the subject matter, which is why it’s kind of funny they’re flocking to see something that they wouldn’t read, and that they think they know. Maybe with things like Spider-Man and Batman, they saw it as a kid—like the TV show or read the comics. But, you know, those things are in pop culture.

What’s a much bigger struggle is selling a movie like Hellboy, a character that the audience doesn’t know. How do you make it something that more than the 25,000 people that are buying the comic want to see? How do you get beyond that audience?

With thanks to Mike and Christine Mignola, and the guys at Dark Horse. The official Hellboy website can be found at hellboy.com. The Hellboy movie website is at hellboymovie.com.

Hellboy week navigation:
Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

Family story

The presentation of the Hellboy comic is quite cinematic. Was the potential for a movie always at the back of your mind?
It never occurred to me! I never even thought I was going to get to do a second Hellboy story. I thought that when I made up Hellboy, I’ll do this once… I tend to be fatalistic! I thought I’ll do this once, and then when nobody buys it, I’ll limp back to doing whatever job I can get from Marvel and DC Comics. What I wanted was something I’d be able to look back on and say at least once I got to put my personality on the page, before I went back to drawing fill-in issues of Iron Man or whatever it would be.

I was just so thrilled that I got to keep doing it as a comic, and I couldn’t get over the fact that I’d made up something that I still wanted to draw, because I’d never really drawn any one character for more than a couple of hundred pages. The fact that I enjoyed drawing this thing over and over again… I thought I’d won the lottery right there!

The whole film thing, even when it first came up, when Dark Horse first said they were interested in developing it as a film, I went: “Pfft! Sure! I’m very happy to take the movie-option money, as long as you guys want to keep optioning it. That’s great, because no-one will ever make a film of this!” It was beyond anything I imagined.

And then when I met Del Toro, I thought if anybody was going to make a film, he would be the guy to do it. But it was always such an uphill battle that I really never thought it was gonna happen. So, no, it was not something I ever anticipated.

When it was clear the movie was going to happen, what changes were required for the character to work on-screen, and how did you go about adapting it?
I’m not one of those guys who says it needs to be like the source material. In fact, one of the very first conversations I had with Del Toro, I said: “Listen, you turn it into whatever you want to turn it into. I’d love for you to keep true to the spirit of the character, but I actually have a different idea in mind for what I think would be a much easier sell for a movie”. Not that I was ever pitching it, but I thought of a way he could do it. And Del Toro said no, and that he wanted to make it like the comic. So, he was the one wanting to be faithful to the source material!

Yeah, he felt the love interest [between Hellboy and Liz Sherman] was necessary. I think as much as Del Toro loves Hellboy, he brought to it his own things he wanted to do. There were scenes in the first Hellboy film that he’s been trying to put on film for years, and he found Hellboy a great vehicle for some other stuff he wanted to do.

But that’s great. I didn’t want a filmmaker who’d just say, “Oh, this is what it is? OK, fine”. I wanted a filmmaker who went in there with his own agenda, because that’s where you’re going to get an interesting film. You want a filmmaker to make the film they want to make, not a film where they just take some money and put something up there.

So do you think this is a good way of creating a successful comic-book movie? Some, such as Sin City, are slavish, and some, like From Hell, barely resemble the original. But with Hellboy, it remains true to the original’s spirit, but with no effort to tie it into the comic’s continuity. It’s its own thing as well as still being Hellboy.
Right, and I think that basically there’s a lot of factors that have to fall into place, and the more I see of Hollywood, the more I’m amazed when something like that does work. I think in my case with Del Toro, we spoke so much the same language, even to the point that when he came over to my apartment right after we met for the first time, he noticed that we both put certain authors next to other authors on our bookcases, and that we’d read similar stuff.

We speak a very common language—film-wise, not quite as much, because he knows so much more about that—but I think we’re different guys with enough common ground to know we weren’t coming from completely different planets.

Despite the fact you said Del Toro should make the Hellboy movie his own thing, you were actively involved. Most creators either get the hump about translations, or take the money and run, but you wanted to be there. Why was that?
Del Toro wanted me involved, and he didn’t give me a choice! I want you there! I can certainly understand, having gone through it, a creator saying “Go make it, just give me the cheque,” because it’s really a difficult process.

I managed to work with Del Toro while we were hoping to make Hellboy—I’d done pre-production on Blade II, and that was fine, because it was someone else’s thing. Del Toro would say make up this, create this, and that’s fine. When we’re working on Hellboy, and we need to make up something different to what I had done… It’s one thing for me to say change it, and it’s another thing for me to be there changing my thing.

We saw eye-to-eye 95 per cent of the time, but the five per cent where we didn’t was really difficult, because it’s his film and so he’s got the final say on certain things with my character. So the only thing I could do to survive that process is really say the comic’s the comic, the film’s the film, and I’m here working with a guy I really like on his movie. I’m not working on my movie.

This is the one thing we had words about—when I’d say to him, “It’s your movie”, he’d say, “No, it’s our movie”. I’d say, “Well, OK, some days it’s our movie”, and there were a couple of days where it was his movie! For the most part though, it was a really smooth thing.

It’s the same for the second one—a very similar working experience. But more and more the film is Guillermo’s film, especially as the story veers further away from the comic. In a way, it’s actually easier for me the more it veers away from the comic, because it’s much easier to look at it as purely his film. I mean, when I was on the set of Hellboy 2, people would say to me, it must be amazing to see your characters walking around. That was funny, because I wasn’t even thinking of them as my characters—I was thinking of them as the Hellboy movie characters!

There are a couple of scenes where Hellboy is actually bare-chested, but wearing his coat, which is the way I’ve always drawn him in the comic, and he didn’t appear like that in the first film. When I saw Hellboy looking like the character in the comic, that was the only moment when I kind of went “Oh cool, there’s my character”. For the most part, I’ve gotten used to those characters as live-action characters being part of a Del Toro film.

With thanks to Mike and Christine Mignola, and the guys at Dark Horse. The official Hellboy website can be found at hellboy.com. The Hellboy movie website is at hellboymovie.com.

Hellboy week navigation:
Intro | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6