Brothers Mike and Todd Mignola have come together for a new two-issue comic in the Hellboy Universe, spotlighting Hellboy and his brothers! The Crown: A Tale of Hell debuts on February 11, and Cemetery Dance spoke to Todd Mignola about working with Mike again, what’s based on their childhood, and what he hopes readers take away.
(Interview conducted by Danica Davidson)
CEMETERY DANCE: You previously worked with your brother on The Exorcist of Vorsk. Was it the same process for working on The Crown: A Tale of Hell, or have things changed?
TODD MIGNOLA: Working on The Crown was a very different experience than working on the 8-pager Mike and I did more than ten years ago now. The Exorcist of Vorsk wasn’t initially intended as a Hellboy story, but just an adapted Russian folktale I wrote for a project that didn’t end up coming to fruition, and which Mike afterward dusted off and rewrote for Dark Horse Presents. For The Crown, he and I worked much more collaboratively: swapping original story ideas, trading off layout and dialogue duties, etc. There are some bits that are definitely Mike’s, and some that are definitely mine, but overall it’s hard to tell where one of us stopped and the other started.
Is there anything about Hellboy and his brothers that’s based on you and Mike?
Well, not on Mike and I exactly — although Hellboy’s half-brothers, Gamon and Lusk, were initially conceived by Mike as exaggerations of me and our other brother when we were kids, one brutal and the other conniving. Early in the writing, I had to ask Mike to stop referring to them as Todd and Scott, which allowed us to then more fully develop their characters for the story we were telling.
How did the project get started?
Because Hellboy’s Hell-brothers were based in part on my brother Scott and I, I was always curious to know more about them. Their brief appearance in Hellboy in Hell whet my appetite for backstory, not only theirs but all of Hellboy’s Hell-family. I had a loose idea for a story that I ran by Mike, who hadn’t really thought of doing anything more with those characters — but as we started batting ideas around I could hear excitement building in his voice. Busy as he was with the new universe he was developing (Lands Unknown), and since I was already working with the wonderful Warwick Johnson-Cadwell to try to get our own creator-owned project off the ground, Mike and I immediately brought WJC onboard for art duties. It all happened very fast, very organically.
What would you like readers to take away from it?
The Crown, from the get-go, was supposed to be good fun — hence bringing Warwick’s fantastically wonky artwork into the mix — and so my hope is that readers, both longtime Hellboy fans and anyone else, will enjoy the wild ride. Set in medieval Hell, the story adds still greater depth to Mike’s already expansive universe. I hope readers will come away with a thirst for more!
Do you think you and Mike will work on another project in the future?
We will, yeah. In fact, we already have — but that’s another story. Mike’s built a fantastic universe over the years with a ton of potential for further storytelling. If The Crown is well received, I hope to have a hand in continuing to expand the boundaries of that universe into areas as-yet-unexplored.
Enjoy this preview of The Crown
