Hellboy Creator Didn’t Recognize His Own Characters On Set
Hellboy 2 The Golden Army main cast
Hellboy is about to be in a bit of a renaissance. There’s a new movie coming soon – Hellboy: The Crooked Man – with Jack Kesy in the lead role that’s said to be a bit closer to the original comics, and a new game, Hellboy: Web of Wyrd, set to be released in about a month and features gorgeous comics-inspired graphics.
It all started, though, in the comics, with Mike Mignola’s original comics. Mignola created and designed Hellboy himself, and wrote just about every comic he’s appeared in since, even illustrating the majority of them. Mignola’s iconic work has resonated with fans across the world, so it was an exciting day when GLHF got to sit down and chat with the man himself at Gamescom last month.
Mignola is a clearly passionate man — he loves to talk about Hellboy, and has no issues answering questions about just about everything to do with the character. In our interview with Mignola, we touched on a few different topics, but perhaps the most interesting was the way Mignola separates what he creates in his comics with what others do with their adaptations — so much so that he didn’t recognise his own characters on the set of Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
“I was on set one day, I think the second movie, and Ron [Perlman] didn’t have a shirt on, so he had the whole red chest,” Mignola recalls, “And I remember saying to somebody ‘Oh, that actually looks like my character,’ and somebody pointed out that there were six different characters on set, they were all my characters. I didn’t recognize them!”
Mignola went on to say that he, on some level, knew that he’d created all of these characters, but seeing them as flesh and blood people instead of drawings on a page turned them into something new.
“It’s very easy for me to divorce what I do from what that stuff turns into.”
He also says that he often spends so much time with the actors and the voice actors that go on to play his characters that he finds it difficult to see them as anybody else. Mignola recalls again seeing Ron Perlman on set, and barely noticing he was in costume.
“I thought it would be very strange the day I saw Ron in makeup, but I spent so much time with Ron that when I saw him in makeup it was like ‘Oh, hi Ron,’” Mignola says, “You know, it wasn’t like ‘oh my god, it’s Hellboy’. There’s a very personal ‘my character’ and then there’s a lot of people who dress up as him.”
Hellboy: Web of Wyrd is set to be released on Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, and PC on October 4, 2023.
