CBA Interview
Hellboy on Earth: The For the love of Mike, CBA talks to the ingenious artist-writer Conducted by Jon B. Cooke Transcribed by Steven Tice
Below: Mike Mignola’s cover art for Hellboy: Almost Colossus #2 (July 1997). Courtesy of the artist. ©2002 Mike Mignola.
As Ye Ed notes in the following interview (which took place on April 23, 2002), Mike Mignola appears to be—stylistically, of course—the ungodly spawn of Jack Kirby and Alex Toth, swiping from neither yet appropriating the best both comic book masters have to offer. Mike’s heavy use of blacks, extraordinary page design, and superb sense of pacing—the Toth approach, if you will—coupled with the sheer exhuberence and manic action found in the King’s work, might be an apt description of the Mignola magic. He is, simply, one of the finest comic book artists—and writers—working today. But no sorcery brought the creator such acclaim; as you will find, it took numerous years of hard labor, combined with a solid, inborn work ethic and sensible practicality. The talk was conducted by phone and was copy edited by Mike.
Comic Book Artist: How do you pronounce your name? Mike Mignola: Minyo-la. CBA: Is that Italian? Mike: Yes. Swiss-Italian. CBA: Where did you grow up? 10
Mike: In Oakland, California. CBA: Did you get an interest in art at a young age? Mike: I drew as far back as I can remember, and it’s pretty much all I ever did. I just drew, and eventually I drew and read, but that was it. No sports, no learning to drive a car, nothing. I just drew. [laughter] CBA: Do you have any brothers and sisters? Mike: I have two younger brothers. CBA: What kind of neighborhood was it? In Oakland, you said? Mike: It was in the Oakland hills. It was very nice, middle class, residential-house kind of neighborhood, which all burned down in the big Oakland fire. CBA: Did you get to San Francisco much? Mike: No. Everything I needed was in Berkeley, so I never had any reason to go to San Francisco. In high school, I spent a lot of time in Berkeley once my brothers and I discovered used bookstores and comic book stores. So our weekends were spent haunting old record stores and bookstores. CBA: How did you get there? Did your parents drop you off? Bus? Mike: We went on the bus. CBA: Were your brothers like-minded? Mike: Yeah, we had a strange relationship with this kind of stuff. I think it started with comics, where we collected everything Marvel put out. I don’t remember how we started, but everything Marvel did, one of us would collect. My youngest brother bought Daredevil, Spider-Man, Marvel Team-Up; the middle brother collected all the monster stuff, Captain America and Iron Man. Then I had the big stuff; you know, Fantastic Four, Thor. The bigger, cosmic kind of stuff. And that’s how we did it. I remember that Marvel would put out some new book and there would just be a discussion among us, like, who was going to collect that? Did it relate to this? Was it in some way related to Spider-Man? Was it a horror kind of thing? [laughter] So I saw everything Marvel did. We didn’t see anything of DC, though my youngest brother did get the Atlas/Seaboard stuff… CBA: Because it looked like Marvel? Mike: I don’t know why, but that was as much branching out as we did. We didn’t stray into DC at all. CBA: Was that you dictating that, or was it a democratic agreement? Mike: I think there was a brief period when we were all really into it, and our decision was all by mutual consent. Nobody was assigned a book they didn’t want. I don’t think it was more than two or three years of pretty intense comic book buying and reading. I remember around that time when we discovered our first comic book store. Somebody told us about this place in downtown Oakland, and we ventured down there. It was a really intense period that went up through… I think I was a senior in high school when I stopped reading the stuff. I was still buying for a while, but… I remember looking in my drawer and there were the last five or six issues of The Avengers, and I hadn’t read them. I thought, “I’m buying out of habit at this point.” I remember Jim Starlin’s Warlock, and I was still buying comics after he’d finished, but that was the last thing that really had me that excited about comics. There was Paul Gulacy’s Master of Kung Fu and Jim’s Warlock. When that was over, I kind of went, “Enhhh, I think I’m done.” CBA: What year were you born? Mike: I was born in 1960. CBA: Do you recall when you first got into comics, and what they were? How young were you? COMIC BOOK ARTIST 23
December 2002