IGN Comics: I noticed that, with both Garden and Darkness, you're not doing art. Will you be doing art for Hellboy books in the future?

Mignola: I certainly hope so and certainly plan to. The problem right now is I'm writing so many books while working on the film and the animated movies, if I did anything it'd be a nightmare. I wouldn't get anything done. Even if I wasn't working on anything else, Darkness Calls is six issues. I just couldn't survive it. I'm so slow these days that the series would never come out. I'd have a nervous breakdown before I'd ever get through it. I'm very, very lucky in the artist I have though, Duncan Fegredo, who's doing a beautiful job. My only fear now is, once people have seen Duncan's version of Hellboy, they'll never want me back. Duncan is doing an amazing job. But I would like to come back and do Hellboy in small doses in the future. I do plan to draw comics again when the dust settles a little.



IGN Comics: Hellboy is coming to the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. Do you have any involvement in those productions and in what capacity?

Mignola: At the very beginning, both Guillermo and myself came in to consult on that. My only contribution, because I'm not a game player, was looking at what they were planning and trying to impose more story structure on that. Beyond that I've made general comments on color and things like that, but it's not really what I do. Actually Guillermo and I were both at the recording studio the other day since Ron Perlman was doing his voice for Hellboy and Selma Blair was doing her voice for Liz Sherman. So we were both there. Guillermo was directing and we were tweaking some of the lines.

IGN Comics: So then moving on to the Big One: Hellboy 2.

Mignola: Oh yeah, that thing!

IGN Comics: Yeah, just a small, little thing. What can you tell us about it? How is it progressing?

Mignola: Let's see… things are looking really, really good right now. We just spent 2 months doing pre-production here in L.A. and now we're kind of in between… as soon as Guillermo finishes with the Oscars (Pan's Labryinth, directed by Del Toro, has been nominated for six Academy Awards), which is pretty damn cool, he'll be going to Budapest to set up production offices there. I believe that's still the plan - things sometimes change day-to-day. In the next month or so we'll have an office in Budapest. That's where the last stage of pre-production will happen. We'll start filming probably in May.



IGN Comics: What can you tell us about the plot and villains?

Mignola: It's an original story that Guillermo and I came up with about two years ago. It actually reflects the direction the comic is going in. It's not in any way the same story, but it deals with similar things. The focus is more on the folklore and fairy tale aspect of Hellboy. It's not Nazis, machines and mad scientists but the old gods and characters who have been kind of shoved out of our world.

I kind of equate it to the whole American Indian situation. The Indians were shoved onto reservations. You had your old, wise Indians who said, "You know, this is the way it is. We can't fight anymore. We just have to accept our fate." You then have your Geronimo character saying, "Or we could just kill the White Man." That's kind of the situation we have in the film. We have our elf characters resigning to the way things are and then there's one saying, "Or we could take the world back." The main difference is - what if the Indians had a nuclear warhead? The elves have their equivalent of the weapon that is too terrible to use. What if this guy decided to use it?

IGN Comics: Will we see Hellboy leaving the B.P.R.D.?

Mignola: Well, that I can't say. There is certainly a lot of development with the Hellboy character and the Liz Sherman character. There is a lot of development with Abe Sapien. We bring in one character from the B.P.R.D. series, Johann Kraus, who is basically a gas in a bag. So he'll be joining the team of guys.



IGN Comics: What else do you have in the works these days?

Mignola: I have a novel coming out at the end of the year in the fall. It's a non-Hellboy novel called Baltimore or the Steadfast Tin Soldier and the Vampire to be published by Bantham Books.

IGN Comics: We want to know more. What can you tell us?

Mignola: It is my giant gothic horror monstrosity. It's co-written by Christopher Golden, who has written some Hellboy novels in the past. I planned to do it as a comic, but it got too big. I'm juggling so many things it was never going to happen. However Christopher Golden, who is a best-selling horror novelist, expanded my notes into this book. I've also done 150 illustrations for it.

IGN Comics: Sounds very cool!

Mignola: Yeah, I don't know how the hell I found the time to do that with everything else, but there you go.

IGN Comics: Anything else out there for the fans?

Mignola: Oh I think that's enough.

IGN Comics: Well thanks for chatting with us!

Mignola: Thank you!