These things tend to take on a life of their own, if I do it right. I never set out to be a writer. But part of my thinking right now is, yeah, but I always wanted to be an artist. The hardest part will be to just do artwork and not turn it into a story. If you only do a painting once a year, you kind of have to re-learn it every time you do it. So to buy myself this chunk of time and say for a year to carve out this big chunk of time, produce some work with no expectation and then at the end of the year, look at it and say well what did I do?
Is there something here? So a lot of it was just begging my brain to give me enough juice to draw those last few pages. Fortunately, we had already come up with the idea of doing this series, Hellboy and the B. I never would have taken it to DC or Marvel. Even when they were supposedly doing creator-owned stuff -- I saw their creator-owned contract once, and maybe it's gotten better over the years -- it was horrifying. I wanted to take it some place where I would actually own it. Okay, let's stick with the myth-busting.
Did Hellboy originate as a sketch at a con in the s? Yes, I did it as a drawing that appeared in a convention book. I was doing a convention, and they said they wanted a piece of art for the program book. Since I wasn't known for one particular thing, I just drew a monster. At the last minute, I wrote "Hell Boy" on it.
He had a belt buckle kind of thing, and I just wrote "Hell Boy" on there. I thought that was really funny. That was really it. I wasn't trying to create a character. I did this thing as a goof, but I thought the name "Hell Boy" was really funny.
A couple of years later, when I started thinking about doing a creator-owned book, I thought of him because I'd drawn monster characters like him a few times just for fun. I thought, if I was going to do something, maybe this would work. And, maybe, I'll get to draw it for a length of time, so let me come up with something that might be fun to draw.
And since I'd drawn this character for fun, let's make him our main character. I changed him radically and added that hand, but that's the kind of thing I liked to draw just for fun, and that's the only name that I've ever come up with.
So I thought, let's use that kind of guy and let's use that name. You mentioned that hand. Tell us something about the Right Hand of Doom that nobody else knows. It was basically Thor's hammer. I needed him to have something to hit something with. There was no thought at the beginning as to what that hand was, it was just something that had a Kirby kind of feel to it. That's really it.
It was amazing to me that for years nobody really asked what the hand was, or what did it mean. I guess there is something weird about that hand. Looking back at those early days, when did you think that you actually had something with Hellboy?
Students always ask me, "How do you go about creating a trans-media franchise, blah blah blah blah blah? If I was thinking anyway along those lines, I wouldn't have called it "Hellboy. Almost immediately, TV, movies, animation -- all of that stuff is never going to happen, because not only is it a stupid name but what I found out later, especially with the movie, is that the word 'hell' in the name is a huge problem. I would have thought that it was such an innocuous name and such a funny name, but people still didn't like that it had the word 'hell' in it.
Even going into the second movie, they were like, "We don't know if we are going to call it 'Hellboy 2. I never had any idea that it would go anywhere. My hope was that it would sell enough that I could keep drawing the comic. I was certainly not expecting that. I was already looking at the fact that I was doing the "Hellboy" miniseries, and then I will go back to DC and do another Batman book, because I knew people at DC and they liked the way that I did Batman.
I figured I could get some other project going at DC. Being realistic, I thought that was what my career was going to be.
I will do something for Marvel or DC, and then I will go and do my creator-owned thing. I will do it between paying gigs. The fact that comic did well enough that I could keep doing it, that's all I ever wanted back in those days. It's very much me. I'd never written anything before, so the only way I knew how to make a character talk was asking myself, "What would I say?
The physicality of the character is my father. I always thought of Hellboy as being an older character. He's a tough, been there, done that kind of character. And that was very much my father, who had been in the Korean War, worked in a cabinet shop, worked with his hands, so he had these big, calloused hands. He was just bulletproof. He always had blood on him.
I always knew what Hellboy felt like because he felt like my father. But his personality, the way he spoke, was very much like me. While this isn't a direct retelling of "MacBeth," "Hellboy in Hell" certainly follows similar plotlines, and you even quote Shakespeare's classic play in the story.
This is big action and big adventure, but is "Hellboy in Hell," like "MacBeth," a tragedy too? I was a big Michael Moorcock fan when I was in high school, and all of his characters were doomed. His characters were always just screwed. Corum: doomed. Elric: doomed.
Horrible things happened to these characters, and ultimately, they would get the relief of finally dying. That stuff was very much in my head in the "Hellboy" stuff. Certainly, as "Hellboy" went along, it became more and more about the prophesies built up around him, and while this character might not be screwed, he's got a lot of shit he has to do.
John Saavedra johnsjr9. He lives in New York City with his two cats. Skip to main content area. Join our mailing list Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! Share: Share on Facebook opens in a new tab Share on Twitter opens in a new tab Share on Linkedin opens in a new tab Share on email opens in a new tab Comment: Comments count: 0.
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